There was a time in my life where I didn't know the word for "brown". I didn't know the word for any color for that matter. But my eyes knew what they would see. My eyes knew the tones of skin, the shapes of faces, the way hair is styled; I knew how people looked like without really knowing it. For example, I knew that almost everyone in my family has dark brown to light brown skin, brown eyes, and black hair. This is also how I more or less look like, and the way most people would see me.

Still, when I was young, I wouldn't think about how people looked like or how they would see me. What would the way someone else look like tell me about them, anyways? It was all about what others showed interested in. Anyone that also loved playing video games, thought that superheroes and dinosaurs were awesome, anyone that loved to eat pancakes, burritos,and pizza, people that would enjoy running around and being silly were automatically people that I cared about. Life is perhaps much easier this way. But it was only a matter of time before I noticed the people around me talking about other things. Not just what people liked to eat and play and feel and think, but what people looked like, and just how they looked like. I knew what people looked like, but it was never anything that I thought people would focus on, think about, or care about. But I would soon learn it was, and that it all started with a story.

This story really is the story of people, the story of our history. I would soon learn that everyone has a different understanding of this story, a version of their own, where everyone's understanding was meant to explain the world around them. It was confusing as a kid then, and it still confuses me now. In fact, it seems to be something that confuses everyone, yet we all sort of know it without really knowing it.

One of the very first stories related to our history that I heard about was the story of a place called Mexico. This place was where my family was from, and whenever I would see other stories about Mexico on TV, I would see a lot of people that looked like my family and I. They spoke Spanish, like my family did, and they ate the same kinds of food and listened to the same kinds of music that my family did, too. But I would see that some people in Mexico didn't look like my family did. They seemed different. They seemed more like some of the people that I would see on TV whenever the TV was talking about a place called the United States of America; they seemed more like the people that were in the movies and a lot of the books that I would read about.

The story of the United States was a story that I really began to hear about when I started school. The school was also the first place where I saw people that just didn't look like any of the people that were in my family. I still wasn't paying much attention to any of it, though. It would take a while for me to not pay much attention to it, but the story really began to permeate my mind when I learned about geography.

I learned that where I lived was a place called Los Angeles, and Los Angeles was in the United States of America. I learned that there was somebody very important, called the President, that was somehow responsible for what would happen in the USA. The President didn't look like me, or anyone in my family, either. I wondered if the President even knew about me or how we lived if he seemed so different, but I generally assumed he didn't.

I learned that Mexico wasn't too far from where I lived, as well. I wouldn't visit Mexico for years, only using the stories that my family would tell to imagine what it would look like, especially family that would come visit us from Mexico. I also found out something very important: that the United States and Mexico were called countries, and that there were other countries too, a lot of other countries. I wondered how many places were a part of other places, but I found out that the biggest possible place that had all other places where people lived was this huge floating rock-and-water ball called our planet, or Earth. It was really mind-blowing to think and put into perspective, especially when I would see the pictures of this green and blue looking ball that was floating around, thinking that everybody in every city in every country lived on a ball. I wondered just how many cities and countries there were on this ball.

One of the most important stories that I heard was that people looked different if they were from another country. That people looked different depending where they were from did and didn't make sense. Why, then, were there so many different looking people at my school, and why were there so many different looking people at the mall and the market and the airport?

By the time I was in middle school, I had already learned a lot about this story of people, about history, especially in social studies. Experts on this story still fight about where and when it all started, but I learned that the story of people started somewhere in a place called Africa, and that everyone, and I mean everyone, in some way, is related to the people in Africa.

It didn't make much sense to me then, and it still confuses me now, but we called a lot of the people that came from Africa black. But, I was able to pick up on the analogy, because they called people from the Americas brown and red, people from Europe white, and people from Asia yellow. Maybe it's because of my obsession with learning different things and describing things in as many different ways as possible, but I always thought it a bit funny and too simple to call people colors. It made sense to me because one of the first things I noticed about people was the way they look, and skin color is definitely something that I would notice. But, it also didn't make sense. I would soon find out from many of my closest relationships that while people from the same country could be different colors, and that some people that have the same color could be very much different.