Growing up in Bell Gardens, an urban neighborhood within the city of Los Angeles, I was surrounded by many different cultures. In my neighborhood, in the twenty-first century, the streets were bright and full of music, colorful environments and children laughing during the day, and once the sun went down, everyone went back to their homes. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay My mother had a strict policy of not letting my sister, brother, and I play outside once the sun started to set. There were often gangs and violence running the streets late into the night, and my mother knew that the streets were not a safe place. As a child and before I went to college, she told me, "I want you and your brothers to get out of Bell Gardens and make a better life for yourselves," because she didn't want me to be trapped in the "hood" my whole life; he believed I was better than what Bell Gardens had to offer. My mother stood up to me after every little mistake in my life by refusing to allow me to be part of the growing statistics of Latino high school dropouts. I was taught that I must fight vigorously to provide a better life than the one I have lived, for my family, for future children, and for myself. I discovered I was Mexican very early in my life. My maternal grandmother was the daughter of parents from Guadalajara, a city in western Mexico, who both remained in their country. My grandfather on my mother's side is from Cofradia de Duendes, a city in western Mexico. Both my grandmother and grandfather on my mother's side are immigrants from Mexico who did not speak English. I never knew where my father's father was from, but I heard that my paternal grandmother was an immigrant from Mexico and also spoke no English. My father is one of seven children and has a high school diploma. My mother is one of six children and attended East Los Angeles Community College for two years, but unfortunately dropped out of college before failing to obtain a college degree. My family was financially stable at one point. My mother became a single parent in 2002 due to my father's endless drug and alcohol use and is now unable to react to the world as she did before. Once my mother stopped receiving financial support from my father, the total family income dropped dramatically. I attended both primary and secondary school in Bell Gardens. The way the Los Angeles school board worked was by dividing the city by district. Students were required (unless they received special permission from the city) to apply to schools in their district. My class, the kindergarten class of 2002, was a large class of fifty students within one classroom. I stayed in the same class for the next four years. My class was extremely diverse, but we had no white students in the classroom at all. Often some of my peers thought I was white, but once they heard my last name, they knew I was Hispanic. Looking back, I never remembered my racial identity being questioned until I moved on to high school. In my primary and middle school years, I did not yet perceive myself as having a racing body. When I was young, I had not encountered race and was unaware of various racial backgrounds, because I was part of the majority, I never realized whether I was experiencing marginalization or not. When I was in middle school, I was strongly encouraged by my primary school teachers to enroll in private schools. I applied for scholarship programslike the Gates Scholarship, in hopes of receiving the financial assistance I needed to attend these institutions. My mother thought that sending me to a private school in a wealthy neighborhood was a great opportunity to get the best education possible. My classmates would wonder why I wanted to go to these “white” schools. My classmates told me I wouldn't belong because my race wasn't white. I will be the "symbol" Spanish girl of the school. I ultimately decided not to go to private school because I couldn't afford the tuition. I wanted to go to a high school in Miracle Mile, which is just west of downtown Los Angeles. Instead, I ended up at Bell Gardens High School, which is located in the town of Bell Gardens. The ethnic makeup of my high school was 99% Hispanic, of which approximately 50% of the students were of Puerto Rican descent and 0.01% were African American. Puerto Rican students often spoke Spanish in class, at outdoor play, and after school. Since I was in a small classroom during my time in primary and middle school, I had never met a Puerto Rican person before. I saw that they knew Spanish and communicated in Spanish using their Puerto Rican accent, they knew more Spanish music than I did, and they had more friends they could relate to. I often wondered why Hispanic students didn't approach or even talk to me and try to connect with me. I was often teased for being a “Spanish softie” in my class. Because of my white skin, my Hispanic peers often called me “la gringa” or “la Americana.” I told them I was Mexican when they asked "Do you speak Spanish?" I said yes and they said “Well, let me hear your Spanish. “As I spoke a couple of words in my broken Spanish, my peers told me “speaking broken Spanish doesn’t make you Mexican.” “I felt that my language barrier and the color of my skin prevented me from being accepted into this community. I felt a strong intuition that I should be part of this community because I identify with it. In my reality, it was okay for me to identify as a Hispanic/Latino without being able to speak Spanish properly. To my peers, however, because I wasn't able to communicate with them “properly,” I wasn't “Latino enough.” of the Hispanic/Latino community. As I experienced these microinvalidations, I began to question my experiential reality. What does it mean to be Hispanic/Latino? Were there any rules to follow? My peers disapproved of my racial identity because I was unable to speak Spanish fluently, even though my cultural upbringing was extremely Latino-centric. This in turn discouraged me from being determined to learn more Spanish and communicate freely with my Latino peers. The fact that I was communicating with them in broken Spanish, in turn, made them claim that I was “white” because I couldn't speak “Spanish” correctly. “I had a lot of difficulty understanding whether students were intentional in their insults or unintentional. Because I was an outcast in my high school community, I was often excluded from group activities on the playground, conversations, and extracurricular social events. At the time, I didn't think about what these microaggressions meant to my identity and how these microaggressions were changing the way I perceived the world as black and white, I decided to ignore them and do nothing. Michael Omi and Howard Winant explain that: “ Our compass to orient ourselves in race relations depends on notions.