Cultural Limbo

So I finally realized for myself what a difference aspects of phenotype such as skin color can affect the manner in which people perceive you, even in my own country of the U.S. My Guatemalan co-workers had been learning this lesson since their arrival in the U.S. and for some of them, skin color also affected how they were perceived back home in Guatemala. The bakery owner's wife told me that in Guatemala, she is considered an American, "una gringa" (a female gringo), due to her skin being lighter or "whiter" in comparison to some other Guatemalans. On the flip side, in the U.S., she is not considered an American but rather a Hispanic and sometimes even an indigenous Hispanic due to her dark or "darker" skin when compared to some other Americans. If she is American in Guatemala and Guatemalan in the U.S., being both and neither at the same time, then what exactly is she? She has been caught in cultural limbo, stuck between two nationalities, two worlds, and two cultures, without being fully accepted by either. Her cultural limbo is much like what the Ladinos of Guatemala experienced that Daniel Wilkinson talked about in his ethnography "Silence on the Mountain". The Ladinos themselves had experienced being stuck between the European and Indian communities and never being fully accepted in either group. The Ladinos' story and the story of the bakery owner's wife is one shared by millions of people globally, who live within multiple cultures whose people consider them as "others" due to phenotype and cultural differences, estrange them by these distinctions, and place them in cultural limbo.