The Colonial Erasure of Identity in 1993: The Day My Free Lunch Form Tried to Erase Me

Oye, mira.

I remember vividly being in third grade, filling out what seemed like a harmless piece of paper. Only 30 years later did I come to understand that this paper had exposed the violence of colonial classification. It was the free lunch form, a bureaucratic necessity designed to determine whether I would receive a basic human right—food. But before it would grant me sustenance, it demanded something more sinister.

"Race - Please select one: White, Black, Asian."

I stared at the form, my small hands gripping the pencil tighter. I was raised in a Puerto Rican household, where the echoes of Taíno ancestors lived in our traditions, where the rhythm of bomba and the resilience of Black Boricuas coursed through my blood. My father, Mexican, carried the Indigenous people who survived centuries of conquest and genocide. But where was I in this colonial taxonomy?

I didn't fit. And that wasn’t an accident.

The Violence of Colonial Classification

Violence is not always a wound you can see, not always a physical act of harm. Violence is also erasure, silencing, and the psychological and systemic forces that strip a person of their identity and humanity. When I was asked to choose between White, Black, or Asian, I was not just given a difficult question—I was being told that parts of me did not exist. That my Indigeneity and my Afro-Caribbean roots were not valid. That to receive food, I had to first erase myself.

This is epistemic violence—the act of denying knowledge, truth, and identity to maintain the power of the dominant group. Colonial racial categories were never designed to reflect the truth of who we are; they were built to force us into systems that serve white supremacy. They are instruments of control, shaping how resources are distributed, how history is told, and how we are allowed to define ourselves.

This type of violence is insidious because it is silent, normalized, and woven into the very fabric of everyday life. It does not come with sirens or bruises, but it is just as damaging. It teaches children to internalize a fragmented version of themselves, to feel alienated from their own histories. It forces generations to conform, to simplify, to shrink into categories that were never meant to honor their existence.

The Colonial Construction of Race in U.S. Schools

This moment of childhood confusion was more than an oversight—it was an intentional act of erasure. The racial categories on that form were never meant to honor identity; they were designed to control, categorize, and simplify race to serve white supremacy. These classifications were constructed not to reflect the reality of human existence but to uphold systems of power that dictated who was human, who was citizen, who was deserving.

From the earliest days of colonization, European powers imposed a racial caste system upon the lands they violently occupied. In the United States, these hierarchies took shape through census records, blood quantum laws, and one-drop rules—tools that policed identity, justified genocide, and upheld slavery. The same systems that sought to erase Indigenous nations and enslave African peoples later codified race into neat little checkboxes, teaching children like me that we must conform or disappear.

For Afro-Indigenous, Latinx, and other mixed-heritage peoples, these classifications are not just inaccurate—they are acts of violence. They erase our realities, forcing us to pick between incomplete identities, to amputate parts of our ancestry to fit within a colonial framework.

Why Did Schools Do This?

American public schools have always been sites of racial surveillance and social engineering. While they claim to serve education, they have historically served empire—indoctrinating children into a whitewashed national identity and erasing those who do not fit within it. The racial categories on that lunch form were just one of many tools designed to maintain this control.

• Colonial Census-Taking: Schools use racial data for funding and demographic tracking, but these frameworks are dictated by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which still operates on a Eurocentric racial hierarchy rooted in colonial census-taking.
• Misrepresentation & Invisibility: The forced categorization of students into limited racial groups ensures that Afro-Indigenous, Mestizo, and Afro-Latinx identities remain statistically invisible, reinforcing systemic neglect in education policies and funding allocations.
• Erasure of Indigenous and African Heritage: Latinidad itself has been constructed as a racialized ethnic category, one that denies the Blackness and Indigeneity of millions in an effort to assimilate our communities into a Eurocentric, anti-Black, and anti-Indigenous national identity.

Decolonizing Identity in Schools

The erasure I experienced that day was not an accident—it was by design. But what is built can be dismantled. Decolonizing our identities means rejecting the frameworks imposed upon us and demanding systems that honor the full spectrum of our existence.

1. Destroy Colonial Racial Categories – Schools must eliminate binary racial constructs and adopt Afro-Indigenous, Mestizo, Afro-Latinx, and Two-Spirit categories that reflect our histories, rather than erase them.
2. Abolish Eurocentric Racial Frameworks – Educational institutions must acknowledge that race is a colonial invention used to justify oppression, displacement, and genocide. Instead of reinforcing these constructs, they must actively work to dismantle them.
3. Reclaim Identity through Community-Led Narratives – Schools should prioritize Indigenous storytelling, oral histories, and Afro-Latinx migration narratives as a means of self-determination, rather than forcing children to check a colonial box.
4. Teach Decolonial History & Identity Formation – Education must be rooted in Indigenous and African epistemologies, not just as a counter-narrative, but as the central truth. Children must be taught that their histories do not begin with colonization, and that their identities are not footnotes in whitewashed textbooks.

That free lunch form was not just paperwork—it was an act of colonial violence, an attempt to erase me before I had even come into my full understanding of who I am. But what I didn’t know in third grade, and what I know now, is that my identity is not for the state to define.

I am Afro-Indigenous. I carry the blood of those who refused to be erased, the spirits of ancestors who built resistance into our very DNA.

And no form, no checkbox, no colonial construct will ever take that away.