Racial Identity - What's in a name?

First an update: 
I have tried to contact that milk seller a couple of times. When I call they tell me I have to talk to Dave in sales (I don't know why sales), but Dave's never in his office.  I've left messages for him, but he has not called me back.  At the end of the day, I'm glad Aldi is selling hormone free milk at a very cheap price, but the living conditions of their cows are still unclear.  Go with that where your conscience leads.  Ideally, we would all change our lives in all the ways that would make our world better:  we'd feed the hungry, recycle, walk or ride bikes more, volunteer, eradicate systemic racism, shop locally, etc, etc.  Reality tells me that I can only focus on some of these at a time and based on my story, my current surroundings, my faith and community, I lean more naturally toward some of these issues.  Also, as I walk my day by day journey, certain issues become heightened in my heart and I am compelled for a time (if not forever) to get involved.

On that note, racial identity. Whoa.  Those words are so loaded and filled with emotion.  I wonder as you read those two words, what emotions, thoughts and memories were stirred inside of you?  I wonder what definitions you have for those words?  A flood of emotions and thoughts have overwhelmed me the last few days and the ideas, and thoughts are a jumbled mess inside.  This space is an attempt to begin to organize and deal with my story and the stories of others that have forever changed me.

You might be thinking, 

"Juli, you're 31; you're seriously just now starting to think about this? Where is this coming from?"

For the last three days, I attended the National Summit for Courageous Conversations.  If you are an educator and have never heard of Courageous Conversations, please stop reading my blog and go spend some time looking into it. Seriously, stop reading this now.  I'd love to tell you more about all that I learned and experienced at the Summit, but that's not really where I want to start.  I think the best place to start is my own story. The beginning of my story.

If you read my tab On Immigration, you can get a quick idea of what my first few encounters with race and ethnicity were.  The one that sticks with me now is this:

With immigrant parents who didn't speak any English, my aunt, who had lived in the states for many years, took me to school and signed me up.  My name was Maria Julieta Acuña, and I was registered as such, except for the tilde.  Like many Latinos, my first name is a family name, my mother's name, but was not the name I was called.  I was always called Julieta, and for short July (hoo-lee).  I don't remember the details, when exactly it became necessary, but after some time of trying to get English speakers to say my name correctly, my aunt encouraged me, or maybe just told me, to say my name was Julie.  And this was honestly to protect me, to guard me from the constant frustration of people mispronouncing my name, and maybe ridicule, otherness.  I guess, it was the beginning of a movement toward assimilation.  More on assimilation some other day.

And so it was.  My name. Changed.  The sound that made my head turn. Forever changed.  Also, it had to be spelled J-U-L-I-E because J-U-L-Y is a month of the year and would be pronounced as such, and it would obviously be weird to be called a month of the year (oh way, April, May, June).  I just accepted it as a necessity.  So many things had changed and were continuing to change that someone telling me to change my name didn't really seem like an offense or identity change or anything monumental.  Also, I was nine, so what did I know?  Years later, I think by high school, I got tired of spelling my name J-U-L-I-E when I wrote in English and J-U-L-Y when I wrote to someone in Spanish, so I decided to start spelling it J-U-L-I which is what I do to this day.  And to think, my personal and work email, my work ID, the way I write every Christmas card and every love letter has been signed off with this new name.  My real name, Julieta, is reserved for a select few, who say it with a tenderness that I suppose makes its near extinction almost sweet.

This is just the beginning.  But I've come to find out that it's not just my experience.  So many immigrants and children of immigrants have very similar stories.  Today, another Latina at the conference introduced herself as Betsaida (bet-sigh-dah), but because it was difficult to pronounce, her second grade teacher told her she was going to call her Susan.  

I think the first theme when I think about racial identity is CHOICE.  And to discuss this idea of choice, I think I want to talk about color soon.