Identity crisis seems to be a prominent theme within Latinos in the United States. Adjusting to American social norms while still upholding the traditions of our mother country, serving as our parents’ or grandparents’ personal interpreter at the age of 6, being the only dark complected brunette in a sea of blue-eyed blondes – all of us can identify with these situations and responsibilities that have been imposed on us.

Well, all of us except for me.

Look at me. Go on. I am giving you permission to gape in confusion. I am a pale, redheaded Latina.

Let’s be frank, the words ‘redheaded’ and ‘Latina’ don’t even sound right next to each other.

Being surrounded by tan, sun kissed brunettes all my life has not made the process of coming into my own skin a simple expedition. Many of my physical features are blamed on the fact that I am mixed, my father white and my mother from Guatemala. My father is three shades darker than I am, his rough skin forever darkened due to years of working as a carpenter under the sun’s unforgiving rays.

I was born with the blackest of black hair, but the color expired in about a year and a half. Dark orange roots began to sprout, and so too began the confused gapes to which I have become so accustomed. The rich red roots and jet-black tips fascinated my aunts and uncles. From then on, I was simply referred to as la peliroja.

As my mother and I would go to school to pick up my older sister from kindergarten, my hair appalled the other children’s mothers. To them, my multi-colored hair symbolized complexity, bad parenting. How could a mother dye her baby’s hair?

Growing up, I was the only redhead in my predominantly Mexican neighborhood. In high school, I was “the Guat” to the white girls and the white girl to the Hispanic girls.

Exclusion is something I have come to recognize all too well. And yet, my deceiving demeanor has allowed me to detect discrimination dead in its tracks. On numerous occasions, I have overheard Spanish-speaking people make snide comments about my red hair or my conspicuous freckles splashed on my face, assuming I am a monolingual American. I seem to encounter many of these chismosas on my Orange Line train rides in Chicago.

“Mírela, Maria,” I heard a young Hispanic woman say to her friend, both fully equipped with some of the most common Latina stereotypes – gold hoop earrings, tightly geled hair, heavy lip liner. As the train was approaching the Kedzie stop, I got up from my seat and started heading towards the door.

“¿Qué esta haciendo una peliroja en nuestro vecindario?“ she said loudly and completely unafraid.

She did not care if I heard her. Why should she? She assumed I didn’t know a lick of Spanish. But I understood.

I could feel her eyes fixed on me as they embraced every single one of my features. I finally turned to look at her, and all she could do was give me a fake smile.

Sometimes I’ll chime in with a response to their remarks in Spanish in order to make them aware of their idiocy. And yet other times, like this particular incident, I was too sad to bother myself with them. It’s time the Latino community take a step back and realize that being a minority does not justify discrimination.

My entire existence has made me feel like a Latina in disguise, a minority within the minority. And while the Latino population continues to grow, my fellow redheads and I are an endangered species. Red hair is the result of a mutated gene, which means we makeup only 2 percent of the world’s population.

My crimson crown does not make me feel like any less of a Latina, and I have strived to show the rest of the world that my hair does not define me. Although bigotry against fair skin is nothing like the blatant discrimination aimed at the darker-complected, it is our responsibility as Latinas to grasp the concept that our passionate orgullo manifests itself through what is felt rather than what we look like. I am unapologetic for my Anglo features. Every freckle on my body and every bright red hair on my head is exactly where Dios intended it.