Helping My Daughter Feel Proud of Her Culture (Without Pushing Her Away)
“Mom, can I change my name?”
I was standing at the kitchen sink when my daughter Citlali said it, her backpack still on, one shoelace undone. She’s eight, and she’d been in the car for ten minutes without saying anything, which I’d taken as a normal after-school silence.
“Change your name?” I asked, turning around. “To what?”
“Anything normal,” she said, and the words landed harder than she meant them to. Then she added, quieter, “My teacher said it wrong again today. She called me ‘Sit-lolly’ in front of everyone. I just want to be called Liz.”
Liz. My grandmother’s name was Lucia, and we’d chosen Citlali after a great-great aunt we’d never met but whose photo hung in my mother’s hallway. I knew she was struggling. We live in a mostly white suburb, and she’s one of three kids in her class who speak Spanish at home. But knowing the reason didn’t make it easier to hear.
That night, at dinner, she sat looking at the tamales my husband had unwrapped from the steam basket. She poked one with her fork.
“My friends eat normal food,” she said.
“What’s normal?” I asked.
“Sandwiches. Pizza. Things that don’t have leaves inside.”
I had a vision of myself launching into a speech about our heritage, about her abuela grinding masa at four in the morning, about the Americas before Columbus. I’m glad I didn’t, because she would have shut down completely. Instead, I just said, “Okay. Want some store-bought tortillas next time?”
My husband shot me a look. But Citlali shrugged, put a bite of tamale in her mouth, and ate it without complaint. That was the first clue: she wasn’t rejecting the food, exactly. She was rejecting the feeling of being different.
And that’s when I started to think about what I was actually doing to help her. Because until that moment, I’d been waving the culture flag in one hand and pushing her toward the school door with the other. I expected her to feel proud because I told her she should. And it wasn’t working.
I remembered being her age. I grew up in Texas, and I was the girl who answered her mother’s Spanish with English in the middle of Walmart. I refused to bring burritos to school because the other kids called them “soggy wraps.” I was embarrassed when my abuelita kissed me goodbye in front of the bus. So I knew this kind of discomfort from the inside. But that memory didn’t give me a plan.
So I tried something small. I stopped narrating our traditions and started just living them.
That Saturday, I said, “Let’s make tortillas from scratch. Not because it’s important, but because I’m hungry.” I didn’t mention culture. I poured masa into a bowl and let her get her hands messy. I sang the same song my mother used to sing, badly at first, then laughing. Citlali rolled her eyes at me but asked, “Why is that song about a donkey?”
“Because your grandmother thinks donkeys are funny.”
We made a mess. I let her form the tortillas into hearts and stars. She ate three before they were even on the table. No lesson attached. No “see how proud you should be.” Just me being comfortable with who I was, in front of her.
Something shifted that week. She asked if we could make them again.
Then I decided to confront the name issue head-on, but not with a lecture. I called my mother, who still lives in Sonora, and put Citlali on the phone. My mother didn’t say anything about heritage. She told Citlali the story of how she got her name—about my great-great aunt, a woman who kept bees and sold honey in the plaza, and who once chased a man out of town with a wooden spoon because he shortchanged her. Citlali looked at me with wide eyes. “Did she really hit him?”
“Your great-grandma said yes,” my mother said.
Later, we found a few bilingual picture books from the library where kids had names like Citlali and lived in houses like ours—where abuelas cursed gently and tortillas appeared at breakfast. We didn’t turn them into lessons. We just read them the way we read any book, giggling at the parts that didn’t translate well.
I also gave her a little script for the next time someone mispronounced her name. “Just say ‘It’s like sea-tla-lee. But you can call me Cit if that’s easier.’” She practiced saying it in her room, to her stuffed bear. The next week, she came home from school and told me she had corrected her teacher without raising her hand. She had just said it quietly, and the teacher repeated it back correctly. Citlali had said “Close enough.”
That small victory mattered more than any speech I could have given.
The bigger moment came in March, when her teacher announced Heritage Day. Every kid was supposed to bring something that represented their family’s culture. Citlali wanted to bring a picture of a unicorn. She said she had “no culture.”
I didn’t push. I said, “Okay, but I was thinking we could bring your abuela’s chamoy cookies, because they’re actually amazing. Or we could bring nothing. Your choice.”
She thought about it for two days. Then, on the night before, she said, “Fine. But I get to tell them about the bee lady.”
On Heritage Day, I watched her stand in front of twenty-five kids and explain that her name meant “star” in Nahuatl, and that her great-great aunt chased a thief with a spoon. She tripped over the word “Nahuatl.” She forgot the part about the honey. But she held her ground, and when a boy asked if she was “Mexican or American,” she said, without hesitation, “Both.”
She didn’t say it proudly. She said it like it was obvious, like he’d asked if she was left-handed or right-handed. And that, more than any cheerleading, felt like a win.
We haven’t solved everything. Last week, she still asked for a cheese sandwich on white bread for lunch. She still says Spanish words with an English accent when she’s telling a school friend. She still rolls her eyes when I play cumbia in the car.
But I notice other things too. She sometimes calls her grandma just to ask her about the bee lady. She’s started using a few Spanish words at home without hiding them. And last night, when she asked me what I was reading, I told her it was a book about Mexican border towns. She didn’t say anything. She just leaned over my shoulder and looked at the cover for a long time. Then she said, “Is that where Abuela lives?”
“Kind of near there,” I said.
“Can we visit?” she asked.
It’s a small thing. But sometimes that’s where pride starts—not in a big declaration, but in a question asked quietly, out of simple curiosity. My job isn’t to make her proud. It’s to keep putting pieces of her culture within reach, so that when she’s ready to look at them, she finds them hers.
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