Guest Contributor: Author and Illustrator, Laura Lacámara

I am so delighted to end this week with a guest post by the talented author and illustrator, Laura Lacámara. You may know her from one (or both!) of her books: Floating on Mama's Song and The Runaway PIggy.

HOW MY HAIR SUFFERED IN THE TRANSLATION FROM  

CUBAN LATINA TO SUBURBAN AMERICAN

by Laura Lacámara

My dark brown Cuban head of hair made its way to blonde suburban southern California in the late 1960s.

I was starting third grade, and I had by then acquired a reasonable mastery of the spoken English language -- especially considering I had been thrown into it cold just two years prior. That burning shame I had felt every time I had been pulled out of my first grade class and sent to the dreaded trailer to learn English as a Second Language had by then cooled and been all but forgotten.

Now all I wanted was to blend in, to be like everyone else. But, one obstacle stood squarely in my path: the color of my hair.

I became obsessed. “Mamá,” I would cry to her every day after school. “My hair’s so dark. I wish I had light hair like the other girls in my class.”

Now don’t get me wrong, my mother had done a lot up to that point to keep our family’s culture alive. Not only did she encourage my brother and I to speak Spanish at home, she also made a point of teaching us to read and write in Spanish. Thanks to my mother, I grew up being bilingual and biliterate.

And growing up, Mamá always cooked traditional Cuban dishes -- she taught me to cook some of them, too! (OK, she cooked with lard, but everyone did back then.)

So, I know she was just trying to be supportive. Maybe she struggled with her own inner shame. Maybe she felt isolated and helpless in our small suburban apartment, away from her country and her people. Maybe she also wished she could just blend in. Or, maybe I just wore her down, until she was willing to do whatever it took to make me happy (and to stop my whining!). Whatever the reason, Mamá finally cracked under the pressure.

“I will lighten your hair,” she announced. “Just a little bit.”

I was thrilled! Now the kids at school would like me and want to be my friend. At last, here was my ticket to becoming “normal.”

My mother sat me down and colored my hair using a permanent-dye that (she promised!) would turn my hair a light shade of brown. But, she must have accidentally left the dye in too long…

When I unwrapped the towel and looked in the mirror, I saw a redhead staring back at me. My hair was the color of the oranges in the groves that surrounded our sprawling apartment complex.

I was shocked and horrified -- especially when the realization hit me that I would have to face the kids at school the next day!

Naturally, all my classmates stared at me and asked questions. I came up with a lame story about swimming in an over-chlorinated pool. Some kids seemed to buy the story about the chlorine, but I was mortified nonetheless.

So, from one day to the next, I went from feeling different and just wanting to blend in, to being shockingly different and drawing total attention to myself! It was traumatic. On the “shame meter,” the sting of the ESL trailer experience registered as a mosquito bite, while the hair-dying fiasco was more like being stung by a swarm of wasps!

But, in time, my initial shock wore off, and, before long, my mother found a solution to restoring my well-being.

She dyed my hair once again, this time to match my original color. My dark brown Cuban head of hair was back. And, though I had to let go of the dream of ever becoming a popular blonde suburban girl, I was greatly relieved to be myself again.

In an interesting twist of fate, my own daughter came home from school one day last week crying, “Mama, I wish my hair was brown. I’m the only blonde girl in the class.”

My adopted daughter, who is Caucasian with blonde hair and blue eyes, attends a first grade Dual Language class in a Los Angeles Unified school, where about 85 percent of the children are Latino.

I told my daughter that I had experienced the feeling of being the “different” one in my class, too. “It’s OK, mija,” I assured her, trying to seize the opportunity that my own mother unwittingly let slip through her fingers, “You have beautiful hair, and you are perfect just the way you are.”

Laura Lacámara is the award-winning author of Floating on Mama’s Song / Flotando en la canción de mamá, which was chosen as a Junior Library Guild Selection for Fall 2010 and is a Tejas Star Book Award Finalist for 2011 - 2012.

The story, Floating on Mama’s Song, was inspired by Laura’s mother, who had been an opera singer in Cuba. The book was illustrated by Yuyi Morales and published by HarperCollins.

To learn more about Laura Lacámara, visit her website: LauraLacamara.com