At a young age, the South was the place where Cortez learned what it meant to be Jim Crowed, while for nonblack Latinos it was where they learned what it could mean to be free from that violence.
Growing up, Cortez’s family was upper middle class. She attended a French Catholic private school where she was the only “colored” girl in her class. While she was the only “colored” girl, there were also two light-skinned Dominican girls in her class, the goddaughters of a member of the Trujillo family, a Korean girl and a Filipina. To the Dominican girls, Cortez was “just an American colored girl.”
During her senior year of high school, Cortez’s school decided to take the graduating class on a trip to Washington DC. Cortez, however, was excluded from the trip after the school decided to have the group stay in an all white hotel. Even in her racially diverse group, with a “Korean [girl] who was darker...the Filipina who was about [her] complexion...and the two girls from the Dominican Republic,” it was Cortez’s status as an African American that prevented her from staying in the hotel. Alienated by her classmates who she “lunch with everyday for four years,” Cortez was destroyed. When she spoke to her mother about the incident, Cortez’s mother lamented, “that’s just how white people are.” But “they’re not white,” Cortez responded. “Well,” her mother said, “that’s how they’re considered.”
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