“I was proud to be Mexican. I was proud of my dad’s family. Like, I was Daddy’s little girl as a little girl.”
In pigtails and, when she got older, thick-rimmed 80s glasses, the resemblance between Marlena Velasquez and her mother is strong. And, if you didn’t have a reason to question it, the man in all her childhood photos was her father.
But, even as a little girl, Velasquez says something seemed off.
“They’d be like, ‘You’re not Mexican.’ And I’d be like ‘Yes, I am!’” Velasquez recalled.
Proving her ethnicity, and the backfire
To prove her ethnicity to her childhood naysayers, Velasquez took an Ancestry DNA test