I got my first pair of gold hoop earrings before I can even remember. As is the tradition in Puerto Rico, my ears were pierced as soon as I was born, and I was given a pair of gold hoops, a pair of gold studs and a dainty gold bracelet. Every time I wore them I felt safe, like I was home. When I got to middle school, I stopped wearing them because they weren't allowed by my strict Catholic school, who thought them “unprofessional and distracting.” The rules also influenced me into not wearing them when I wasn't at school, because I thought I would be looked down upon. Why would I want to wear something that would make my tanned skin look tanner, my brown eyes look browner, and my thick eyebrows appear thicker? From there on, my ears were always naked and I opted for all those early 2000s charm and jelly bracelets. I distanced myself from them because I was too busy ‘‘mirando pa’rriba” ― looking to American culture as the most important thing, thinking of it as better than the things I knew and loved that were uniquely Puerto Rican. The writer Frantz Fanon studied this behavior and named it, the so-called dependency complex of the colonized , but I like to keep it simple and call it ignorance.