Getting To Know Myself Through DNA Testing

I recently took an ancestral DNA test because I’ve always felt like an adopted child of the world. It’s not because I don’t know who my parents are, but because I can barely trace my family tree farther back than my own parents (pictured above.)

My middle school art teacher used to say, “I can trace my family back to the 12th century!”  I was so jealous of her! Meanwhile, I barely knew my grandparents. As much as I’d like to believe that I should just look to the future, I just wanted to know a little bit of my history. Most of the ancestral information I could deduce was not from actual records or genetic information, but by assumption based on the country I was born and my features, which is not exactly scientific evidence. I had spent hours throughout my adolescence in front of mirrors trying to understand myself and how I came to be.

Growing up I was often asked “Where are you from?” because I have ethnically ambiguous features that in New York are typical for a Latina, but in a place like Cairo make people wonder where I came from. My partner is Egyptian, and when we visit his family in Egypt, I seamlessly blend in with his Arab family. If I didn’t speak, no one would ever know I wasn’t an Egyptian woman, so naturally many are confused when I state that I’m Dominican-American. His family has always said they are sure I have some Arab ancestry, but now that I know better I’m sad to disappoint them. I have less than 1% Middle-Eastern ancestry, a drop in the ocean compared to my partner’s nearly 100% Middle-Eastern heritage as dictated by his DNA.

Having an atypical surname did not help either. If I only had a dime for every time someone asked “Valoy? Hmm, where is that name from? Is it French?” And now that I have the evidence, the answer is no, I have no apparent French heritage.

I was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in the United States. I’m Dominican, Caribbean, Latina, and American; I hold all these identities simultaneously and interchangeably. All these identities are equal in my mind. But I know that they are based on a mixture of many races and ethnicities, and that is what I was searching for when I took an ancestral DNA test. To me it wasn’t about confirming what I already knew, but literally finding my place in this world. So while I learned from ancestral DNA that I am mostly of European descent, my lived experiences were not. Being ethnically mixed while not knowing what those ethnicities are has left me in limbo in a society that is eager to fit people into boxes. While my straight hair and light complexion grant me insurmountable privilege within communities of color, the languages I speak, my customs, my likes, and my relations set me apart from Europeans.

For this reason I call myself Latina even more so than Dominican. It’s the closest term to explain an identity that is not homogeneous but that is ambiguous— especially in the United States, where race seems to be White, Black, Asian, or Other. So where does that leave me? The Brown race? Multicultural? Multiracial? These aren’t always options for people like me.

As I wrote this, National Geographic commemorated their 125th anniversary issue with a feature on what we will look like in the near future, after presumably much more interracial breeding. It’s somewhat laughable to me because this racial mixing that National Geographic exalts as something that will help us move forward and presumably past racism has been going on for centuries. As far as I’m concerned — and as far the strange man who said I looked like a cup of café au lait is concerned, too — racism is still very much alive after more than 500 years of mixing, in the Americas. I suspect in the year 2050, people will look just like they do now. Though genealogists understand that race is not defined by genes and the human race is almost genetically identical, race does matter outside our bodies and beyond Petri dishes.

I was born in the Dominican Republic and I know our history, so there is little chance my ancestors were all native to the island. Latin America has a history of colonialism, slavery, and immigration (very much like the United States.) This set the stage for a population with an array of phenotypes and skin complexions, and much racial ambiguity.

Adding to the conundrum, I happen to be from the one island that served as the stomping ground for many idealist conquistadores, voyagers, adventurers, exiles, and missionaries. It is an island that was populated by Taínos who were mostly annihilated by European diseases and forced labor. Eventually the island became the battleground for many powerful European nations looking to get a piece of the New World.

To me, being Latina explains where I live now, my customs, language, traditions, and cuisine, but it doesn’t explain where my ancestors came from. I want to know how patterns of migration and historical events shaped my distinctiveness. Yet it was clear to me that because I’m a Caribbean woman, tracing my history wouldn’t be as simple as looking through some birth certificates, property records, census records, or tracking my surname.

It became evident that ancestral DNA would be the only way of understanding my past. A mitochondrial DNA test (mtDNA) would find my maternal ancestor, and a Y-DNA test taken by a male relative would find our paternal ancestor. Because I was looking for a larger overview of my ancestry, I took the autosomal DNA (atDNA) test that would provide me with all my inherited ancestral information. Unfortunately my genes are not stamped with a country of origin, but some comparisons to known populations would be able to determine a point of origin.

