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FIVE YEAR OLD Lucia Mitchell stood by herself in the corner of the crowded room. Gripping tightly onto her new Spider-Man lunch box, she purses her lips noticing the rest of the girl's in the room had bright pink Barbie or Hello Kitty Lunch boxes. She began to pout, suddenly feeling out of touch, as if she should've picked a different theme during her family's trip to Walmart last week.
Nevertheless, she was a Brats kind of girl anyway.
It was the first day of kindergarten at her new school. Truthfully, she had no trouble making friends. It was just that at this school, there seemed to be no one that looked like her nor did they seem remotely interested in getting to know her.
The Mitchell family moved from sunny California to Utah just a week prior. Not that Lucia fully understood why or how they moved to an entirely new state but what she did know was that there was a lack of girls and boys with similar caramel skin that mirrored her own.
Lucia grew up surrounded by her native tongue and culture. Her five years of age allowed her life to be predominantly surrounded by fellow Hispanics and other people of color in her rundown neighborhood. Hell, the first time she ever saw a white person was when she was three.
He was a tall man with vibrant green eyes and soft brown hair to compliment. Her mother, Marisol, had met him at her day job. He had wandered into the diner she worked at and ordered a cup of coffee. He showed up again the next day, and the day after that, and eventually, he mustered up enough courage to ask her out on a date.
His name was Daniel Mitchell, 22 and a freshly graduated student from UCLA. On the road to success with a job at one of the high end companies he had worked so hard to get.
He soon became the surrogate father to Lucia, and after a year of dating her mother, they officially became a family of three. Marisol and Lucia Jimenez became Mitchell and moved out of their hole in the wall apartment into a spacious house that allowed Lucia to have her very own room and a backyard. The young girl fell in love with the home and she fell in love with her newly formed family.
But that home only housed the Mitchell family for a year. The company Daniel had been working at gave him an opportunity he couldn't pass up, there was a new branch opening up in Utah and he was selected to run it. And so, with Lucia just having started kindergarten and Marisol nearly to term in her pregnancy, they chose to move to Salt Lake City for the new chapter of their lives.
Moving to the suburbs of Utah, it was clear to Lucia that there weren't many kids that she knew how to befriend. Her own neighborhood was filled with picture perfect families, white picket fences, and usual pale skinned and blue eyed individuals she hadn't seen before.
And now standing quietly by herself in the corner of the room, the girl had no idea how she'd be able to talk to the white kids who kept staring and whispering. Sure she had been living in the states since she was born, but her mother came to America only knowing a lick of English and so her first language growing up was Spanish.
