Canche means “blonde” but it has expanded its scope to simply mean “white folk.”

And don’t confuse canche with cancha, because cancha is “soccer field.”

Even though I’m not blonde, I’m a lot closer to a canche than a cancha. One letter different and I am calling a person a soccer field.

This brings up an interesting feature of Latin-American culture: it’s common for them to call you by your appearance like a nickname. This includes your skin color which undoubtedly does not fly in the United States. You can call someone “Moreno” (dark-skinned) or “Colocho” (curly-haired) or “Canche” (white person) or “Gordita” (fatty) and they are all terms of endearment here.. At breakfast during my second week, my host mom asked “Have you always been thin?” She also told me I’m very tall compared to all the men in El Campo. When Amanda (and sometimes I) run, it’s not uncommon to hear “Corre, Flaca!” (run, skinny!).

I learned last week that Guatemalans use the term hermosa/beautiful in regards to large people. If they describe you as hermosa, it’s positive, but it’s also another way of saying “they are big and beautiful!” It’s not mean, but if I heard someone call me hermosa, I would be disappointed. That’s my own unhealthy standard of beauty talking.

Twice now, people have said “Colocha” to me on the street. I don’t know if it was a greeting or a compliment or simply an observation. “Oh, the sky is blue. Oh, there’s curly.”

As an Estadounidense, it’s a difficult adjustment because Civil Rights have fought time and time again for the identity of the person to be separate from appearance (well, one of the things Civil Rights fought for). We obviously don’t get this correct a lot of the time.. look at police brutality, so it’s touchy. And to call a person fat in the United States is declaring yourself a witch in Salem.

But here in Central America, they call spades spades even if that spade is a person. To be fair, we do that in the States if a person loses weight: it’s nearly your civic duty to acknowledge when someone has gotten thin. Getting thin in the States is like a new lease on life, whereas south of the border it’s a sign of stress, poverty or health trouble. And we call tall people tall and short people shorties, but width and girth are off the conversational market.

It’s weird to be reminded, once again, that these ways of thinking are all encouraged and defined by culture. Yeah sure, so I know that, but it’s another thing to live it. It is a paradigm shift to see that conceptions of beauty are not standard definitions, they’re just popular ideas. It makes all my efforts to look a certain way seem futile and like a waste..

So I am a canchita. I am a collocha. I am alta. I am delgada. I am an extranjera. I am here.

I’ve never been so defined yet felt so undefined.