The Day I Learned I Was a Woman of Color

One afternoon, several years into my tenure at Wayne State University, I got a phone call during my office hours from a journalism student who wanted to meet with me. When I asked her what it was about, she explained that one of my colleagues from the English department had given her my name because she thought it could be interesting to interview me, as “a woman of color,” about my experience at Wayne. When I heard that, I thought, A woman of color? Is she talking about me, or has she confused me with someone else? Of course, according to the US classification of people (White, African American, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, other), there probably was no confusion at all. I, as a Hispanic, must be a woman of color. It was a technical fact that became a tag.

The realization of being seen as a woman of color shocked me deeply. I, who used to introduce myself to my university students and everyone else who showed curiosity about my origins as a second-generation Argentinean with paternal grandparents from Italy and maternal grandparents from Spain? The statement was usually accompanied by the pun “The Mexicans descended from the Aztecs, the Peruvians descended from the Incas, and the Argentines descended from boats,” meaning descending from the ships on which our ancestors arrived from Europe. Give me a break! I was not, and I could not be, a woman of color.

It is important to mention that this experience had been comfortably hidden from my memory until recently. More precisely, until the appearance of the COVID-19 pandemic—an unexpected nightmare reinforced by the “I can't breathe” uttered by George Floyd. This, in appearance, was just another case of a Black man killed by a white police officer but powerful enough to trigger—in the middle of the pandemic—an explosion of anti-racist manifestations not only all over the United States but around the world. Still… why was I able to remember that interpellation just at this precise moment? The self-awareness of bei