Latinos try so hard to be American in the United States, sometimes it kills us. This assimilation, pushed by our own family once we come into this country, has us losing ourselves to the point of extinction.

We get to a point where we don’t know a word in English or Spanish. When the accent comes out on special occasions — frustration and anger. When we have forgotten our foods.

But there are flashes of lights in our obscured path. For a few seconds, we see some of us are only white skin deep or we’ve been lying to ourselves saying we are indio, when we are negro.

This hurts because we tried so hard to be Americans. At ESL, we did our best to drop the accent and gain the one from our particular state. We straighten our hair religiously because it looks more American that way. We cook Thanksgiving dinner, when we never celebrated the holiday in our own countries.

Ni de aqui, ni de alla

We are like that kid who is picked last at dodgeball practice, and we feel it too. So we try harder to assimilate and voice our distastes for anything that may be deemed too Latina, because we are American. But in the back of our minds we ask ourselves, where did we go wrong?

As the re baptismal water continues to roll through our tendrils, it takes with it our latinidad.

“You are not Latina enough,” we hear from friends and family.

“We speak American here,” we hear from our environment.

Being stuck between these two extremes is a painful revelation.

Yet we don’t want to admit that long ago we morphed into something different when we came to the United States.

At the corner of fantasy and reality

That is till a police officer approaches our window and we see the hesitation in his eyes when we meet them with our own. When he checks the license with the blatant Spanish last name, hesitation leaves his eyes and suspicion enters.

Our palms sweat because we know he’s wondering whether or not we are legal. Because as much as we have tried to be American, an American will always know we are not one. When he lets us go, we whisper a sigh of relief. Perhaps we pray to La Virgencita. Some of us even kiss the cross hanging from our rearview mirror. Then we drive away.

At home, we turn on the news to watch another black man shot by the hands of a cop. We wonder, too, if he’s American enough. But we change the channel and don’t think about it too much. Besides our accent and last name, they can’t really tell.

Yet, in the back of our mind, we wonder, when will we be next.