My Grammy was a Mayan native who spoke Spanish. She was dark and short. She was born Lucila Carmen Alvarez in Zapaca, Guatemala on June 2, 1888.

Nearly a century later, I was born in Hamilton, Canada. I am tall and white. I speak English and my ethnicity is not so fixed. My connection to Guatemala is my Grammy, who held me before she died when I was four.

She came to Canada when her son, my Grandfather, was a boy, during the Depression. He can speak Spanish, though I never hear him do so. He raises his family in a North American bungalow. Guatemala is a place they have made in the basement. That is where all the Spanish stuff is kept. I've wanted to explore my Mayan/Spanish heritage; but, then I worry: isn't just my privileged white educated post-colonial self appropriating my Otherness, the one I know little of?