Half Puerto Rican Girl: An Intertextual Analysis

In this essay, I’d like to talk about my experiences of being a half Greek and half Puerto Rican girl growing up in a hispanic neighborhood. Sure, I can discuss being a woman or how greatly my race and Greek culture have influenced my life, but I chose to write about the racial discrimination and prejudices I experienced in this specific area of my life because experiences like mine do not get recognized and are hardly ever talked about. They should. I chose this topic because I never get to voice what my experiences were like. The times I had voiced them, they were met with eye rolls from people who thought I was lying and labeled my experiences as fiction.

I grew up in a predominately hispanic neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. I was …show more content…
For many of the people I went to school with, this was a problem. It didn’t matter if I had some Puerto Rican in me either, if I looked white and mostly had white in me, I was white. At the time, I didn’t know what the words cracker or other derogatory words thrown at me meant, nor did I understand why I received so much negativity. I remember the first time I got called a cracker. Upon hearing this, I laughed because the only kind of cracker I knew, were those delicious Greek treats my grandma would buy from authentic Greek shops. I run upstairs to tell my mother because I found this so amusing, and to my surprise, she looked shocked. As I look back at this incident, I was around 10 years old, which means the girl who said it, was the same age as I was. How did she know what this word meant and the proper context to use it in? She learned it from her family. In school, the slurs continued and most of them, always referenced some kind of ignorant and prejudice stereotype of white people. I was teased for my thin nose and pale …show more content…
I had teachers make derogatory comments about my race, made fun of my complexion, and encouraged classmates to react this way towards me as well. I felt hopeless in many of these situations because these people had power over me and they used this to their advantage. Over the many years, this kind of negative energy started to profoundly affect me and my confidence. I was a lot more angry and hostile. I started to internalize the treatment I received. I started to feel like something was wrong with me. I felt like I wasn’t good enough and disliked myself. These experiences had turned me into a shy, sad, quite person who felt neglected and isolated. I had no motivation. It was when I was in high school that the racial prejudice and tension I was experiencing made me reach my breaking point. I never went to school and was failing all of my classes. I was mentally depleted and felt like a failure. My mother pulled me out of high school and I never went back to any school after that. I taught myself four years of high school and went on to take my GED. This took me a little bit longer than four years and for awhile, I hated that I started college late. I felt like I could of been done a few years ago and had my life