I recently found a charro sombrero in a local Mexican restaurant. As I rapidly tore it off the display with excitement and placed it carefully on my head, I turned to look at my dad for approval. He looked at me strangely but with a small yet visible beam of pride in his eye. Being from Guadalajara, one of the most historically majestic cities in Mexico, my father grew up seeing mariachis serenade damsels on balconies in the streets at midnight. He saw Dia de los Muertos parades from the hole in wall that his family could barely call a window. He experienced his beautiful heritage until he moved to a small town in California to pursue his american dream. When he saw his Mexican-American daughter take this very obvious symbol of his culture and place it on herself, he couldn't have been prouder. I handled the sombrero with such delicacy as I placed it on my head, feeling the centuries of history falling down on my tiny little box of knowledge. I felt its velvety skin wrapping around my scalp, its itchy golden embroidery roughing up my fingertips. This beautiful piece of art sat on my head like a crown on a queen. I wore this sombrero in a restaurant full of white people looking for the best queso dip in town, proud of my own heritage for the first time. I had never felt proud to be a Mexican because I was so accustomed to the derogatory term that accompanied it. A term that embodied not only my parent’s entire cultures but also one that forced me to identify as only American for the first 18 years of my life. Today I stand tall as a successful Mexican-American, ever proud of my heritage and nationality. A couple minutes later the server came to me and told me the sombrero was only for display.