A simple spit test, and a few weeks later I was provided with a list of countries in which my most recent ancestors likely lived. I thought I would approximately know what the results would be, but was I in for a surprise! I expected my ancestry to be split halfway between West African and Iberian roots, but what I got was a lot more interesting and confusing. Nigerian, Italian, and Greek ancestry are perhaps not very far fetched, but what about traces of Scandinavian, Northwest Russian, Western European, Beninese, Togolese, Cameroonian, and Native American ancestry! That’s a lot of people from all over the world coming to live in the DNA of a Caribbean woman.

After the initial excitement I called my parents to share the news. When I asked my father to take a guess his first response was West Africa and Britain. He claims that his family came from a colony of freed slaves that left the United States and made their home in the coastal city of Sámana in the Dominican Republic, formerly Haiti. The Sámana Americans are very aware of their distinct history, so it is entirely possible that my father is correct, but I have no way of knowing. It’s unclear how he knows this information, but one thing I was certain of was African heritage. Now, his wild guess that we might have British ancestry was a little off; about 2% trace origin is not very convincing. We talked about our Nigerian, Ghanaian, and Cameroonian heritage and reflected on the importance of acknowledging these roots with scientific evidence.

When I spoke with my mother, she was reluctant to take any guesses, which is not so surprising. She knows that she has European features, but she was orphaned as a toddler and only knows some of her paternal relatives. When I pressed her for a guess, she said we likely had Spanish origin, and also insisted that most Dominicans have some African heritage and she assumed she must have some, too. I knew this was hard for her because it reminded her that she doesn’t know most of her family and that stirred up a lot of emotions, but she was curious. I confirmed that we did have some Iberian heritage, but that most of our European heritage was Italian and Greek – to which she laughed and said “I suppose someone had an Italian lover, or many!” She randomly decided that my Irish heritage was probably from my dad, and the 4% North-African heritage was likely from her side – no particular reason, just her hunch.

I also called my two sisters, and as I expected, my sisters and I were shocked that we had 7% Native American ancestry. We assume it’s Taíno, who were presumably all wiped off the island, but definitely live in our genes and customs (see, casabe.) To us it was a way to reaffirm our connection to the island and this continent, as tiny as it may be. But even more importantly, it’s proof that colonization, slavery, and war haven’t killed the indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean. Ancestral DNA serves more than just an interesting bit of information for us, it’s a literal link to a history that was deliberately erased and buried.

This matters a lot! Living in the United States as a Latina means that I have to deal with immigration policies that hurt people like me. Our home countries are wrecked by poverty and corruption so we leave to find a better place, as human nature dictates. But when immigrants are told to “go back to where we came from” it can literally mean not going anywhere or leaving to an entirely new continent.

The personal has become political, and while I find myself I also find others like me.

I still would eventually like to do a mtDNA and Y-DNA test to isolate my hereditary information, but for now I feel happy to have started on this journey. I promised my mom that I would take some time off and travel back to the Dominican Republic with her to trace her family. I might not know for sure what all this information means and why they came to live in my genes, but it has solidified my belief that little parts of me are in every continent, and the entire world lives in me.

I am not African. Africa is in me, but I cannot return.
I am not taína. Taíno is in me, but there is no way back.
I am not European. Europe lives in me, but I have no home there.
I am new. History made me. My first language was spanglish.
I was born at the crossroads and I am whole.

By: Aurora Levins Morales

*I originally wrote this article for Double X Science

My Name is My Cultural Identity

When I read Jill Filipovic’s “Why should married women change their names? Let men change theirs,” I immediately felt that she was not talking to women like me. As much I embrace feminism and support dialogue that expands cultures, traditions, and races, once again some women were left out of the conversation. Had Jill Filipovic asked me what I think about a woman changing her last name upon marriage, she would have learned that as a fellow feminist, I have a completely different mindset on what a name means.Since I got engaged the question I get asked the most after “when is the wedding?” is “will you change your last name?” I know this is a question most women get when they announce an engagement, and it doesn’t bother me much. I do however feel that the conversation is very Anglo-centric. I am a Latina woman marrying an Arab man, and in both our cultures women do not change their names when they get married.

Why Feminism Can Be Scary for Some Women

This post was originally published for Everyday Feminism.

----------
Feminism is a polarizing term.

You either fully embrace it as a way of life or want nothing to do with it.

Personally, I’ve always led a feminist lifestyle. But until recently, I would often start conversations about women’s right with the dreaded phrase “I’m not a feminist, but…”

Why was I so hesitant about calling myself a feminist?

The truth is: I simply didn’t understand what feminism was about, let alone how freeing it could be.

