Diary 47

Dear Diary,

Knowledge comes in strange ways. I never thought that a person who

lived over 10,000 miles away could impact me, but tonight, that changed.

Zlata has been with us for four days now and we’ve really gotten to know

her well and she’s just like us. When I met her, we were wearing the same

shoes! I couldn’t believe she was wearing Doc Martens. When we started to

get to know each other, we talked about the same things. About Pearl Jam

and how cute Eddie Vedder was. If I hadn’t known that she was Zlata

Filipovic, “the famous teen author from war-torn Bosnia,” I would have just

assumed that she was a normal fifteen-year-old girl who liked to shop and

hang out with her friends. The best part is, that she was a normal fifteen-

year-old girl.

When she came, we were invited to the Croatian Hall where she would

be speaking. We didn’t want to go empty-handed, so we gathered medicinal

supplies, clothes, and even old toys. All these were going to be sent back to

Bosnia. This would be our first encounter with people who had been

persecuted in Bosnia. We expected nothing less than for them to be

accepting and tolerant. I thought they would care less what color, creed, or

race any of us were. Unfortunately, some proved me wrong.

As Zlata was speaking in front of the people from Croatia, they were all

nodding their heads. “Yes, yes,” they would say. She spoke about all of the

injustices that one must go through for a simple label or belief. She

mentioned her experience as a fourteen-year-old growing up in war-torn

Bosnia. How hard it was for her to lose friends because of the way they

looked, or what they believed in. At this point, we were the ones nodding

our heads.

There is one thing that really stands out in my mind from that night,

however. As she was answering questions, a couple of adults asked her

what ethnicity she was, Croatian? Muslim? Serbian? I was upset that

instead of getting the message that she was trying to convey, they were too

preoccupied with what nationality she was. Were these the same adults that

preached how wrong racism and discrimination are? Were these the same

people that a minute ago agreed that we shouldn’t care about labels? Zlata

looked around, stared at us, and simply said, “I’m a human being.”

That’s exactly what we all are. We spend so much time trying to figure

out what race a person is when we could just get to know them as

individuals. I felt like answering their question with a question. Does it

matter? Will it make a difference if she is Croatian, Muslim, Serbian?

She taught me the most valuable lesson that anybody could ever have

and to think that she is only fifteen! Ever since that day I’ve tried not to

accept society’s labels, but to fight against them. I have always been taught

to be proud of being Latina,

I have always been taught to be proud of being Mexican, and I was. I

was probably more proud of being a “label” than of being a human being,

that’s the way most of us were taught. Since the day we enter this world we

were a label, a number, a statistic, that’s just the way it is. Now if you ask

me what race I am, like Zlata, I’ll simply say, “I’m a human being.”

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