Philly Moms

How do I count?

Time online wrote about it. The tweeps I follow on Twitter have been buzzing about it for weeks. It’s even been Facebook fodder. How do Latinos identify themselves on the census forms? There’s no box to check under race for mestizo/a which is how a number of us are configured -- being blends of African, Caucasian and/or First Peoples from across the Americas. Equally confusing, under the Hispanic ethnicity categories there is no box to tick for those of Puerto Rican heritage.

The census may only be ten questions, but answering them is not so easy.

Take my family, for example. My husband’s no problem -- his ancestry is all Welsh, French, English. White bread, as I like to tease him. I’m a corn tortilla, and surprisingly, there was a box appropriate for me under ethnicity (Hispanic of Central American origin) though not under race (White? No -- but none of the other options fit me either). Many Latinos/as in the same quandary as me checked “other,” and wrote in “mestizo/a.” In retrospect I wish I had thought to do this. Still, I wasn’t the census problem in our family.

It was my daughter.Where does my girl fit in -- my white flour tortilla kid?

Ladies & Gentleman, The President of The United States...

Philadelphia is different today.Our nation is different. Our lives feel newer and better somehow. After  Tuesday, our children, their futures, forever different, hopeful, brighter, better. It took only a few seconds for now President Barack Obama to take the oath of office and be sworn in as the 44th President of The United States. In those mere seconds, the way I perceive the world, the way my children may now perceive the world is forever changed. I could have written right away about the well of emotion, the surge of feelings, the unparalleled joy that I felt over the course of the day on Tuesday, but I had to wait. It was almost too much. Too much jubilation. Too much euphoria. I had to wait until the confetti had settled and the amazement had cooled just a bit, so that I could really process the impact the last two days have had. We now have an African American President. I knew there would be no shortage of accounts of the inauguration and it's impact both here at home and across the country. I knew my colleagues would beautifully report the tale of how the day shaped us all, changed us all. They did not disappoint. Now, I feel as though I can recount what I saw, what I heard, and how it made me feel.

Tuesday was surreal for me.