Jose “Jay” Zarate,
Soquel, CA

My skin is pale, my hair normally just light brown, yet in the summer you’re always eager to point out my streaks of red. It’s funny how you focus on that, how the contrast seems to shock you every time the sunlight reveals it or starts to make it apparent. Or when my facial hair grows and the picture changes, around the same time UV rays start to color me golden and the tiny differences start to click. To matter. To change things.

You thought I was like you. Called me a friend, a coworker, a classmate so much easier than you did. You “knew” “me”, an assumption that sprung to life as you finally thought you could let your guard down. My teacher, my childhood friend, a scared transfer student I shared my time with as you silently tested the waters. Eyeing me closely as you sent wave after wave of jokes and comments carefully designed to try me.

When I was a child I’d ignore those ripples until the tide would come to crush me, let those off-color comments slide as you let them fly. Too naive to understand the full weight of them beyond the discomfort I felt, the confusion, the panic as I wondered if you knew I was brown too.

I know now you didn’t, too focused on the narrow caricature of color the world believed us to be that my hard-to-explain half shades went unnoticed. Ignored until confronted. A simple glance deeming them white by the faculty, the student body, and the hiring team that would only interview me when I went by Jay instead of Jose. Because that’s who you can trust, right? Because that is who I am…right?

Right?

Why can you only trust me when you see me as you. Why am I only equal before the summer comes around, or before I slip up and speak anything but English a little too well. Before I tell you about my family or the fact I’m not even from here in the first place. Why do you look at me, treat me, and talk to me differently before you knew?

Because then you know. And suddenly I’m “almost white” until you remember I’m “a Mexican too”. Suddenly all the jokes about landscaping, or “la Migra”, or the jokes about being deported are okay because we’re “friends”. Even though I can’t come over because your grandpa would flip if he knew. Suddenly I’m google translating in class, until the white Spanish teacher Ms. Smith decides she knows more than me about my own culture than I do because I don’t use “vosotros”.

Because suddenly you know, and no matter how good my english is, how long I’ve been here, or how good of friends we are…now you know.

Now I’m different, no matter what I do.