"Who are you and what defines you? " At first this questions seem very easy to answer and i am sure for some people it might be, but for me it is a whole different story. And as many people have told me before you may also be thinking "everyone knows who they are you are just scared to be yourself" and i realized that it may be true maybe im scared to get to know who i really am, but see the thing is how do people expect you to be true to yourself and the exact second you do something that doesn't fit in the standards of society they tell you to not be yourself and change. And for me this happens on a daily basis see as a black hispanic kid that was raised in two very different cultures with different mindsets and point of view. 20 years ago my parents moved from the Islamic Republic of Mauritania a big country in the west of Africa to Mexico city and even bigger country 9,238 kilometers far away. My parents did an amazing job raising me and my 2 sisters, they made sure we stayed close to mauritanias culture and religion, so they taught us part of the "quoran" and Mauritanias lenguage "puular" while in Mexico the mayor part of the population was catholique or Christian and the spoken lenguage was Spanish I managed to follow the mauritanias culture and the Mexican one as well. Although I always felt as if i didn't belong there because of the color of my skin for several years i was the only black kid in the schools that i went to and for a while i didn't pay much attention to it but it wouldn't take long for someone to ask me where i was from, imagine the shock the went through when they found out that i was born in Mexico. I fell in love with Mexico, the food, the people the places it was a very good place to live. All of that disappeared when my dad said "we are going back to mauritania" saying i was scared would be an understatement i knew all my family lived there and that was a part of me but it didn't feel like it, it didn't feel right i considered Mexico my home.
A few weeks later i was standing in a room full of people that I've only heard stories about, i couldn't believe i was meeting them. I stood behind my mom while everyone was eying me i didn't understand what was going on i greeted everyone and soon after i asked my mom why they were looking at me like that she told me it was because the way i was dressed, i had jeans on and a shirt the clothes i always wore but i realized that in there, women where only in dresses and the fact that didn't wear a hijab didn't help either. The next several months i had to change the way i dressed, the way i talked and my point of view in many different ways all of that just for people not to judge me or my parents for raising me the way they did, my mom always told me to be myself but deep down I knew sje was relived that i had done my best to fit in. In mauritania when they asked me where i was from they couldn't accept it when i said i was Mexican but when i did something that wasn't right for them I would hear them say "oh she doesn't know what she is talking about, she is Mexican" now it may seem that i am only looking aat the negative sides of Mauritania but while being there i learnt so much, met people that really want to do something to change the world, i learnt more about where my lineage is from, thanks to Mauritania i know that i want to do something to help people and to make people raise awareness about many issues that not only the country but many parts of the world are facing. I am blessed to say that i have got to look at life a lot of different ways.
Both mexico and mauritania played a very big part of my life and I am still figuring out who i am but i know that i don't have to choose either of them because i am a part of both and that makes a part of who i am. And the reason why i don't know who i am yet is because im still making choices that define me, i am always making mistakes and learning from them but i hope that one day i can sit down without having the fear of answering who i am.