LIZ NARRATION: Straightened your curls for the first day of school. Swapped out that burrito for a turkey sandwich in the lunch box you took to work. Instead of red lipstick, you wore a neutral shade for the big presentation. At the big cookout, you lowered the volume of that old school reggaeton in case the neighbors complained. How many of you have ever done one of these things — not because you wanted to, but because you felt the pressure to fit in, to BELONG? If you answered yes, you, my dear member of the Pulso fam, have felt pressure to assimilate.
[PERCUSSIVE MUSIC BEGINS]
Assimilation is a broad and complex concept that sometimes you just have to feel it to know it, but basically, it’s the process of becoming absorbed and integrated into a mainstream society or culture.
As diverse as the United States is, there is undoubtedly a mainstream “American” way of talking properly, being politically correct, of eating and of aesthetic acceptability that we know when we see it. In many parts of the country, the expectation is that this culture continues to dominate how we behave.
I’m Liz Rebecca and today, we’re talking about assimilation and the way we can break free from it to be our full selves. This is In Confianza.
[PERCUSSIVE MUSIC FADES OUT]
LIZ NARRATION: Julissa Arce has had quite a life.
[PERCUSSIVE MUSIC BEGINS]
A former Wall Street executive, raised in Mexico and then the United States, she’s now a social justice advocate, speaker, and best selling author. Her books My (Underground) American Dream (Entre Las Sombras del Sueño Americano) and Someone Like Me (Alguien Como Yo) detail her experiences navigating life in Texas after being raised in Mexico and the ways she built her career in and out of the corporate world. Today, we talk with Julissa about the themes of her latest book, You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation. In this discussion, Julissa shares the ways her upbringing shaped her desire to fit in and the simple, yet powerful way she’s learned to embrace her latinidad.
[PERCUSSIVE MUSIC FADES OUT]
Liz INT: Our first question for all of our guests is, what’s the last thing that you shared with a friend, en confianza?
Julissa Arce: Recently I think a lot of the things that I have been sharing, en confianza, with friends has been around my motherhood journey and the challenges that it’s presented. My daughter is by far my favorite person to spend time with. And also it can be very exhausting. So a lot of what I have been sharing has been just around navigating this new time in my life.
Liz INT: I’d love to know about the places where you grew up. What did they smell like? Sound like? Paint us a picture of how you grew up.
Julissa Arce: I was born in Tasco, uh, which is a small town three hours south of Mexico City. It is an absolutely beautiful place. All the streets are paved with cobblestones, all Terracotta roofs. Then I moved to Austin, Texas for college. I was 21 when I moved to New York and I lived there for ten years. And I would say, you know, not as part of my childhood, but I do consider New York City a place where I really grew up, right?
Liz INT: In the book you mention a moment when now you’re here in the U. S. and a boy tells you what you sounded like. Who did he tell you you sounded like? And how did you react?
Julissa Arce: I absolutely remember that story because it’s why the title of the book is what the title of the book is. This boy I had a crush on, we’re chatting on the phone and he said to me that I sounded like a white girl. And in that moment, I actually took it as a compliment, even though he didn’t mean it as one. I was like, “oh my God, I sound like a white girl. Awesome.” Because ever since the moment I came to live here, it was a priority for my parents and it became a priority for me to learn how to speak English. But not only to learn how to speak English, but to learn how to speak English in the way that white people spoke English, to get rid of my accent. Because people who heard an accent treated you like you weren’t smart.
Liz INT: There’s another moment that you describe in the book — when you were eight, you were with a group of girls and you had an interaction with a student whose features were more Indigenous. That was such a formative example when you were so little. Can you tell us more about that?
Julissa Arce: I was with some girls from school, in Zocalo, the sort of town square. And there was an indigenous girl playing, and the girls I was with who were white Mexicans were making fun of this girl and calling her an India, which is a derogatory term that a lot of Mexicans use to refer to indigenous people, or it can be derogatory. When I look at myself, I am an indigenous-presenting person and looking at her and thinking, “do they see me as an ‘India?’” And just kind of feeling like, do I say something? You know, I was eight. And so like the best thing I could do was to kind of join in sort of that making fun. What I didn’t know as a girl is that there are Mexicans who have a very different experience than the one that I had living in Mexico, right? When I think about that indigenous girl in the town square, when I think about Black Mexicans who, at least when I lived there, were not even part of the everyday conversation of who Mexicans were. Like it was not even something you thought about. I shared this story in the book to paint a picture of how whiteness is not something that I learned when I came to the United States, but something that was already ingrained in me as a young child in Mexico. Because racism is very much present in Mexico. It was then when I was growing up and it is today.
