I’m Chicago bred, through and through, but my heart has always yearned to live abroad. Ever since my first visit to Paris, France at the tender age of 15 (2006), I knew I was meant to travel the world.
Even though I’m Afro-Latina and didn’t know a lick of Spanish, I learned French first (instead of Spanish) and joined the French club in 9th grade. Someone told me that if you learn French first, Spanish will be easier later. And I just assumed I would pick up Spanish one day. Arrogant perhaps?
I fell in love with French and would later see Paris another 2 or 3 times, study abroad there in college, and see at least 20 other countries in my 20s.
This isn’t a humble brag, travel is simply my passion. I was traveling before I was posting anything on the ‘gram’. Heck, the gram didn’t exist yet. I didn’t start posting on social media until a decade later.
I recently found a stack of 300 polaroids from my first few international trips. My eyes welled with tears. I kept ticket stubs from the trains in Paris, playbills, subway maps, and a flier from the salsa club (that was from the college study abroad).
I have a deep love of people, culture, language, history, vibrant colors, food and the richness that lives within the soil in other continents. Exploration is in my DNA.
Perhaps I’ve spent my life searching for my lost heritage. My interest in other cultures, languages, and people, is my own search to learn about my family from Tampico, Mexico or my Native American roots, or my ancestral roots in the Yoruba Tribe of Nigeria. Yep, I’m sure, I took the test on AfricanAncestry.com.
I joke that my family is a little “United Nations”. No two people in my family look exactly alike (except for me and my son lol). Everyone ranges from deep mahogany brown skin to ivory peach tones. We’ve got kinky hair, wavy hair, straight hair, coarse hair, silky...literally everything.
I used to be insecure about how different we all looked because it brought on so many questions from classmates or neighbors. And I never felt “Mexican Enough” or “Black Enough” or “Native American Enough” to really own any one identity. The way your friend’s face contorts when you try explain your lineage says it all.
I didn’t learn to truly appreciate who I was until I began to travel. That’s where I learned that hiding your identity is what families did to survive in America. And somehow it has become American culture to blend and not know where you come from...but when I travel, they always ask me “where are your people from?”
And even though I know a little. I want to know more.
This time next week, I’ll be in Mexico City with my family. Luckily, it's just an affordable, direct, 3 hour flight, so I can be back in Chicago with less than a day’s notice.
It’s time for me to learn my family’s history before it’s lost with our generation. I hope to pass on Spanish to my boys and to gain it for myself.
I hope to restore what we’ve lost to colonization. And maintan what we’ve built in our own backyard, in Chicago.
Where are your people from? Let me know in the ‘CurlMixers’ Facebook Group.
Love,
Kim
P.S.
I love art and I will always stop to get a photo with a mural or graffiti. I found this mural in Pilsen, Chicago and it reminded me of Dia de los Muertos. A holiday celebrating your ancestors and their memories. After watching the move “Coco” on Disney, I vowed to celebrate this holiday in Mexico and to remember my na-na [nah-nah], my Mexican & Native American granny who raised me.
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