A Love Letter to Latinas of Mixed Heritage Who Never Felt They Fit In

Growing up as the only child of a mixed Mexican American mother and an Italian immigrant father, I always felt like an island.  No one in my life shared my experience as someone of mixed heritage.  I’m from suburban Connecticut, was one of the only Latinas in my high school class, and with the exception of family trips to New Mexico, I found myself in mainly traditionally white spaces. I went to both private and public schools, I learned to sail on Long Island Sound and became a collegiate sailor at the University of Southern California.  The only child of two parents who wanted better for their own, and thus, put her in spaces they could have only dreamed of penetrating.

But, no matter how much I infiltrated or assimilated, I wasn’t a WASP (white, anglo-saxon, protestant) with a trust fund and a boarding school pedigree.  I was the daughter of two people who were “the firsts.”  The first in their families to earn college and graduate degrees, buy houses and have money leftover, send their kid to private school without a scholarship – and who were hell bent on preserving their cultures within their only child. I grew up with my face against the glass of a family history riddled with adversity, risk, and luck.  I learned from primary sources, but like a lot of mixed race kids, I didn’t experience most of the struggle firsthand.  I am not the stereotypical Latina.  At 16, I walked into my cousin’s house in Albuquerque wearing Sperry boat shoes and came home with a pair of cowboy boots I wore to my lily white high school.  I somehow never got used to other people’s thinly veiled shock when they found out my background.  You can almost see “A Mexican who sails?!” written across their forehead.

My grandmother, Arcenia, was the first to marry outside her culture when she met a U.S. Airman stationed in her hometown of Roswell, New Mexico.  My dad was the first to marry outside his culture by picking not only a non-Italian, but a brown girl.  Safe to say feathers were ruffled.  I navigated my family with no example of someone like me – someone who felt deeply connected to her cultures but didn’t feel worthy of claiming any of them, who felt like she was not enough.

And, when I peered out into the larger world, I had the same experience.  Although the younger generations are largely mixed, society largely ignores those of us who didn’t fit into its time honored boxes.  I took a Feminism class in college and while my professor was musing on the intersection of race and gender, I raised my hand and asserted I thought her take didn’t account for experiences of mixed race women.  She stopped in her tracks and asked the class to raise their hands if they identified as mixed race and I would say about 75 percent of the class raised our hands.  My professor did not hide her shock the number could be that high.

American society is uncomfortable with those that do not fit in the expected boxes, despite the boxes becoming increasingly obsolete.  Just look at the outrage over Bad Bunny playing the Super Bowl.  Thousands of people went online and asked why a “non-American” who doesn’t speak English is allowed to play the halftime show.  The ignorance is astonishing considering Puerto Ricans have been U.S. citizens since 1917, but what it shows is a deeper problem of the rejection of anyone who isn’t like them. We are a melting pot and many still can’t accept that, a thought process largely preserved through lack of BIPOC representation.

Another example is American Girl brand’s Girl of the Year 2026, Raquel Reyes. Raquel is half Latina and a direct descendant of the brand’s wealthiest, whitest, and most beloved historical doll, Samantha Parkington. Amidst my own jubilation, I witnessed a creator on Tik Tok wonder what society was coming to if the Girl of the Year’s big dream is to be a DJ. Shouldn’t she be a saver of worlds? This is what we mean when we say systemic racism.  A likely good person doesn’t realize how subconsciously influenced she is by lack of representation of this kind of Latina in the larger cultural zeitgeist.  A seemingly benign, even “color blind” opinion reinforcing the boxes Americans live and die by, and ultimately, holding our society back.  It is exactly why representation is everything.

Minority women do not owe the world a massive dream like being president or a doctor or winning the Nobel Peace prize. Believe it or not, minority upper class nepo babies like Raquel do exist. They participate in country club sports like pickleball and sailing, and listen to playlists that have The Chainsmokers and Bad Bunny side by side. Brown people are of value beyond “the first to do X” tropes. Many of us are navigating being the first to not be the first.  This is why Raquel matters, she reminds people that the future is already here, diversity exists whether they like it or not. We are no longer the exception, but becoming the rule. And, while the rest of you are calculating our DNA breakdowns and pondering which box to shove us into, we are thriving.

