This moment in our interview resonated with me deeply as my brother and I used to express similar sentiments when we experienced feelings of alienation about our mixed identity. In those moments we would tell each other how we needed to seek out the only other half-Indian half-Scottish people and make friends with them, make them our people, that they would understand. Looking back, I think in our childhood minds these would be the people who understood us better, who understood how we were navigating our complicated identities and the greater social world. As I was doing the interviews for Crossing Borders Bridging Generations, I realized that I was hearing stories that rang true to my own experience and that through having these conversations, we were, in a sense, creating community around these experiences.

This sentiment came up in other interviews as well, the feeling that being mixed heritage created deeper bonds within your nuclear family, but also connected you to others with similar experiences.  Emily Pinkowitz began her interview by describing herself and her brother as a “species of two,” explaining: "I’ve never had a tribe.  Like, I don’t even know what my tribe could look like.  Like, I said, it’s me and my brother, and we’re the whole tribe."

Later, she went on to say: "I mean, I’ve never felt like I had a tribe anyway. Like, for any reason. I just tend to be someone who has friends who are in different groups of people, and always, but if anything, I feel like the people that I tend to feel closest to are people who also have really complicated senses of identity...And so they’ve thought a lot about you know, what does it mean, where is my identity?  Where does it end, and where does it begin?"

Creating community around these complicated identities and these questions feels particularly important in the context of the often very painful life experiences that people recounted during the interviews. These were experiences of not fitting in, of being in-between or of feeling a lack of legitimacy. As my brother, Hansraj Maharawal, describes in my interview with him:

"...I think the problem with my race is that I don’t really fit into any category.  Like it would be easier if I was just straight Indian. Or straight Caucasian or straight black.  But it’s like you know when you’re a mutt you’re just not really part of any group. So I had no support."

These moments often came when I didn’t expect them, in this case Hansraj was talking about not making very many friends in middle school and trying to understand why this was. Vilray was talking about his mother when he said to me:"You know, I struggle, definitely, thinking about myself racially, because, you know, my mother’s side, the Nicaraguan side of me, is, I’m always sort of reaching for it, and I want to be connected to it. I try to -- to have it be very present in my thinking."

In other interviews, there were stories of having one’s Jewish-ness questioned because of being half Chinese and looking Asian, of developing a “double consciousness” in order to grapple with looking lighter, whiter and less “other” than one’s mother, of someone having their hair dyed blonde to look more look one side of their family, of identifying one way when with some people and another way when with others, of having your racial category change when you moved from one place to another. Towards the end of the project, I interviewed my partner, whose father is an immigrant from Hungary, and whose mother’s family is Mexican, Jewish, and Filipino. He, however, was raised only to think of himself as White, as part, he told me, of a project of upward mobility that his parents are invested in. These are the complications, the erasures, the connections between place and race, between class and race and the types of stories that I heard while conducting these interviews. Narrators grappled with how to define themselves, their race and class contingent identities in intersectional ways that were legible to social structures of race and class while also working through how they had inherited these structures, both knowingly and unknowingly.