When I was a teenager I had a lot of self image and self esteem issues. I realize that this is a hallmark of adolescence but since this is my diary I thought I might wax nostalgically for a few lines.

I think I may have mentioned this earlier, but when I was thirteen my mother moved me from new mexico to northern california. I went from being an indian kid amidst a large population of indian and latinos to the only brown girl in the school. I did share the pleasure of being "of color" with the one black kid in the entire school. There were a handful of asian kids who were all stereotypically high achieving and popular, and then there was me and Steve.

Nobody there really knew what an indian looked was. True, there was a reservation less than 60 miles away, but there was very little interaction between the kids in our coastal town and the people of that mountainous reservation. I didn't even know they were there until my junior year when these three indian girls from the reservation transfered to our school because their parents wanted them to get a better education.

As a result of being the only (yet again) I had to hear a lot of strange questions. This was before multi-culturalism swooshed over the nation, making different somehow better. This was when different was alien, and subject to ridicule. I remember one guy asking me point blank: "Why is your face so flat?" to which I responded "because I'm an Indian, stupid." I may as well have said I was a yorkshire terrier, for all the sense it made to him. He just didn't know.

In the southwest you can just be Indian and everyone knows it and that's the end of the story. In northern california at that time being indian was this strange and unfamiliar thing. People didn't even have a romantic attachment to native americana, except for the most ridiculous suede finge vest "end of the trail" kind of pulp that followed sonny and cher in the 1970s. The kids at my school couldn't put me in a box that they could relate to, so I lived outside that box.

I had a lot of problems understanding my own indian-ness at that time. I knew that when I went home I was with people who looked like me and talked like me. I didn't have to explain where I was from or that I wasn't from Mexico and didn't speak spanish and that an arroyo is a dry riverbed and that sage isn't just hippy incense. When I was in California I could have gone crazy nutso trying to get my friends to understand the deep feeling of indigenousness that I had. I didn't even try to explain myself.

I internalized the feeling of difference. I made myself the alien. I hated the way I looked- I wanted so desperately to have a cute little nose like bridget, the kind that moves with you talk. I wanted blue eyes like grace, and pale skin like lisa. I wanted to be white.

I was so convinced that I looked like an alien that I refused to get a job. I wouldn't even apply for a job when I was a teenager, because I was sure that they wouldn't hire such a hideously disfigured person. Why have an alien faced brown girl working your shop counter when there are so many pretty white girls in town who could do the work? When I did get a job, my suspicions were confirmed when the shopkeeper made me work in the stock room, filing and managing inventory.

I'm so glad that time has passed. I am a lot more comfortable with who I am and how I look. When I look in the mirror sometimes I wish I had taken on more of my father's side just so I would have a clearly indian face. I wonder if all inter-racial kids deal with this lifelong racial ambiguity- wishing they could be one or the other instead a best appromixation of both.