A young Sarah and her father in Ohio.

The other night a friend asked me, “So what was your childhood like? How did you grow up?”

It’s a question whose answer changes depending on the person you’re responding to. I looked at my friends, Mexican-Americans whose stories go between the U.S and Mexico, between two distinct nationalities and histories and a hodgepodge of traditions and neighborhoods and cultures, and I gave my knee-jerk reaction.

“Normal.”

I wasn’t trying to shut them down –that’s just how my childhood surfaced at the moment. Of course, “normal” is a ridiculous answer to just about anything. What does that mean? PB&J in the suburbs? I always preferred cheese and mustard, anyway, and for a long stretch my parents fed us seaweed and Fibars.

I dare you to ever respond to an academic with the word “normal.” They had barely to raise an eyebrow and I was clarifying. I got around to the Buddhist cult and violin lessons in Louisville and the suicide hotline and bohemian weekends in Cincinnati and we all washed our hands of normal.

Of course there is the normal storyline as well – the white middle class American girl who grew up to play soccer and eat Honey Bunches of Oats and take AP English and get her liberal arts degree from a nice university and accumulate books and drink microbrews. That narrative runs straight and steady between the swerves of the Buddhist cult and the suicide hotline. I suppose anyone could find an archetypal storyline that cuts like an interstate highway through the back roads and dusty towns of her life.

But later on I got to thinking about that normal and what, exactly, spurs me to whip it out like a confession when faced with people from other cultures, other ethnicities, with seemingly more complicated backgrounds and stories. “Normal” isn’t so much about Columbus, Ohio and the nice house in the quaint neighborhood with good schools, or about the granola bars or the rollerblades or the dog. It’s about whiteness. Whiteness and money – enough of it, not too much. It’s, of course, the working definition of normal that defends all those amorphous politician-sculpted “values” and perpetuates the same hierarchies – class hierarchies, race hierarchies, gender hierarchies.

It’s easy to debunk normal. Normal is that cup of coffee teetering precariously on a wobbly desk, and one nudge of the hip sends it flying. But things get complicated when you start debunking all the components of normal – when you start to look at each individual element that makes it up and you explore each one, digging into its past, looking at the social and cultural constructions behind it, revealing its myths.

When I let that first “normal” loose and words of protest formed on the anthropologists’ lips, I resorted to the instinctual shoot-yourself-in-the-foot solution of qualifying the term with a definition.

“You know, a white, middle class blonde girl from Columbus, Ohio.”

Of course, the normality of all of these things was quickly debunked, but out of this selection – middle class, white, blonde, Columbus, Ohio – blonde later struck me as the most questionable.  Ohio’s often a stand-in for American “normality,” the bland singular personality of flag-waving middle ‘merica. Obviously you could shake Ohio around for awhile like a piggybank and all sorts of normality-defying truths would fall out, and same goes with the monolithic notion of “middle class” or “white.” But still, these categories – Ohio, middle class, white – seem to be commonly accepted as normality defaults.

But blonde? I didn’t think to question it at all as a function of the standard normality myth until I was walking down the street a few days ago and somebody shouted, for the upteenth time, “RUBIA!” in yet another act of Macho-Stating-The-Obvious-In-A-Mildly-Threatening-And-Self-Congratulatory-Way. It’s always one of two things with me: guërita or rubia. Little whitie or blondie. The two are interchangeable. Blondeness is whiteness and foreignness. It makes me so much more of a female object, confirms and reinforces a stereotypical gringa-ness that makes it OK to treat me like a small plastic doll that can be picked up and played with.

But, more interestingly, it feeds into, shapes and reaffirms my definition of what it is to be a “normal” American and acts on my sense of identity.  It makes blondness a part of me in a way it wasn’t before – makes it that thing that separates me from them, that thing that says this is me and I’m from here and these are my roots in the way that the indigenous costuming of Oaxaca’s artists says this is me and I’m from here.  That cultural street always goes both ways- the way other people see you in another place reflects their given prejudices and their worldview, and simultaneously alters, contradicts, and/or compliments your perception of your own identity.

The strong link between blondness and foreignness here is, on the flip side of the coin, a link between blondness and normality there and a reinforcement of my distinct connection to both places.

