I’m a US-born Hispanic – what do people mean when they call me exotic?

I’ve been told I’m exotic more times than I’ve been told I have toes.

“You look so exotic,” an older woman once told me at Publix in Florida. “Where do you come from?”

“I’m originally from New York,” I said, deflecting the question. New Yorkers in Florida are a dime a dozen, so I doubted that alone made me exotic.

“They look exotic,” said a gentleman at Costco a few years ago. “One day you’ll be famous.”

This time I shrugged and walked away, confused by the exchange. I am a stocky, middle-aged woman. What would make me famous? (Well, hopefully my writing.)

The first time this happened was in 1998 when I was a freshman at Duke University. Google had just been invented, and I remember sneaking into the search engine, confused by the comment, and asking, “What does it mean to be called exotic?” Is it a compliment or a criticism? I really didn’t know.

What did they want to say about me? More importantly, what were they trying to say about the millions of Latino and Hispanic Americans who look like me?

Hispanics like me belong in America. So what do people mean when they call me exotic?

With age and wisdom, I finally have the answer. Even if it’s not intentional, when someone calls me exotic, they’re implying that I don’t belong.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines exotic as:

1. Imported from another country: not native to the site

2. Strikingly, excitingly or mysteriously different or unusual

3. Of or relating to striptease: include or highlight exotic dancers

I was born in the United States. I speak perfect English. I have dark hair and dark facial features; Does this make me “non-native” or “unusual”? Or maybe my strong stomach makes me the ideal striptease candidate? What exactly is “exotic” about me?

My mother comes from a long line of northern European immigrants, including Irish and Swiss. My grandmother can trace our family history back to the Sons of Liberty. Like her mother, she was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

However, my father was born in El Salvador. He emigrated to the USA in the 1970s. I was born on Long Island – about as far from exotic as you can imagine. As a baby, I had jet black hair and pale white skin. My mother said I looked like Snow White.

As I got older, my skin turned brown when I walked through sprinklers in the summer. Because of our different skin colors, people asked my mother to be my nanny. As an adult living in Florida, I’m generally tan year-round. My hair and eyes are also dark brown.

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Does that make me exotic – because my skin and complexion are not beautiful? If that’s the case, then why do we think that being brown isn’t American?

A microaggression is a “comment or action that subtly and often unconsciously or unintentionally expresses a prejudiced attitude toward a member of a marginalized group (e.g., a racial minority).” These statements reinforce stereotypes, such as that brown people are not included USA are based

I am very proud to be part Hispanic. Drawing boundaries between two identities gives me insights into two different cultural worlds. But when I’m told I’m exotic, it means I don’t belong in the country where I was born. I’m trying not to be offended, but deep down it’s bothering me. I wonder how I will be seen and valued.

Not surprisingly, I was first told I was “exotic” while attending Duke University. Even though I graduated from high school at the top of my class, I still felt like I had to justify going to an elite college. They didn’t think I fit in. (While I was in the computer lab, another student whispered that I had the “most beautiful hair” she had ever seen, so not all of my experiences were bad.)

Somehow my brown hair and tanned skin seem strange in a country made up of immigrants from different backgrounds. Many people who immigrated to the United States came from places much further afield than El Salvador.

I have seen Far and far a hundred times. We all know about Irish immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries. Between 1820 and 1930 alone, up to 4.5 million Irish came to America.

This makes my Irish roots as foreign as my Salvadoran ones. Irish immigrants also experienced discrimination and exploitation upon their arrival, although the extent of this is still controversial.

But once they lost their accent, it was easier to integrate into society because they were white and spoke English. This was true for many white immigrants from northern Europe. Non-white and Hispanic immigrants were not so lucky.

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I am exotic not because my father was an immigrant, but because my father was an immigrant Brown Immigrant.

During my childhood and adolescence, I repeatedly experienced how my father was confronted with stereotypes. My father became a U.S. citizen in the 1980s. After years of working as a chef in restaurants, he and my mother opened a pizzeria. He was fluent in English, Spanish and Greek.

To improve his language skills, he read the newspaper every day. He voted in every election and took great pride in being part of the political process. (Even though he voted for candidates I disagreed with, I admired his sense of social responsibility.)

Still, customers came to his pizzeria and talked to him in broken English. Because of his skin color, black hair, and dark eyes, they assumed he was uneducated. He always answered them the same. I would listen in shock.

One day I said to my father, “Why don’t you tell them you speak English?” Why are you humiliating yourself?”

I wanted him to stand up for himself. He worked so hard to assimilate and be an American.

He shrugged. “They see what they want to see,” he said. And all they saw was that he was of Spanish descent, so he was illiterate and uneducated.

In the summer of 1998 we traveled to El Salvador to celebrate my high school graduation. After returning to the United States, my father was asked by immigration officials to write down his Social Security number and other information. They questioned him vigorously about the brooms he brought with him to the United States to clean the pizzeria.

Again I was defensive. He had a US passport and brought no prohibited items with him. Why did they still single him out in front of his family? I later learned that they do this because when someone uses a stolen passport, they get confused when asked for certain details.

That horrified me even more. I had just graduated at the top of my class and they treated my dad like he was last in his class. But my father did as he was told. He didn’t question her at all.

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My father did not question his place as an immigrant. He accepted that he was a foreigner. What he didn’t expect was that his children, who were U.S. citizens, would still be questioned.

A study published in 2021 by the American Psychological Association examined whether people’s skin tone influences the way perceivers categorize their immigration and legal status, and the possible relationship between perceivers’ support of strict immigration policies and certain categorization patterns.

The results suggest that people with brown (compared to white or black) skin are more likely to be perceived as undocumented immigrants and that there is a higher level of respondents’ perception that a person with brown skin is more likely to be an undocumented immigrant Support for Hard Immigration Predicts Policies.

Pew Research reported that in 2021, only one-third of all U.S. Hispanics were immigrants, meaning two-thirds of U.S. Hispanics were born in the United States. From 2020 to 2021, U.S.-born Hispanics outpaced new immigrants. The same report found that “immigrants make up a declining share of the U.S. Hispanic population.” Additionally, as of 2021, 81% of Hispanics in the country were U.S. citizens.

Despite these numbers, it is still assumed that Hispanics are immigrants or foreigners. With European immigrant groups, generations assimilate and over time their status as Americans is not questioned. But non-white immigrants, some of whom have been here for generations, still have to prove themselves.

I used to have these stereotypes too. Before I went to Duke, I thought that all the men who looked like my father shared his story. But I’ve learned that’s not the case. Whether it was the Mexican Americans who lived here before and after the Mexican-American War, the Chinese immigrants who laid half of the railroads and helped Manifest Destiny prosper, or the blacks whose forced labor laid the foundation for American prosperity put – there are diverse citizens have always played an essential role in the history of our country.

The greatest part of our country is our diverse roots. The US is a melting pot – yet for some it is still highlighted.

I am writing this article to normalize the idea that Hispanic and Latino people, as well as other non-white immigrants, belong. A darker or different complexion does not mean someone is exotic or foreign. It’s a form of microaggression that many may not be aware of.

Unless I’m wrong and they call me “exotic” because they think I have the build and arm strength to be an exotic dancer. After all, you never know.

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Julie Calidonio is a writer, lawyer and mother. Her essays published in Scary Mommy, Motherly, and Medium highlight her comedic yet poignant writing style.