Hispanic Heritage Month: My Story

The Fire Inside Me 

When I was a little kid, I used to get headaches all the time. I would be in the school gym when sunlight would burst through the window and reflect off the floor, hit my eye in just the wrong way, and suddenly a blinding pain would escalate into a massive, intense migraine.  

During one of these episodes, a well-intentioned family friend commented, “Well, it’s no wonder you get these headaches all the time! Your Latin fire and Irish fire are at war inside your brain.” Eight-year-old me, who still believed my eyes were brown because of an unfortunate incident involving a bug flying into my eye, thought, “Maybe he’s right…” I was the product of an Irish mother and a Mexican father.  

Headaches aside, as the years rolled on, I wondered what other parts of myself could be attributed to those two fires swirling together inside of me.  

Hispanic Heritage Month  

This month, we’ve been focusing on Hispanic Heritage. National Hispanic Heritage Month runs from September 15 – October 15 each year and recognizes the contributions and influence of Hispanic Americans to the history, culture, and achievements of the United States.  

This felt like the perfect opportunity to reflect on, celebrate, and share about my own Hispanic heritage – one of the two fires I feel fueling my passion, drive and resiliency.  

My Family Background 

Rebecca with her father, Santiago Sanchez

About Santiago Sanchez

Allow me to introduce you to my father, Santiago Sanchez; a Mexican American, a hardworking business owner, an inventive artist, and responsible for so much of the woman I am today (think Belle’s father from Beauty and the Beast). I see my dad in so many of the ways I show up in life and in my business.  

My father comes from a family of sheep farmers. When he was a boy in Texas, his family of 10 (2 parents + 8 kids) would pack the car and head up the highway to southern Minnesota to pick asparagus. My grandparents would take the kids out of school and live in encampments on a farm for the duration of the harvest. While my father and his brothers and sisters pulled their weight pulling asparagus, my grandfather made his living shearing sheep. 

I have a tattoo of a sheep in honor of my Sanchez side.

On one of these trips up north, a family in Iowa that my grandpa sheared sheep for said, “Why not stay here? You can shear our sheep and take care of our farm.” In Texas he was a ranch hand; his children attended segregated schools. He couldn’t pass up this opportunity and they made Dubuque, Iowa their new home. 

But my grandparents were only cautiously optimistic about the generations to come – my generation. They essentially told their children, “You came from nothing, grew up poor and attended segregated schools. You want to give your kids a fighting chance? Go find yourself a white person who is better off and marry them.” 

Their kids listened.  

A Lost Language 

When people find out that I’m half Mexican, they’re stunned. “No,” they say, “that can’t be right.” 

During the icebreaker game called Two Truths and a Lie, one of my truths I use is that my dad is Mexican. This usually gets pegged as the lie, because “you don’t even sound Mexican,” they say.  

 I wish I did.  

Of my grandparents’ eight children, everybody had at least two children of their own; and out of all those grandkids, nobody was taught Spanish unless they chose it as their required language in school. I regret not learning Spanish to this day, and it’s a goal I still hope to accomplish in my lifetime. With the clarity of adulthood, I’ve had so many conversations with my family about how much of a hindrance it was that it wasn’t a priority to learn my native language, how it could have helped me and gotten me further ahead. But the past generations hadn’t seen it that way. They saw it as a potential handicap; something that would hold us back and take them away from hustling to make our lives better.  

White Privilege 

I don’t blame them. I saw firsthand how a Mexican identity or Hispanic heritage could be regarded.  

Shortly after I completed my undergrad, I began applying for jobs, certain that my glowing recommendations and stellar GPA would speak for themselves. This was before the time of LinkedIn and stalking people on social media to get a look at them. I was simply a name on a resume – Rebecca Sanchez – and a list of corresponding experience. It’s amazing the doors that opened up for me once I got married and the name on that resume became Rebecca Bowman. Same GPA. Same references. Same experience.  

Because in person I pass as white, I don’t think I truly understood the enormity of white privilege until I passed as white on paper too. Sadly, the messaging my dad had been hearing from his parents all those years – to be the whitest you can be in order to succeed – seemed justified. They had faced this sort of discrimination, and worse, their whole lives.  

In 2020, we’ve come a long way. But we still have a long way to go.  

Celebrating My Legacy 

One step we can take on that long road is, of course, a sort of reflection on our heritage and how we want those legacies to be carried on moving forward. But with that comes celebration, too.  

For me, that means celebrating the values that I learned from my father’s side – namely, the importance of community. The importance of a close-knit community involved in each other’s lives, doing business with and supporting and spending time with each other. The importance of gathering together with food and music.  

As a small business owner, I also celebrate the values of hard work and loving what you do. 

My dad was always a hustler – always has been and still is. Growing up in Iowa, I watched him interact with a majority-Mexican client base. He put tremendous effort and pride into each and every job he did but you could also tell how much he genuinely enjoyed the people he did business with – how they would joke and laugh and have a good time. It was clear those he surrounded himself with valued the same things he did.  

He started his own business in his early 20s and has been in business for himself ever since. I learned from him what it means to be an entrepreneur. I learned from him the importance of trust and care when it comes to doing business with others. I wanted to be in business for myself because I saw the freedom and joy and love that it brought him. Now, I’m a successful entrepreneur too.  

He gave me the better life his parents intended, not in spite of his last name, but BECAUSE OF IT.  

Proud of Being a Sanchez 

If I ever get married again, I will never change my name. I am so very proud of my name. I am proud to be a Sanchez – granddaughter of a Spanish-speaking sheep farmer.  

This month, and always, I celebrate my Hispanic heritage and the fire it ignited inside of me.