[INTROSPECTIVE MUSIC BEGINS]
The idea and the creation of whiteness is not something that is exclusive to the United States, right? It’s something that exists all around the world. When you think about issues of colorism, I mean, they exist in every single community, around the world. In the United States is kind of where I learned to fight against white supremacy. When I came to live in the United States, and it was very clear that I was, that I was different than many of the other kids in my classroom.
[INTROSPECTIVE FADES OUT]
LIZ Int: You Sound Like a White Girl is divided into parts, each titled with the word “lie”, as in “lies we’re told about assimilation.” Tell us about the four parts of the book and what you learned in the last one which you call “The Lie of Success.”
Julissa Arce: So the first part of the book, I talk about the lies of assimilation, the lie of whiteness, the lie of English, and the lie of success. And so when I talk about my time in New York, I talk about it in the context of this lie of success, that if you just make enough money, if you just become successful, successful enough, educated enough that you will be respected, that you will be accepted. I talk about some of what I faced when I worked there, some of which was, you know, related to my being a Mexican. And the other part of it really related to how I grew up socioeconomically. One of the examples I gave is a former boss asking me to put a sombrero on a newsletter that I was sending out about investing in Latin America. And when you’re 22 years old and somebody says that to you — I didn’t even know what to say, how to respond to it. I remember going to dinner at a fancy restaurant in Tribeca with my colleagues. We were celebrating a deal. And when I was walking back to the table, another table, mostly of white people — one of the people asked me to get them water. So these things sort of just kept happening, right? These small little things that just kind of reminded me that no matter the size of my bank account, no matter what my title was, no matter the fact that I worked at the most prestigious investment bank in the world, that unless somebody knew those things about me, if they just looked at me, then they made assumptions about who I was.
[INTROSPECTIVE MUSIC BEGINS]
LIZ NARRATION: When we come back from the break, Julissa shares the code to breaking the patterns of assimilation faced by so many Latinos. This is In Confianza.
[INTROSPECTIVE FADES OUT]
LIZ NARRATION: When we last left off with Julissa, she shared the many ways she faced both racism and her own acceptance of the norms that it took to “fit in”. But, unsurprisingly, her growth didn’t stop there. Sometime in adulthood, she made changes in her life to fight the need to assimilate — and they were simple, but profound lessons.
Liz INT: Do you remember a specific time when you’re like, “okay, this is it. I am rejecting assimilation.” It probably wasn’t with those specific words, but I’m curious, was it after that chapter in New York? Or was it just a combination of all these many moments that led you to reject the codes imposed on you?
Julissa Arce: It was not one specific moment where there was like a light bulb that went off in my head, right? It was not the aggressions. that led me to reject assimilation. It was the beauty that I found in us that made me want to reclaim those pieces of myself and I cannot possibly gain this knowledge and still behave in the way in which I did before I had that knowledge. I can no longer want to be accepted by white people when I understand that their approval means nothing to me and that my goal should not be to get the approval of white people. It was really the history of our people, of my people in this country, that helped me to really understand just how deep our roots are here and how much I belong here because of what my people have been through, because of how long they have been here because of, um, everything we have contributed to this country. When I was like in seventh or eighth grade, I asked my dad, “where were we when segregation and Jim Crow laws were happening?” Like, “what fountain did Mexicans drink from? Like, what schools did Mexicans go to?” And my dad didn’t have an answer for it, and I definitely didn’t find an answer, um, in any of the books that I was reading in school. And so it was this curiosity that I had since I was a kid. And it took me many, many, many years to finally kind of have a stronger desire to go find out the answers. And started just reading a lot of history books. And once I started to learn that history, I was like, “oh man, like…”
Liz INT: We’re amazing.
Julissa Arce: Yeah! It’s like, “why are we still doing this? Why am I still aspiring to whiteness? Why am I still assimilating?” Like, people already fought so hard, so I don’t have to do those things.