Living here, I’ve gotten blonde all mixed up with a definition of American normal.  And blonde has come to signify lots of things (personal, cultural, and economic) that it’s never signified before.

I realized this after that dinner conversation with the anthropologists connecting blonde to normal, and after I started paying attention to all the places where rubia creeps up in my life.  When we went to Jorge’s niece’s birthday party, her cake had the small figure of a girl mounted atop it. The girl had big blue eyes and the kind of yellowy blonde hair that exists only in Disney animations.

“It’s Sarita!” Jorge’s sister said, and everyone laughed. And sure, as much as anyone can represent the two-inch figure planted on a cake, I did look like the girl. But obviously no one else did, which made the choice of figure a little odd.  Jorge’s niece is a beautiful little girl with large, oval brown eyes, high cheekbones, and hair the color of roasted coffee that glides to her tailbone and swishes back and forth when she walks.

I thought that figure might’ve been an exception to the rule until Jorge showed me photos from a wedding he shot, and atop the cake was a miniature couple in plastic: the man with dark hair, wearing a tuxedo, and the woman fair-skinned and waxy yellow blonde, in a white wedding dress. In the background were brown people in bright green gowns, women with hair in rope-like braids wearing traditional isthmeñan dresses the color of a rainforest canopy. The contrast was striking – the delicate blonde bride on the tiered cake, the vibrant velvet and silk of the women’s skirts in the background, the black depth of their hair.

So blonde here is aspiring to something – aspiring to normality per the standards of North American advertising campaigns. Blonde here is a cultural and economic indicator of an idealized normality. It means washer and drier, birthday cakes, toasters and white bread sandwiches with Kraft cheese and pretty two-story houses in nice neighborhoods. It means everything, in essence, that the United States exports as “normal.” And living here I’ve absorbed this definition of blonde normal and come to embody it.

“I wanted to take pictures of you at my party!” Jorge’s uncle said the other week. “A guëra, a rubia, at my party!” He said it kindly, in all sincerity – he wanted to show off all that I stood for at his fiesta.

“You are the kings of the world,” he declared in reference to the U.S, in the tone of voice some older Mexican men take when making a pronouncement about The Way The World Is. “You own everything.”

When he said this I felt very white and very blonde, eating my soup next to this dark man with a mustache and hair the color of rich wet Earth. My blondness was the symbol of and the gateway to a normality that evoked wealth and world domination.

So with all of these implied meanings of blonde surfacing in my life, rippling out into my perceptions of myself and the world around me, I decided to research the history of blonde.

As it turns out, blondness is pretty damn rare. Only 1-2 percent of people around the world are naturally blonde. In fact, blondeness is thought to have been somewhat of a freak mutation in history. Japanese researchers have been able to track the emergence of blondes back 11,000 years, to the last ice age. Some theories speculate it was a response to Vitamin D deficiency in northern Europe. Low pigmentation levels, resulting in blonde hair and light skin and eyes, allowed the body to absorb more sunlight and evade diseases like rickets. Other theories simply label blondness a rare genetic mutation.

In any case, adaptation or mutation, blondes have persevered through the ages. Why? As Canadian anthropologist Peter Frost would have it, because cave men preferred blondes. Literally. (The potential for awful jokes here has been thoroughly exploited by the dapper British press, so I’ll just move on to the facts.) Essentially, Frost’s theory holds that Europe has such a wide variety of skin, hair and eye colors because men could be very choosy about their mates and they ultimately preferred blondes, leading to widespread variation on the dark-haired dark-eyed theme.

So why could men get so choosy? Well, in contrast to Africa, where food (grains, nuts and fruits) could be easily gathered by both men and women and hunting was not crucial to survival, in Europe subsistence was almost entirely dependent on hunting. According to Frost, retreating glaciers created landscapes of abundant grass and moss – ideal conditions for grazing herbivores – but eliminated many of the plants edible to humans. What resulted was a stark division of labor between genders, with men going off on long, dangerous hunting expeditions and women building homes and caring for children. These hunting expeditions quickly whittled down the male population, creating a situation in which a small group of men could choose mates from a large population of women.  Many of these men supposedly chose blondes, and the female population consequently adapted to this male desire. Frost is a bit vague about why men preferred blondes – he points to studies that say blonde hair is an indication of high estrogen levels.

