How can I claim my ethnic identity when my family never talked about it openly?

Silence around identity often has a history—sometimes survival, sometimes shame that wasn't yours to begin with, sometimes the weight of assimilation. Sor Juana worked in a system that demanded she perform Spanish intellectual life while her indigenous and African heritage lived in the margins of her writing, coded and careful. Her example shows: you don't need permission or a perfect family narrative to claim what's yours. Start with what you *do* know—a language fragment, a recipe, a name, a story someone whispered. Research fills gaps that silence created. Connect with communities of people from your heritage, especially those also doing this work of reclamation. You'll likely find others navigating the same gap between what was passed down and what was hidden. This claiming—this making visible what was kept quiet—is an act of both personal and ancestral justice. You're not inventing identity; you're recovering it. That takes courage, and it matters.