I have usually called myself Indian, half Indian, or if time and interest permits, Indian-Salvadoran-Russian-German. It really is a strange thing to have to find a name for it all so that others have something to call me. In a time when we so vigorously identify with specific racial, cultural, and gender groups, I feel as if I belong to everything and nothing, not Indian enough to fit in entirely, or Latina enough to relate. My Spanish is more broken than I like and I admit I have to watch YouTube to help me wrap a sari, and so that feeling of not being enough of anything to be part of something has always lurked in the shadows of my definition.
I am the daughter of an Indian immigrant, the first in his family to come here on a student visa, and eventually the one to bring his brothers and sisters over to build prosperous lives as well. I have a tiny grandmother from the tiny country of El Salvador, a land that she left behind when her parents sent her on a California bound train to put miles between her and a boyfriend deemed unsavory. I am the granddaughter of an Ashkenazi Jew, who magically sidestepped concentration camps to live in Shanghai for a decade. He then found passage to Chicago, and later to San Francisco, where he met my little grandma on a park bench on a Sunday afternoon.
It is nothing less than divine synchronicity that brought all of my ancestors together from their far-reaching places to coil their DNA together for my creation. Starting from my Ukranian great-grandfather who married a German non-Jew, the people of my lineage have consistently broken from tradition and radically stepped forth in love. Their hearts have bravely pulled them across continents and through wars and it is from this blueprint of openness and courage that my cells emerged.
Finally looking at my actual ancestry composition, though, has helped me to expand this vague view of who I am. Yes, I am of mixed race, but even those pieces that I thought were pure are uniquely muddled. To be half Punjabi Indian registers at only 36.7% Punjabi, and the rest a smattering of Central and South Asian. Indeed my Punjabi forefathers were India’s gatekeepers, defending and blending with travelers from the West. And my quarter Salvadoran blood shows up as 10.3% Native American, 5.6% Southern European and 2.0% Sub-Saharan African. Perhaps a dynamic blend of Pipil Indian, West African slave and Spanish conquistador? Pieces of pieces of pieces, really, which I think is true of any undiluted ethnicity any of us claim.
Like looking into a mirror within a mirror and finding infinite reflections, I know that I am enough to be everything. Here is what I know to be true as I celebrate a new year of being on this Earth. That I am a rare specimen who carries the soil of every peopled continent underneath my fingernails. That I can pass for many things, my edges fluid, allowing me to travel peacefully and my words to land softly. And that I am no different than you. Each one of us has always carried that wholeness of being and spiritual wisdom that goes beyond any ancestral memory or makeup. I am just a reminder that we are all pieces of recent cultures and particles of lost civilizations, that the only identity we can claim with absolute certainty is that of our one pure soul.