Thus the initial – scientifically/academically backed – myth about blonde sexuality and desirability.

Since then blondeness has been lusted after, built up, glorified, vilified, and exoticized over and over again. Joana Pitman has actually written a book about the process of glamorizing and demonizing blondes. In it she examines the way blondness has functioned as a symbol throughout history. Pitman starts with a blonde Aphrodite in Greece, who made blondeness synonymous with beauty and sensuality, then jumps forward to a blonde Venus in Rome, who continued and reinforced the association. She then proceeds to the Middle Ages, where she sets up the duality that prevails throughout the rest of the book. While central European Christians portrayed Eve and Mary Magdalene as blonde seductresses whose errant yellow hair went hand in hand with sin, northern European Christians depicted the Virgin Mary with light blonde hair that represented innocence and purity. This opposition would endure millennia in history, right up to Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe, Reese Witherspoon and Madonna – the virginal blonde, the seductive blonde. (After all, virginity and seduction go so damn well together, and humans love to create drama out of pairing and contrasting them). There were sonnets to blondes, then movies about them; Queen Elizabeth went blonde to create a coveted air of purity, Norma Jean went blonde to become a bombshell.

And of course, there are the stereotypes – Hollywood loves a stereotype (or twenty). The influence of flicks like “Legally Blonde” certainly weighs on the way the world sees blondeness. Hollywood blondes, from Drew Barrymore to Cameron Diaz, are flirty and innocent, a little dumb, and simultaneously cuddly and seductive in a way that more “serious” brunettes (Demi Moore, Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Connelly) aren’t. (Unless, of course, the blondes have gone nuts with their own super-charged sexuality, i.e. Glenn Close of Fatal Attraction and Sharon Stone of Basic Instinct).  Britney, Christina Aguilera, and Jessica Simpson have helped in their own special ways to contribute to Hollywood’s vision of blondeness: Britney’s Rolling Stone shoot in her undies, playing up the blonde and virginal and unabashedly sexual all at once, could easily represent the trajectory of historical and contemporary meanings of blondness.

What does all of this cultural manipulation of blondness mean? Well, blonde is a category nearly as constructed as normal. Overseas, it’s constructed in a slightly different way than in the U.S, but the two constructions play off of one another, building up blonde as both vaunted and normal, as both a glossy physical ideal and an accessible normality.

Bringing this all down to the level of one blonde American living in Oaxaca, it means a different kind of attention. It means the extra charge of being a symbol – not just a foreigner, not just a gringa, not just a foreign gringa woman, but also a blonde. And as much as Columbus Ohio and green bean casseroles, backpacks and Buddhism, coffee shops and Cincinnati diners shaped my childhood, blondeness has shaped my coming of age in Mexico and around the world, shaped the way I identify myself and the way I see myself being seen.

Blondeness, above all, is an oppositional category. By itself it doesn’t mean much. At home in the U.S., it means very little to me. But in Mexico, in China, in South America it has meant and means a lot. And it has become one of those conditions that defines me, that roots me in a particular identity and a particular past despite the wheres and hows and whys of the present moment.

So perhaps that’s why, this past spring, I dyed my hair blonder. It was turning darker as I got older, fading to a non-descript dishwater blonde; and with it, I felt, my perception of myself was changing. La rubia. I wanted her back. I still suffer waves of guilt over this decision.  Call it vain, call it weak, it could easily be both, but blondeness has captured me. Perhaps this is one of the effects of travel – we end up defining ourselves in ways we can’t predict, clinging to parts of our identities that would otherwise remain un-noticed, insignificant, even undesirable.

For me, blondeness has become a signifier of otherness, and I’ve learned in all this time in Mexico that for as much as I want to participate, for as much as I love belonging here, I value my otherness, too. I clutch it like a security blanket – I am so often so far from my “normal” childhood, from so many parts of myself, that I hold tight to the shreds of myself I can still express.

So for as guilty as I feel when I buy the little box of blonde, the smell of ammonia has become another brick in the complicated construction of my identity; my hair darkening to root brown a casualty of the identity politics and confusions inherent in travel. But do I mourn it, mourn the loss of blonde innocence?  Mourn the need I feel to recreate it?  No, I think – it is the indicator of another surprising self unfolding in this journey, another me atop all the others born in travel.