I remember the first time I attended an educational conference centered on the experiences of people of color. At first, it was jarring. I found myself reconciling my own lived experience and my proximity to African American culture with my identity as an Afro-Dominican man. I had always known who I was in these spaces, but I had rarely needed to interrogate my identity so directly. Where I grew up, how I was treated, and the people and cultures that shaped me had all influenced how I understood myself. Yet being in a space that invited me to examine those experiences made me realize how much of my identity I had simply learned to navigate without questioning.
Recently, I found myself returning to some of those questions. I had to make decisions about attending school functions organized around particular affinity spaces. When I served as a diversity practitioner and helped facilitate these events, I felt comfortable participating. My role gave me a reason to be there, a responsibility to contribute, and a way to understand my place in the room. Without that title, I found myself reconsidering the same questions. Where do I belong? Which experiences connect me to a particular community, and which parts of my identity might make my presence more complicated? I realized that having experience facilitating conversations about identity doesn’t mean I have finished having those conversations with myself.
I feel confident that I can move between spaces connected to Black and Latino experiences. My appearance, upbringing, and lived experiences shape how I enter those spaces and how others might perceive me. But I also recognize that identity isn’t only about the communities we feel connected to. It requires us to examine the other parts of our lives, including our proximity to whiteness and the ways privilege, geography, and opportunity shape our experiences. These aren’t always comfortable questions, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers. I am learning that acknowledging one part of my identity doesn’t require me to diminish another.
I am a man, Latino, Afro-Dominican, and Caribbean. I am American, a New Yorker now living in the Pacific Northwest. I am a father, a husband, a musician, and a teacher. Each of these identities carries its own history, expectations, and ways of moving through the world. Sometimes, depending on where I am and who I am with, I lean into my experience as a Black man who is Latino. Other times, I move through the world as a Latino man who is also Black. The shifts aren’t necessarily deliberate. They happen through language, relationships, shared experiences, and the subtle ways we learn to adapt to our surroundings. My code-switching is more complex than I sometimes realize, and I am still discovering the ways it shapes my interactions with others.
As educators, we often talk about identity as something students bring into our classrooms. We ask them to see themselves in the curriculum, to recognize their stories in the music they play, and to feel that they belong. But our own identities are not always as settled as we might present them to be. We are also navigating, adapting, questioning, and learning. Perhaps part of creating belonging for others is being willing to acknowledge that process in ourselves.
I don’t think identity is something we eventually figure out once and for all. It changes as we move through different communities, relationships, and stages of life. Sometimes we feel at home in a space; other times, we pause to reconsider our place within it. I am learning to make room for both experiences. I can honor every part of who I am without needing those parts to fit together neatly. And perhaps the invisible act of identity is giving ourselves and others the grace to exist in that complexity, even when we don’t yet have the words to explain it.
