Stella Díaz Has Something to Say

Stella was born Mexico and grows up in Chicago, and her bicultural background makes it more difficult for her to understand and accept her own identity than it is for most other children. Stella was a baby when she moved to Chicago, so she doesn’t have any personal memories of Mexico, nor does she speak Spanish perfectly like her family does. This makes it difficult for Stella to fully relate to some of her relatives, and sometimes she feels like an outsider among her own family. On the other hand, Stella doesn’t feel that she fits in at school, either. She has an accent in both English and Spanish, so she tends to keep quiet at school to avoid being embarrassed or criticized. Her classmates sometimes view her as an outsider because she wasn’t born in the US, and she sometimes sees herself as an outsider among her extended family because she doesn’t share the same language and culture as them. Even her older brother, Nick, fits in much better with their relatives, because he spent more time in Mexico when he was young.

Stella struggles with feeling torn between cultures, often wishing she had never left Mexico because “things would have been easier” if they had stayed (91).