I Swear I’m Hispanic

I swear I’m Hispanic.

I made a playlist with this title featuring reggaeton artists like Bad Bunny, Ozuna, and Daddy Yankee after years of seeing people’s shock when they heard me speak fluent Spanish. For some reason, most people associate “Hispanic” or “Latina” with thick-accent-bearing, huge-family-having, fiery bombshells. With English that easily passes as American and an aversion to anything Spandex, I am the opposite. I am an introvert in a family of three who was born and raised in Argentina. The pressure of the expectations for how I should behave, think, and look used to make me feel like I had to prove myself and my identity. While I cherish opening gifts on Christmas Eve instead of Christmas Day and look forward to the World Cup more than Thanksgiving, I’ll only ever dance while alone in my room—and to anything except tango.

I swear I’ll eat anything.

Born into a diverse family of self-proclaimed chefs without any accolades, I’m a sucker for all kinds of homestyle cooking and long meals. To sample as many dishes as I possibly can, I annoy my friends with a constant “Can I try what you got?” My Lebanese great-grandmother cursed me with my inability to tan, but she fueled my quest to create my own twist on her famous hummus recipe. My Italian grandma created my love for pasta and formaggio and gifted me my Italian citizenship. My Spanish grandparents taught me to appreciate a classic tortilla de papa and condemned me with a last name that gets misspelled everywhere I go. And my 10 years in Buenos Aires made me realize that there’s never enough asado on a Sunday afternoon. I believe the kitchen is a place where home cooks across the globe use their superpowers to slow down time, helping friends and family craft lasting memories.

I swear I have a superpower.

I don’t know if it’s innate or if I acquired it from watching hours of behavioral analysis and true crime shows, but I am a mini psychological profiler. As a gelato shop cashier, I can predict with near flawless accuracy what flavors customers will order, what type of milk they’ll want in their coffee, or whether they’ll use blue or black pens to sign their receipts. I associate myself with mostly blue pen users, who I’ve noticed tend to be creative, intuitive, and perceptive. However, I deeply respect black pen users, who seem to be structured, methodical, goal-oriented, and objective. I annotate the margins of novels, write essays, and take history notes in blue, but take math notes, schedule planner appointments, and complete lab reports in black. The balance I find in my pen ink personalities is what attracts me to behavioral psychology’s blend of the social and natural sciences.

I swear I’m 18, but I can’t vote (yet).

As a Latina immigrant who’s watched her 12-year-old sister deal with the repercussions of her open bisexuality and witnessed her cousin’s challenges with Asperger Syndrome, I’ve realized that the fight for equality is far from over. Although I’m still on my path to acquiring a US citizenship, I think it’s time to take the historical deconstruction that is currently occurring a step further, and I wish I could include myself in this narrative. I’ve become more aware of my own role in systemic homophobia and racism, and even though I can’t vote in 2020, I actively look for ways to be an ally in the fight for Black liberation and LGBTQ+ and neurodivergent rights.

I don’t need to swear anymore.

Although I don’t fit the stereotypes of what most people think Latinas should do, eat, love, or believe in, I know and embrace that I’m Hispanic. You can find me in the kitchen making my signature “no-tahini” hummus, buried in an FBI profiling book, or at a protest. My name is Lara Abril Afonso Martinez: an Argentinian, food-loving, equality-seeking profiler.