L: I was wondering, since you touched upon it a bit, would you like to talk about your experience as a queer Latina in the Netherlands?
I think it’s very interesting to be a Latina in the Netherlands, because it’s harder to find a Latina community within the Netherlands. In the United States.. like, it’s depending on where you live, my family lives in Florida, and they got a big Latino-population. But I sometimes joke ˗ my partner is a Latino as well, and I sometimes joke that I found one of the few Latinos in the Netherlands because it’s not very common, especially living here long-term.
You can find statistics about the nationality and ethnic background of people in the Netherlands, including all the migration backgrounds, so as you can expect, you would find a high number of people who have a Moroccan background, a Turkish background, a German background, and it kind of goes down after that, and when you’re talking about people with a migrant background that are people of colour, it’s mostly Turkish and Moroccan people in the Netherlands. I think there’s only a few thousand Dominican people here, so I think that’s pretty funny, and I think with Mexicans it’s basically the same, so I feel like it’s kind of not as salient an identity here as it is there, even though I feel it and it’s important to me, and it’s important to us.
Like, my partner and I and his mother, who is a first generation migrant to the Netherlands, I think it’s just that we have a little enclave and outside of that, I feel people in the Netherlands really don’t have that much of a concept of what it means to be Latino or Latina or to identify as that. And that can have downsides and upsides.
“I feel people in the Netherlands really don’t have that much of a concept of what it means to be Latino or Latina or to identify as that.”
In the United States they have those stereotypes that are much more alive there, because people have an idea of what it might mean to be Latino and have that migration background in the United States. So that can be negative, but it can also be positive, because people might have some sort of a feeling of recognising… something simple like knowing how to spell my last name, the odds are bigger in the United States that I can find someone who knows that than here, it’s guaranteed that people will always get it wrong here.
And then there you can have more of a community than you have here, so that feels nicer. If you’re part of a diaspora that has settled in that host country, you can feel a lot more at home in a lot of ways. And of course the United States has the highest population of migrants in the world, so it’s a place that for better or for worse has a lot more of those little enclaves and is of course famous for being an ‘immigrant culture’ or a ‘melting pot’ or whatever you want to call it. So, yeah, I think it’s interesting that here it’s like… Sometimes people will look at me and they feel like they see something ‘not just white’ or whatever [laughs], which is interesting, because people will, I feel, project upon me things that they might expect in the Netherlands or things that they might be used to, or their own identities.
During my internship, when I was still studying, I worked with refugees, and there was a refugee from Iran, and she thought that I also might be from Iran, and when I mentioned at some point ‘Oh yeah, my dad is Mexican-American’, she was like ‘Oh, that’s what I see, ok, I’m from Iran, I thought that maybe…’ So she was feeling some kind of person of colour, migrant background, I suppose, and I think that’s really interesting, Now I work with kids because of my job, and we work with a lot of kids with a migrant background as well, and I had one of those kids who said: ‘Oh, I thought you were Indonesian.’ So I just think that’s interesting, that people will kind of sense something, especially people who have a migration background themselves, and who are themselves people of colour, they see that and they are like ‘Oh!’ Like I said, ‘to the trained eye’, they can tell, they can sense it, with my spidey-migrant-sense, that you are also someone with a migration background. I think it’s very different to be Latina in the Netherlands than in the United States.
L: That does sound so tricky though, being bisexual and being a Latina in the Netherlands, with both of that so often being erased. Like you said before, from the outside that can sometimes look like a certain degree of privilege, because people might assume that you’re white or that you’re straight, but in the end that comes from an erasure of parts of your identity, so… that seems very difficult to navigate.
It is. I think that my academic background, like the things that I studied have really helped me give a place to certain things and certain feelings, and maybe feel more confident about my identities and who I am. There’s also this podcast that I listen to, it’s really cool; it’s called Codeswitch, it’s about race and ethnicity in the United States, and they talk about how does that then intersect with other identities as well. But I think it’s cool because they have, like, my favourite episode they ever did was called ‘Racial Imposter Syndrome’, I think.
So, there’s already this idea of imposter syndrome, they did not coin that phrase themselves, but I think that’s usually more often used for people, especially women in the work place, and how women have a higher tendency than men of feeling like they are imposters in their job, like ‘I don’t belong here, I’m not even good enough, etc.’
But they kind of coined this idea of racial imposter syndrome, where people that have certain identities, and it’s oftentimes people of mixed heritage and multiple ethnicities, that they might feel not Mexican enough, or not Latina enough, or not Black enough or something like that… And it’s definitely a feeling that other people recognise as well, which makes me feel less alone in things, and I feel like I really lucked out finding a partner.
I didn’t necessarily plan it this way, but I feel like it really helps me, especially with getting to know my partner, but also now with continuing to feel understood by each other, it has really helped that we both share this experience, which is really quite… It is a common experience, but since there is a relatively small percentage of people who have mixed backgrounds in that way, it’s pretty rare overall still to find somebody who really gets it, in a way that is not just theoretical or ‘Oh, I heard that from a friend of mine who also struggles with the same thing’, but literally has experienced it themselves, and continues to experience it themselves. So, I think that really helps as well.
L: Yeah, that has a very different power, if you share experiences and not just an abstract understanding. Anything you’d still like to say that hasn’t come up yet?
Hm, I’d like to share that when you first approached me for this interview I was like ‘Hm, I don’t feel like I have anything to say’, and I think that might have been also a bit imposter syndrome. I think you can have queer imposter syndrome, too, I think you can have any type of imposter syndrome and feel like ‘Am I queer enough? What does it mean to be queer enough?’, or insert other identities there. But I think I also have to remind myself that it doesn’t matter if you’re… Like, you’re still bi if you’re dating someone of ‘the opposite gender’, and you’re still pan if you’re in the kind of traditional cis-gender man/cis-gender woman-pairing, you’re still bisexual, you’re still pansexual, that’s a part of you that’s never gonna change.
“When you first approached me for this interview I was like ‘Hm, I don’t feel like I have anything to say’, and I think that might have been also a bit imposter syndrome.”
And so, even if you only recently started realising how you feel or what your identity is, or even if you don’t wanna necessarily put a label on it or if you’re in a more traditional situation with your partner, I feel like it’s still valid, and your experiences are still valid to talk about, so… Maybe there are people like me who feel a little bit like queer imposters, and they should know that your identity is your identity and even if other people don’t necessarily always see that or agree with it, it’s yours.
L: Thank you so much for this conversation.