When I reflect on my childhood in Puerto Rico, I realize how the island can be like a bubble that isolates you from the rest of Latin America. Its no secret that, contrary to our counterparts, Boricuas are deeply Americanized. On the island, both public and private schools teach English as a second language, youre prompted to sing both the U.S. and Puerto Rican national anthems at major events, the movie theater mostly offers English movies with Spanish subtitles, and Spanish language TV isnt as widely available as English channels.

I grew up waiting for both Santa Claus and Los Reyes Magos, getting excited about parranda and coquito season, but also watching the Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade. Traveling to Florida, a state with an ample Puerto Rican population, with my family felt like visiting another pueblo.

Spanglish was part of our dialect, as was the use of anglicisms this assimilation was by design. I remember being quizzed by my history teacher on the 50 states but never on all the countries that comprise Latin America. We learned little about our Latinidad; the most we discussed was through Latin American novels Doa Barbara by Rmulo Gallegos and Crnica de una Muerte Anunciada by Gabriel Garca Mrquez. We didnt even touch on how our cultural heritage compared and contrasted to others in the region.

The truth is, most of our history has been whitewashed. And yet when you leave your homeland, you encounter that the rest of the world categorizes you as Latino/x/e. When I landed in the U.S., I was referred to as Latina and Hispanic, terms my family and friends, still living on the island, had never identified with.

Latinhood is an American invention, says Jorge Duany, professor of anthropology at Florida International University. Its a pan-ethnic category that groups multiple nationalities in a box, which can be problematic because although they share a language, some musical practices and the Catholic religion in most cases there are many dialectal, regional differences, in some countries even resulting in rivalries over border disputes.

I felt conflicted, as many people with blended identities do. How exactly, beyond being Boricua, was I Latina? Do I know enough about the history of the region to call myself an expert? Can I (and should I) represent all Latinos? It often felt like my identity as a Puerto Rican was too Latina for the U.S. while being too American for the rest of Latin America.

Duany says the internal dilemma Latinos confront is that our identities depend on the context. Who you feel like identifying at that moment depends on who you are with and the interaction youre having, he tells me. One or [several] of our identities may activate in reaction to the space were in.

This gave me some reassurance. I could be from Bayamn to other Boricuas, Puerto Rican to other Latinos, Latina to Americans and Hispanic to a Brazilian. I didnt have to pick just one. But it took physically traveling between all these spaces to truly discover this nuance.

My identities clashed the most when I visited Rio de Janeiro, where reggaeton was not nearly as popular as it is in other parts of Latina America Id visited. We have our own music, different from the rest of you all, like funk carioca and samba, a friend we met during our first night out told me. Although both of us identify as Latina, we communicated in English it was the only language we could both fully comprehend. That night, they taught me about pagode and bossa nova, and although I didnt understand all the lyrics, I felt like Brazilian music was also mine to be proud of. It was the type of cultural camaraderie I was craving without even realizing it.