I had misconceptions that feminism was about usurping men’s power and dominating them. I truly believed that being a girl required protection from harm, and that I should be content to have men that could offer me that security.

But more importantly, I didn’t think that I, as a woman, was oppressed.

Sorry Catholicism, I'm Pro-Choice!

I was raised in a strictly Catholic household, and while my mother was fairly liberal, and my father had no particular attachment to the Church, we lived with the implicit knowledge that we were Catholic and that everyone else was practicing the wrong religion.

It was not my parents who instilled Catholicism into my upbringing, it was just the way things were. We had no choice and we knew nothing else. My family was very open to talking about sexuality, but only using euphemisms. The women would sit around the kitchen table sipping coffee and giggling over which one of them ate carne cruda, which translates to raw meat, but means to give oral sex. I could hear them talk about other people's daughters and how they saw the girls wearing a mini skirt or showing off her mid-riff, kissing a boy a few blocks away, or with a condom in her purse. And much later at night, when they thought all the children were sleeping they would gossip about the women they knew who had abortions. They never used the word abortion, but it was obvious. They would say things like "she bought the pills that make your period come back" or "she made her husband punch her in the stomach" or "her mom sent her a special tea from the Dominican Republic" and sometimes it went to the extreme, "she punctured herself with a knitting needle" or "she used a coca-cola bottle."

At the time I was not allowed to questions, but I was a curious child and my mother always tried to answer anything to the best of her abilities. When I realized that what the women in my family were talking about was abortion I felt disdain for the women they gossiped about. My mother would rarely talk about other girls, in fact, she would warn my aunts and cousins about comparing their daughters to others. Her favorite saying was "nunca digas 'de esa agua no beberé'" which translates to "don't ever say you won't drink from that glass of water" but means that you should not assume you will never be in a certain situation.  When I asked her about abortion she just said that I should never feel that I cannot talk to her. From early on it was clear that my reputation as a good girl was tied to my sexuality, and although my mother did not want that to be my reality, she knew it was how my culture would value me.

Whenever I was asked what I thought about abortion I would bravely defend the potential for life. For a high school project I stood in front of the classroom and spoke about the way an embryo has tiny fingers and a heartbeat, how the mother could become depressed after an abortion, and to bolster the sentimentality of a pregnancy I showed a lot of pictures of beautiful babies with their caring mothers. I truly believed that a pregnancy was a miracle and that no person in their right mind would want to hurt their baby, but while my intentions were in the right place I was very naive.

At the time I was not sexually active and I had every expectation to save myself for marriage. I considered my virginity the most valuable asset I held. I imagined with disdain having to tell my husband I had been with another man and feeling sorrow for his dissatisfaction; the thought that he was probably not saving himself for me did not even cross my mind. I had never heard of a man being valued for his virginity, in fact, it seemed that men who were sexually inexperienced were mocked by society. My father had a child when he married my mother, but he boasted about my mother being a virgin on their wedding night. I was under the impression that saving oneself for marriage was the morality quick-fix, but only for women. This left me feeling guilty for being curious about my sexuality and terrified at the possibility of getting pregnant before I was married.

Living on my own and meeting people from other walks of life gave me a different perspective on sexuality and abortion. Our society sees sexuality as only acceptable within the rigid confines of heterosexual matrimony and for procreation. Sex for pleasure is offensive and irresponsible, unless you have signed a legal document with a partner of the opposite sex. Yet as much as socially conservative groups insist that the only safe sex is no sex, their ideals do not match our reality. Social conservatives reminist of times when good girls remained pure and waited for marriage, yet they forget that women had no other choice. Women in these scenarios were, and still are in many places, confined to the home, escorted to activities, and under constant watch. If we have to chaperone sexuality until the participants sign a legal marriage contract, what are we trying to prove? Our fascination with an intact hymen results in the demonization of sexuality and puts the entire worth of a girl dependent on whether a man has had sex with her or not. Furthermore, what message are we sending our boys and men? We tell them to value women based on their sexual history and speak of their genitals as if they had damaging powers.

Directly tied to sexuality is the ability, as women, to make decisions about our bodies. Sex is nothing new, people have been having it for generations. We can try as much as we want to say sex should only be acceptable within the confines of marriage, but that was not always the case. Traditional marriage was a simple declaration of intent. The only reason Churches were told of marriages and births was because they were the record keepers in any given city or village. Slaves in Latin America and the United States were not legally allowed to marry. There were no religious ceremonies and contract signing, two people were in love and decided to be with each other against all odds. Slave men would be separated from their families as punishment and the women were raped at their master's whim. We'd like to believe that we have moved on from this mindset, but we have kept the same ideals for women.

