{"id":45050,"date":"2016-01-11T02:16:20","date_gmt":"2016-01-11T02:16:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=45050"},"modified":"2017-07-21T23:44:54","modified_gmt":"2017-07-21T23:44:54","slug":"cesar-vargas-how-i-became-black","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=45050","title":{"rendered":"C\u00e9sar Vargas: How I Became Black"},"content":{"rendered":"

C\u00e9sar Vargas: How I Became Black<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Okayafrica. Giving you true notes since 247,000 BC<\/a>
\n2016-01-08<\/p>\n

C\u00e9sar Vargas<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nThis is me my Junior year of high school.<\/small><\/p>\n

During my first day of school in the United States I was told by a fellow classmate to watch out for the morenos<\/em>. I was taken aback by the warning and in my bewilderment asked how to tell them apart. As a teenager trying to find his place in a new country, race was a difficult concept. I couldn\u2019t tell people apart based on it. This gave me a disadvantage navigating 90s pre-gentrified Bed-Stuy<\/a>. My high school, I.S. 33, was an all Black school with the exception of a few American-born Latinos\u2014mostly Nuyoricans<\/a>\u2014and the bilingual class that I was placed in.<\/p>\n

Sosua<\/a> in the Dominican Republic<\/a> where I was raised is a small tourist town with a very diverse population. Back then I was already exposed to white Americans, Europeans, and Black Haitians. All who, phenotypically speaking, looked like relatives since my family fell within the spectrum of Black to White. Which might be the reason why I couldn\u2019t tell morenos<\/em> apart from the rest of my classmates and family. Some of them were the same color as those morenos<\/em> they were so apprehensive of.<\/p>\n

My bilingual class was their punching bag. We were bullied relentlessly. For being foreigners. For speaking Spanish. For being different. That all stopped when two fresh-of-the-boat Dominican brothers that were brought to our class started fighting back. Both were as dark as the African American kids they fought. These two (Santiaguero<\/em> city-slickers, it should be noted) emboldened the rest of us to do the same. So it was chaos for a couple of months.<\/p>\n

Soon enough I understood why my classmates were fearful of morenos<\/em>…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During my first day of school in the United States I was told by a fellow classmate to watch out for the morenos. I was taken aback by the warning and in my bewilderment asked how to tell them apart. As a teenager trying to find his place in a new country, race was a difficult concept.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,14646,8,20],"tags":[17916,22583],"class_list":["post-45050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-latino","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-cesar-vargas","tag-okayafrica"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45050"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45050\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54613,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45050\/revisions\/54613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}