>I was in my early twenties when I graduated college in Mexico with a degree in economics. I got a job at one of the country’s largest companies, based in my hometown of Monterrey.
>It was just the beginning of my career, and pretty quick I realized there wasn’t a bright future for me there. I didn’t see anyone in leadership who looked like me — a brown-skinned kid with Indigenous features. So I decided to immigrate to the U.S.
>Almost everyone I knew back home warned me about the rampant racism I would face once I got here. “Those gringos are so racist,” they told me.
>So I came here expecting the worst. But as time went by, I realized I was not feeling a whole lot of discrimination against me, strangely enough. I felt the exact opposite. I felt significantly more accepted, acknowledged, and respected than I often did back home.
>When I tried to convey this feeling to my friends and family, it didn’t make any sense to them. To be honest, I was intrigued as well.
>Then one day, after I started my first job in the U.S. as a financial analyst for a film company, I attended a business meeting. At this meeting, my boss, a successful Latino film producer, was physically describing an actor — and he used my appearance as reference.
>“He has Indigenous features, very much like Julio,” he said. I felt deeply offended. I thought, “How dare he say in public that I look Indigenous! Me? That’s outrageous!”
>For a Mexican, you see, one of the most offensive insults is to be called “indio,” which translates in English as Indigenous. “Indio” is used as synonymous with stupid, lazy, uneducated, disgraceful, ugly, and pretty much every negative sterotype imaginable.