Guerita Girl
Overcoming labels during a Mexican semester of self-discovery

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By Leticia Santos

Leaving for my spring semester in Guanajuato, Mexico, I had mentally prepared myself for what I knew would be a challenging experience. The excitement mounted as I prepared to leave, but that excitement also mixed with fear, and a sense of my own timidity. I was leaving my school, my friends, my family, and my boyfriend for six months in a country that was familiar to me in proximity and heritage, but I knew that the Mexican culture of my family would not be the one that greeted me.

After I had passed security and met my program director, we stepped into the dry heat of Leon for the drive to Guanajuato, and suddenly I realized the amount of land that I had just put between myself and all that I was familiar with. Like many students, I spent the weekend before orientation feeling as though I had been hit in the face with a shovel, scared to walk around in the daze of color and sound that is the beautiful city of Guanajuato, where school children sing loudly and the men bringing gas holler outside your window as a wakeup greeting. I preferred to stay secure in my host mother’s house, because I knew that I would soon have to make friends, begin my classes, and bare myself to the scrutiny of strangers. At first, I was too homesick to take in my entirely new environment in all of its complexity, and I didn’t fully absorb how Mexicans were looking at me. Being born in the United States, where the history of skin color causes one to be more careful about ethnicity and race, I was suddenly bombarded by people of all ages and genders wanting to point out exactly where I stood in their eyes. 

“Pasale Guerita”
“¿Adonde vas Guerita?”
“¿Si mi Guerita?”

The term “guerita,” or pale skinned girl, while better than the term “gringa”—a more derogatory and exclusive rather than inclusive word for a white person—still stung me every time that I heard it, a constant reminder of what everyone thought of me as I passed them in the street or at school. I had dealt with people in my own country doubting my ethnic background, looking at my skin and replying “Really? You’re Latina?” But normally after some kind of explanation, most of those inquiring would get the message. Here, I was dismissed without even a chance to explain myself, and it hurt. I made friends with many other Mexican students from other states, which was wonderful in helping me adjust to my new environment and learn Spanish. But even they teased me about not knowing Spanish: I was like the other “Chicanos,” or Mexican Americans they had heard about who had never learned the language of their parents. I found myself in a position of defending myself every moment, working extra hard to speak only Spanish with everyone I met.

My frustration only fueled my passion for improving my Spanish until I finally became fluent. My fluency impressed my host mother, Male, and my roommate, Beatriz, and endeared them to me. As we lived together and learned more about each other, they began to see me less as an American and more as an individual who was deeply invested in learning about Mexican culture and myself.

I made friends with Male’s friends, especially her friends in the church; I even went to see a friend and seminary student be ordained into the priesthood. Many nights, Male, Beatriz, and I would sit in the kitchen together drinking abuelita hot chocolate and laughing till our sides hurt about whatever gossip we had and what we had done that day. Although at times I became upset when people on the street, people I met, or even my friends made judgments about me, I also learned that if I was patient and made an effort to be myself that they would accept and begin to understand me, as Male and Beatriz eventually did.

One of the best parts of my semester abroad was meeting my friend Dennis, who had studied English for several years. Her goal was to become a maid in the United States and study there, while sending money to her family in Guanajuato to help support them because they were having financial problems. Her enthusiasm for learning English and, more importantly, for including me in her culture truly touched me. She faced so many obstacles, yet she was happy. Her aspirations inspired me to appreciate my situation and made me resolve to do better in school, and outside of school. Male also helped me to transform my perspective. She would say, “Ponte en las manos de dios porque no pasa nada que él no puede hacer” (Put yourself in God’s hands because there is nothing that he cannot do).

Thanks to their pieces of advice and conversations, my bouts of homesickness and loneliness became more fleeting. Mexico made me happiest when I learned to appreciate the hard-working, but also more care free, culture that I was fortunate enough to be immersed in. It left little room for me to feel sorry for myself. When I had this realization, it came to me that, in reality, I had the power over my life to make myself happy. Despite the assumptions that people had made about me, in Mexico and in the United States, I decided that it was what I thought of myself that mattered most.  It took crossing a lot of land to realize the power that I have over my own destiny.

Leticia Santos is a senior English Literature/Creative Writing major at Agnes Scott College, a small all women's liberal arts college in Decatur, Georgia. She studied abroad with ISEP in Guanajuato, Mexico, during the spring semester of her junior year. She plans to pursue a career in ESL education and fiction writing. Contact her at lsantos@agnesscott.edu.