On a personal level, we need representation to validate our own experiences, to feel worthy.  I feel I’m always forced to claim things that only represent a piece of me, not the whole of me, and thus feeding my worthiness insecurity.  I had American Girl’s Josefina doll growing up, and my mother used her as a conduit to talk about our family heritage and ties to New Mexico positively.  Yet, as much as I loved my Josefina doll and matching family stories with places my mother had actually taken me in the state, I didn’t entirely feel worthy of claiming her story like the other girls in third grade could so easily claim their allegiance to Samantha or Kit. I didn’t grow up in the southwest, I’m a no sabo kid, and the various sides of my family have spent the better part of the last thirty years persuading me to claim only their identities, only a percentage of my whole. The American cultural zeitgeist provided representation for pieces of me, but not all of me – until Raquel Reyes.

Raquel is a pillar of light for the entire Latina community, but she is much more to the mixies within. Through Raquel, American Girl dares to ask the questions we’ve been asking ourselves our whole lives – does someone like Raquel not only have a place, but does she belong in traditionally white or traditionally Hispanic spaces – including familial spaces. In other words, can a brown girl go to Grandmary’s mansion in the Hamptons and call it home? Can a girl with a white mom sell paletas? Can she be authentic in each group, despite having a foot in two worlds? Is she allowed to claim both groups? And, ultimately, is she enough?

And, can she ever be enough in a society that is obsessed with labels.  If I had a dollar for every time someone reminded me I am only 25 percent Latina or I am actually 75 percent white after I expressed some opinion on my Mexican heritage, I’d be retired. It is said to me as if the numbers should tell me where I fall. As if the speaker is searching for a label and is experiencing profound discomfort that not only do I slip through the cracks of our society’s boxes, but that my existence proves the cracks exist, that the pot has melted.  As if it is too hard to hold two truths at once. As if my opinion doesn’t matter and I am not allowed to claim Josefina or Bad Bunny as part of my own story.  As if “sopapillas” is not a valid answer to “What would your ideal last meal be?” as an ice breaker at school or work.  Too much yet never enough. 

The thing about us mixed kids is though we may only have 25, 50, or 75 percent of a community’s blood running through our veins, we participate in those communities at 100 percent. When I am forced to watch yet another video of masked men pulling someone who looks like my cousin off the streets of a major American city, my heart snaps. I may have grown up in areas like Samantha, but like Raquel, my 75 percent whiteness has not spared me the pain of the other 25 percent. It has not spared me the pain of my community. Unlike white women, I am not afforded the choice to look away.  And yet, I feel like I constantly have to prove that I’m worthy of feeling that pain.

When I first saw the Girl of the Year announcement and read that Raquel is a mixed race Latina and direct descendant of the brand’s richest, whitest, and most beloved historical doll, Samantha Parkington, the following raced across my mind: (1) Cute!; (2) Oh my God, she is me, (3) She’s wearing gingham!! (4) During Hispanic Heritage Month!, (5) What a statement to link a Latina to a white character now, and finally, silent sobs at my work desk. These were not happy tears, they were a release, a cosmic exhale.

Not only did American Girl scrape the surface of these “am I enough” questions, but chose to answer with a resounding, “YES,” as if it was obvious, as if it’d be radical to answer any other way. For those of us of mixed heritage, the creation and embrace of Raquel’s story by a prominent corporate brand signals that we are seen, contradictions and all, fully. We can look out into the world and see representation for the whole of us, not just part of us. I’d say Raquel healed my inner child, but it’s deeper than that. It starts in childhood, but it is a lifelong, uphill battle to figure out and continuously claim your identity in a society that constantly puts you in a box based on a percentage point – that constantly crunches the numbers to determine if you’re worthy of your pain.

Through Raquel, American Girl healed yes, the inner child, but also 30-year-old me who still struggles with impostor syndrome in both cultures I belong to, who still wonders if my pain and mourning for my community is valid, who worries everyone else finds me fake and performative, who agonizes over having to prove my allegiances. With Raquel’s announcement, I felt seen and welcomed and celebrated.  I felt represented.