Women have had access to contraception and abortions throughout history. The Talmud mentions inserting a sponge soaked in lemon juice into the vagina as a spermicide. Hippocrates wrote about using the plant Queen Anne's Lace seeds as a sort of morning after pill. The need for women to control how and when they have children is imperative to equality, fairness, and limiting the amount of children that are abandoned and unwanted. No one wants to have an abortion, and in an ideal world no woman would need one. But in the world we live in women are sometimes raped and impregnated against their will. This is a world where we shun comprehensive sexual education in schools and in our homes and then blame a pregnant teenage girl for her suppose lack of morality. In this world, we posit motherhood as the single most important achievement for all women, without realizing that some women simply do not want to become mothers and some are not financially able to do so. If we truly care about motherhood we should want women to enjoy their sexuality and have children on their own terms. If we want to decrease the number of abortions then we should make motherhood easier for women. Fund daycare centers, ensure that parents get paid maternity and paternity leave, give young men and women the access to sexual education and contraception, and most importantly, let's value women as individuals, not potential baby makers.

Being pro-choice means that I get to decide what I want for my own body. I do not get to tell another woman that she should or should not have sex based on my beliefs. I do not get to judge women on how they lead their personal lives. Those who want to be bound by religious moral standards have every right to do so, but they do not have the right to force their stoic lifestyle on anyone else.

Putting science aside, those who passionately oppose abortion on the idea that the rights of a fertilized egg or an embryo trump the rights of a woman try to make me feel uncomfortable and dirty by calling me a "baby killer." They use words to attempt to dehumanize me and tug at my sentimentality, and for a long time those words hurt. But you know what hurts more? Crippling poverty, hunger, sex slavery, honor crimes, child brides, rape, human trafficking, and far too many other things. If you truly want a better world fight for social justice and human dignity.

Shaping a Latina Feminist Identity

Courtesy of Tennessee Guerilla Women

My mother would never call herself a feminist, even though she is the embodiment of a feminist. She will say that feminism is incompatible with Catholicism, but warns me of the perils of religious fanaticism; that life is tough for all women, while reminding me she wants me and my sisters to have more opportunities than she did; that she does not have time to protests things she cannot change, although she singlehandedly raised three daughters, working 12 hour shifts as a home attendant for the elderly, six days a week; and that she really wants me to one day get married and give her grandchildren, but there's no rush!

For many years I thought my mother's refusal to believe in feminism came from her misconceptions of what it meant. Maybe she was caught up in the whole "lesbian" and "hairy legs" myths that are so often associated with women who are just trying to be treated as equals. But the reality is that as a Hispanic woman she did not believe that the traditional, Western, view of feminism related to her. Feminism for her felt like a movement she was not entitled to be part of. Surely women played a major role in the revolutionary movements of the 20th century in Latin America, but those efforts were rarely spoken of in feminist circles. According to history books women's rights movement of the 19th and 20th century never truly took root in Latin America.

The only way I could understand my mother's brave streak, while her other female relatives were so deeply entrenched in gender roles and a patriarchal household, was to look at her past, starting with the woman who gave birth to her. My maternal grandmother became pregnant with my mother out of a love affair in Dominican Republic. My grandfather was already engaged to be married, and he was not going to lose his macho status by being associated with a woman of "lose morals," so he abandoned her. Being a single mother is not easy in any part of the world, but Latin America is steeped in conservatism that shames women for being overtly sexual, while exalting men's promiscuity. My grandmother was shunned from her village, kicked out of her home, and left to fend for herself and her baby daughter. Ironically, it was my grandfather's oldest sister, unmarried and in the process of becoming a nun, who took a pregnant woman in. After my mother was born her aunt made sure that her niece was fed, clothed, and educated, and she looked after the woman her brother had abandoned. Unfortunately my grandmother was never able to get rid of the stigma of being a single mother and the embarrassment of her lover's abandonment for a more honorable, ie. virginal, woman. She suffered several mental breakdowns, was hospitalized for neurosis, and in 1970 she committed suicide by swallowing a poisonous cocktail of pills. My mother was raised by her paternal aunt, a woman who was planning on becoming a nun and never expected she would have to be a mother to her brother's child. Years later the one thing my mother was certain of was that she was alive, educated, and healthy, none of it had to do with a man. There were no men in her life, except for the few times her biological father would invite her to his immaculate home, where she felt unwanted and out of place.

