By Melissa Guida-Richards — 2021
My parents successfully passed me off as a dark-skinned Italian for 19 years of my life.
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Close to 11% of American adults with Hispanic ancestors don’t even identify as Hispanic or Latino.
“I still eat rice and beans. I just use brown rice now,” said Annya Santana of Menos Mas, a wellness company that speaks to African-American and Latinx communities.
The Latinx community is just as vulnerable to mental illness as the general population, but faces disparities in treatment.
Eso es para locos. Esta generación... siempre inventando. These are the words I’d hear anytime I mentioned therapy or mental health growing up.
I’m learning that my challenge isn’t just to unlearn what my family has taught me, but to put myself in situations that would reaffirm the new lessons I was trying to replace the old ones with.
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“In Latin America, there’s been a great deal of progress around gay and lesbian identities,” Ortiz says. “But with being transgender and non-binary, a lot of people are still unsure what it all means and I believe it’s connected to the words we use.”
In the late ’90s, television was my greatest source of comfort—the place were I went to to find versions of myself reflected back at me. The only queer woman I ever saw on screen, however, was Ellen Degeneres.
So many of the little rituals I have each day—like my makeup or skincare routine—do help soothe and/or rejuvenate me. For me, any type of solo practiced routine is good. But I’ve learned that self-care does not, and cannot, sustain me. And I believe that this may be the case for many of you.
Irina Gonzalez is teaching her son to embrace the beauty and diversity that exists within the Latinx community, not the stereotypes she was exposed to in her own childhood.
For more than a decade, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has been focused on introducing underserved students to a STEM education, which is science, technology, engineering and math.