Promoted by Liza : First, let's welcome Textaisle to the front page. Second, I love how this post was put together. The Topic. The Spanglish. I'll explain further in the comments.
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Rachel has two excellent posts on the language of race and ethnicity in this country and how it pertains to Latinos.

Pa' mi, this is a big thing, since I'm real pale. I've been thinking of taking some pictures of my skin for the sake of comparison, but I hesitate, among other reasons, porque no quiero entrar en un concurso de "brown enough." That said, it's been my experience that I am just marginally "brown enough." This doesn't happen to everyone in my family, but I have always been subject to the periodic question
"Where are you from?"

to which I always answer the state I was raised in, and, invariably, the question come back,

"No, really, where are you

from"

It's not always so interrogatory. A veces, and this delights me, folk at work will come up to me and start rattling off in Spanish, como si mis años de estudios trying to recuperate the language of my father's side of the family fueron escritos en mi cara, that I may be legible as phenotypically bilingüe.

However, I haven't always taken the privlege of my palor gracefully. There was at least one instance in which a friend of mine was criticizing a group of which I was a member for being composed entirely of white people. I got pretty mad about being so totally discounted in her reckoning, as though I either wasn't there or just didn't count. My status as the potentially non-white whiteperson is very important to me, tho ultimately this bit pique got in the way of me taking her legitimate criticism more seriously.

This faux pas on my part weighs real heavily on me, especialmente después de un viaje a Puerto Rico where I realized that my relatives down there consider themselves white. Hay algunos cuentos interesantes about my family's conceptions of race and how weird they seem from a one-drop rule viewpoint, but sufffice it to say the relatives in question are darker than I am.

On top of that, I've got a couplea friends que son judios argentinos, and though they're definitely white up here, they're still marked as definitely "other" and, from lots of little signs here and there "Latinos" incontrovertibly. The best I can say is that the relatively recent historical journey of Jews en este país hacia whiteness is a great example of the impermanence of our racist ideologies. This maleability does not by any means querer decir that they ain't gotta go tho.

So, all of this trouble is just another means where I question my own authenticity and credibility, if not my earnestness. I really mean it. I don't like racism.
But it's the big nagging question with the burgeoning racialization of an ethnicity (o en el caso de mis amigos argentinos, the forging of ethnicity itself): does phenotype matter? Shit, does history matter?

This was cross-posted over at mi bloguito: Arbusto de Mendacity