At the age of 20 my mother married my father. For the first time in her life she had a man in her life, but he was not the prince charming people always told her about. Soon after the honeymoon my father made her quit her university studies claiming her first priority should be her children, he kept her from learning how to drive, and eventually regulated the time she could spend outside the home. This was exacerbated after we migrated to the United States, by then my sister was born and my mother was pregnant with her third daughter. Now my mother was expected to live by marianismo, the concept that the ideal woman should be spiritually immaculate and eternally self-giving; she is to self-sacrifice and reject her own pleasure in order to please others, particularly the men in her life. Meanwhile my father lost the status he once had as a married man with children and the owner of his own business in the Dominican Republic. After several failed attempts at opening businesses he drowned in debts, started to drink heavily, and became violent at the slightest provocation. Six years after we first stepped foot on American soil, my parents separated.

The night my mother left we had no where to go. She wandered aimlessly through the streets of Brooklyn, New York with three young daughters and one suitcase. Her nearest relative was on vacation, but it was the only home she could trust. So we sat in her front stoop for hours, although we knew that there was no chance anyone would open the door. Eventually my mother started looking for a spare key and found it. So we slept in her cousin's house for that night. It was a house I had visited often, but that night it felt eerie, as if we had broken into a stranger’s home. After unsuccessfully trying to search for a shelter that would take in a mother with three daughters, we went to the house of one of my school mates, whose mother had recently left her husband. She took us into her tiny apartment and gave us the bedroom of her youngest son. It only had a twin size bed and one window, so my mother would cover the floor with our clothing and lay a sheet over it as a makeshift bed for me and my sister, while she slept in the bed with my baby sister. We did that for six months until my mother was able to finish a training to become an elderly caretaker, get a job, and eventually a new home.

After all of this, my mother was thankful. She says she is one of the luckiest women in the world because she has three great daughters who make her proud. She does not pity herself, she does not even complain. When talking of the past she says that many have suffered more, and that she would not change anything. Admittedly, when I first began learning of feminism, I became upset with my mother. Surely she had to be angry after so many men in her life had failed her. How could she not see that she had to become the sacrificial lamb for us, while our father went out at night and did not once have to worry whether his daughters had enough to eat or a place to sleep? How could she work 12 hours a day and still come home to prepare us a meal and clean the house? I wanted her to be angry, because I was. Why did she have to suffer because of the mistakes others made?


It did not take long for my mother to notice my rebellious streak. One day she had enough of me talking down to her about her inability to see feminism from my point of view. She asked me if I was ashamed of my culture, or if I thought that taking care of children was not a satisfying job; if I truly believed that domestic duties would diminish my worth, and if I thought following traditions were demeaning. She reminded me that I was the one who insisted on having a quinceañera, the Latin American version of the Sweet Sixteen; a coming of age tradition that included a religious ceremony and my father changing my shoes from flat to heels and presenting me to the world as a woman. I wanted that, and today I know that it was a patriarchal society that led me to believe my father needed to confirm my womanhood, but I loved it. I will not deny it. It was symbolic and it allowed me to feel closer to my culture.

My mother, the woman that was the definition of marianismo, the unfeminist, was also the woman who taught me to find my own kind of feminism. A feminism that is threefold and includes an attachment to traditional culture, a satisfaction for being a mother and wife, and a devotion to religious symbolism. My mothers' feminism was about learning to do better than just survive. She was a full-time worker, a full-time mother, and was fully invested in her community and her church. She did not have the option of choosing between a fruitful career or being a stay-at-home mother. In fact, I had no working definition of a stay-at-home mom until I was in college, because it was a far-fetched dream in my life. All my female relatives had no choice but to work because not doing so meant their children would go hungry. So they all babysat each other's children as a way of supporting each other. I tried hard to make my family fit into the ideal feminist household: a home with two loving and equally working parents who somehow could still make time to be with their children and take summer vacations. But that was idealistic. My reality was my mothers' feminism; a feminism that was not just about envisioning a different world, but creating a life that will change it for her children.

Hispanic women are fully aware that our culture is entrenched in misogyny, but not necessarily any less than American culture. Women in the United States are often expected to take their husbands' last name. Many men still go to their bride's father to ask for her hand in marriage; just because we see it as a sweet gesture it does not mean that it isn't patriarchal in nature. Valuing your heritage will not take away from being a strong, independent, self-sufficient woman. I feel resentment at the way that Western feminism made me see my mother as a woman trapped in tradition, when in reality she was a living example of a feminist. Loving tradition and having pride in your culture does not mean these women cannot vocalize the gender issues of their communities. My mother's feminism was the truest form of feminism for me; a belief in the potential upward mobility of all women. Feminism cannot continue to exist as a monolithic block, or we will never be able to include women from all walks of life.