I get the same comment, granted, I am pale (jincha), but that is also more of “staying out of the sun”. And also, female. I usually tack it that they don’t realize I’m Puerto Rican in part because I do not fit the stereotypical image of a PR female in terms of fashion. I do not have half an inch of make-up on my face, to begin.
But it annoys me to no end that they think that. Even in Puerto Rico, when my exchanges go like this:
Cashier (after serving my parents, with whom I am and I am speaking in Spanish): “How may I help you?” (in English)
Me: “I want this and this and this” (in Spanish)
Cashier: “It will be $X. Have a nice day!” (In English)
Me:
I know one time I kept having this similar back and forth until I started cursing in Spanish. Then the person realized my cursing was definitely from Puerto Rico and talked to me in Spanish. Again, .
Hah! Been there as well. I suppose that during all my years living and working predominantly in non-Latino communities I must have picked up some different body-language clues.
So don’t feel bad, folks, about the presumption, WE have “our” own people do it to us.
So Latinos have trouble identifying me as one even though I speak Spanish, or English with a very strong accent, yet non-Latinos have no problem identifying me as “foreign” the moment I open my mouth.
I profoundly disagree. I am amazed how store clerks generally address me in English, even though it is actually illegal for them to do so until they actually determine I prefer English! I assume it is how I dress, or maybe it is a combination of things. My hair used to be black and my skin is relatively dark, although clearly not black.
A neighbor of ours, East Indian parents, spent a couple years in LA. She said she was addressed in Spanish all the time and replied in French. They sometimes understood each other. But her language growing up was definitely English.
I’m totally white; my husband is Mexican. When we first started going out - to Mexican restaurants - I had to stop him from talking to the waiters in Spanish. Because once he did that, the waiter dropped his English, changed to Spanish, and stopped talking to me at all, even to ask if I needed anything or if everything was okay.
He also thinks it’s funny to answer telemarketers in Spanish and pretend he can’t understand them. But that’s another story. He did it to my mother once accidentally.
On a business trip to Canada I worked with a Quebecer government employee who could barely speak English. He was practising his English with me. Even though he was required to use English with English speaking Canadians, he refused to do so. But he didn’t mind with me because Americans are supposed to speak English, and it’s ok in that case.
I wonder what a Canadian debate on this subject sounds like.
Wow, I can’t believe Redshesaid got banned. I bet it was because she didn’t type her exclamation points upside down in a thread about Hispanics that…aren’t Hispanics. Or something. I know there’s a rule about that somewhere.
I’m a Spaniard, with a look that’s extremely common around the Mediterranean. I’ve been:
refused an entry stamp on my passport (Laredo) because “you’re American!” “Lady, if I don’t get that stamp I can get deported. See how my passport is maroon and has a funny letter on it?” (finally got it)
waved by with a “oh you’re american” by a US Marshall (same day, half an hour into the US; ok, so my friend who was driving is an American whose ancestry is Irish with Irish and a dash of Irish, but there are people of Irish ancestry south of the Rio Grande or in Spain, too!)
asked why was I faking a Colombian accent when I went by speaking in Spanish with a coworker. The USMC sergeant in question didn’t want to believe me when I said that my accent wasn’t fake; once I explained that what happens is that some parts of Colombia were colonized by people from my part of Spain he started considering that it might be true, but what convinced him was the confirmation from the Colombian coworker :smack:
told I can’t be a foreigner, by a cafeteria server who got angry when I asked her to point out the okra for me (I knew it was some sort of veggie, but not which one). By the UN’s accounting, I’m a foreigner in almost 200 countries, and yes, the US happens to be one of them.
asked agressively why wasn’t I waving my flag while watching a 4th of July parade. Because mine is red, yellow and red, ma’am; I’m not from around here.
For some reason people in other countries have never doubted my self-identification. Mistaken me from Italian, yes, but that’s perfectly logical given my looks and that I was in Italy at the time - but never yelled at me that “you can’t be a foreigner an’ stop tryin’ to pull my leg!”
It turned out to be a small calabacín… oh wait, that doesn’t help a lot, does it? Sort of looks like a small cucumber with hollows and seeds in the three parts where a cucumber has seeds but no hollows.
There’s history behind it. A few decades back English was the dominant (albeit not the official) language in Canada (including Quebec). Government business was generally in English, schools were generally run in English, major businesses generally all ran in English. Meanwhile in Quebec, you had a majority who spoke French as their primary language (although pretty much everyone learned English as well). Quebecois Francophones were resentful at having to speak English for the benefit of the Anglophone minority.
So when the inequality eventually began being addressed, things swung a little too far in the opposite direction (at least in my opinion). The Francophones didn’t want to just settle for French and English equality, they wanted French to have an official status above English (with the argument that French was, after all, the majority language in Quebec).
The big problem Quebecois Francophones face now is assimilation. While French is the primary language in Quebec, Quebec is surrounded by the English-speaking culture of the rest of Canada and the United States. Some Francophones feel they have to actively defend their language in order to keep it from fading away.
And I haven’t even gotten into issues like religion and separatism and aboriginal rights. This is just the surface of the issue. I’ll probably have Canadians coming in to tell me I got it all wrong - and they’ll probably split of which direction I was wrong in.
Silly stereotypes equating how you look with ethnic groups. Cultural language sensitivities. Obscene newbie just begging (successfully) to get insta-banned! And now, okra education! This thread has it all!
It’s important to note, Blackberry, if you don’t already know what okra looks like, then you really probably don’t know what it’s like to eat okra.
So be warned: They’re slimy! Those hollow chambers you see in the cut-up okra (where the seeds are) are filled with some kind of thick juice that oozes out. The stuff is utterly grossly gooey and slimy, perhaps being more useful as a water-based lubricant for biological activities other than eating.