Liz INT: Is there anything else that you do now to reconnect with the things you miss out on about your Mexican culture, your heritage, about being you?
Julissa Arce: Well, I’ll tell you one corrective thing that I am doing. With my daughter, I, 90 percent of the time, I only speak to her in Spanish. Because I want her to know Spanish. I want her to speak Spanish. I want her to be proud of the fact that she speaks Spanish. Because you know, language is something that really connects us. Some of my Spanish didn’t just sever the connection to my mother tongue, it severed the connection to my mother, because all of a sudden, there were conversations I could not have with her because I didn’t have the vocabulary to have those conversations, which created a distance between me and her. And I think it creates a distance between us and our heritage. That’s not to say that, you know, if you’re a Latino who doesn’t speak Spanish, that you can’t be connected to the culture, that you are not Latino. Like, I completely reject that notion. Because you absolutely can. I never lost my Spanish completely. I stopped speaking Spanish when I was 11. I stopped learning in Spanish when I was 11. So my vocabulary is not the same. I cannot speak the same in Spanish as I do in English. And that to me is a really big loss.
Liz INT: I do the same with my daughter. We only speak to her in Spanish. Thankfully, here in Miami, there are a lot of teachers who are bilingual and definitely welcome us asking if they can please speak Spanish to our kids first. I’m curious if There are any special moments with your mom and now your daughter around a multi-generational connection or anecdote that you’re really proud of?
Julissa Arce: You know, my mom lives in Mexico. She can’t come to the U.S. and so the amount of time that she has spent with my daughter it’s not much. Although they have met and it was like a wonderful thing to kind of see my mom holding my daughter. It’s pretty amazing to see that and I wish that we could do more of it. But what I will say, the connection to my mom, I feel like it’s grown stronger now that I am a mother also. Because I think about, you know, when I was in labor, the only thing I wanted was my mom, right? I’m 41 now. I was 40 when I had my daughter. A 40-year-old woman with a lot of resources, with my doula right there, with my husband right there. But like, I cried out for my mother. Like what I wanted most was my mom. We hadn’t even cut the umbilical cord and I was on facetime with my mom. And, you know, having a daughter now, I think, wow, like, I just want to pour into, into that because I hope that when my daughter is 40 years old that she has the same desire for a connection with me as I have a desire to connect with my mom. And I just hope I do as good of a job as my mom did.
Liz INT: Oh, that’s so beautiful. Julisa. I hope the same, you know, that they wanna spend time with you. It’s the thing we treasure most. For those of us who are listening, who are struggling with maybe living in a part of the country where the pressure to assimilate is stronger, uh, than in other parts of the country, how would you suggest they take their first step to reject assimilation? And how would you suggest they try to find belonging?
Julissa Arce: Well, for me, as I mentioned, learning our history was sort of my first step. Right. And so, start learning our history. I think a great place to start is, uh, my book, You Sound Like a White Girl. Not to toot my own horn, but one of the things that I hear most, uh, from people who have read it is just how much they appreciated the history that I shared. People say that it’s like a mini crash course of history because it’s not a history book, you know, but there is a lot of history in there. And so, and if you do pick up the book, then you just have to go to the appendix in the back to then find like a wealth of other books that you can do further reading on. but I would say that that is like number one, just like pick up a history book, start learning. If it’s not, You Sound Like a White Girl, A Latinx History of the United States by Paul Ortiz is another great place to start. Manifest Destinies is another great sort of first book to pick up. Start reading, start reading the history of our people.
[HOPEFUL MUSIC BEGINS]
LIZ NARRATION: You can find You Sound Like a White Girl or any of Julissa’s other books at your bookseller of choice or on her website julissaarce.com.
[HOPEFUL MUSIC FADES OUT]
[THEME MUSIC BEGINS]
LIZ NARRATION: This episode was produced and edited by Mark Pagán. Audio engineering, scoring, and mixing by Charlie Garcia and Mark Pagán. Additional audio editing by Julian Blackmore. I’m your host, Liz Rebecca Alarcón.
You can subscribe to In Confianza wherever you get your podcasts, and if you like what you heard please leave us a review on apple podcasts and tell a friend to give us a listen.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for joining me, Pulso Fam. We’ll be back next week, in Confianza.
[THEME MUSIC FADES OUT]
