Growing up I never had an idea of the type of man I wanted to be with. In all honesty, my teenage self used to dream about being a single mother of an adopted daughter (I'm weird like that). So I never really thought about being in a relationship, let alone the race of the guy. But I also knew the expectation of my family: find a nice, successful Punjabi boy, preferably a doctor. But I never thought this was set in stone. So I went on with my dating life, thinking once there

Everyone talks about cultural appropriation. As an admirer of cultural differences, I’m constantly checking myself. And, with Halloween costume ideas already taking over the web, I thought it would be good to address it from a different angle. Let’s define it for the purpose of this article. There’s a difference between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation. And appreciation does include participation. You don’t have to admire from afar. But there’s a caveat: you h

I must admit I don’t think I ever felt different until I was about 7 years old. Prior to that, I had always been surrounded by people like me: Mexican Americans or Chicanos in South Texas. My parents rarely went outside their comfortable circle of family and friends in the small town where I grew up. Even when I was about 4 or 5 and we lived in San Antonio, we stayed in our (Mexican-American) area of the city. We all spoke Spanish and sometimes English. We were all brown skin

I am 18; perched on a wooden stool overlooking the Plaza de Armas in Cusco. I turn back to my hot chocolate (I’m in the chocolate museum.. naturally), when I notice someone taking a photo of me out of my periphery. He wasn’t particularly subtle about it. He had a large SLR camera and possibly a tripod. I kept sipping my chocolate trying not to break the candid shot. His camera snapped the little white girl swamped by an enormous orange, red and yellow ceremonial style poncho,