Diversity Writing Contest Bias Caught Teenagers By Surprise

I didn’t think I was different. I was born and raised in Sioux Falls, S.D., in the 1950s. My friends and classmates were typical Midwesterners Swedes, Irish or Germans with fair skin, blond or light brown hair and blue or green eyes.

When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t see that I was Mexican. So what if my hair was jet-black, my eyes the deepest brown and my skin color a little darker than those around me.

I was accepted for who I was. I was friendly and well-mannered, the child of ambitious, hard-working immigrants who came to the states from Mexico just three years before I was born.

Our family ate non-traditional food: chili verde, refried beans and homemade flour tortillas, which brought hordes of curious friends to our dinner table.

With seven children in the family, there was never a dull moment in our home. It was where our friends always wanted to gather. My older sisters were extremely popular in school as cheerleaders, class officers, and homecoming royalty. They dated those handsome European boys.

Though we were financially constrained, we lived in a middleclass neighborhood. Our family’s net worth never kept my siblings from acquainting themselves with, and being accepted by, the well-to-do crowd of Sioux Falls teenagers. They welcomed us into their homes. I didn’t know prejudice or discrimination. It wasn’t how I was treated or raised.

I will never understand why it happened. We had just moved to culturally diverse California where all nationalities were represented in our schools and neighborhood.

I was 16 years old. My younger brother was 14 and fancied his eyes on a pretty blond girl in his ninth-grade class.

One day my brother came home from school, anguished and in tears. When I asked what was wrong, I will never forget what he said.

Though it was over 30 years ago, his excruciating words, uttered between his sobs, are etched in my brain. “My girlfriend’s parents won’t let her go out with me because I’m Mexican.”

Our young innocent faces were slammed into a brick wall of ethnic reality that day. With tears streaming down my cheeks, I hugged my little brother and realized, for the first time, that others thought we were different.