Having been part of one of three Puerto Rican families in a practically all-white suburb, I understand that race and identity formation is a complicated issue that manifests itself in different ways. For example, I do know of Hispanic/Latino individuals who chose to reject their culture and identify only as their skin color plus American, most likely, white American.

Then you have people like me who desperately held onto my culture even as everyone outside my home thought we were weird foreigners. I swore up and down I would never live anywhere where there weren't Latinos, or people who looked like me and spoke Spanish. Even though my children are lighter than me and have blond hair, we live in California where there are many native Spanish speakers, my kids are fluent in Spanish and even attend the occasional Spanish mass like I did as a child. I won't let them forget that they are Latino just like their mother and their father who, for some time, also had to endure being the minority in a largely caucasian suburb.

You could say I was perturbed by baseball slugger Sammy Sosa's use of a cream that has freakishly lightened his skin. Perhaps it isn't fair, but my first reaction to the picture is does this always have to happen when you become so rich you have no idea what to do with your money? You go Michael Jackson crazy and bleach your skin?

But then I read this Open Salon essay by a mother in Puerto Rico whose brown son wants to be white. Her husband challenged her on the Sammy Sosa story and her own biases when it comes to race.