"I think that they were shocked...that my sister and I were going through problems," she says, adding that comments like "What are you?" were common.
Ethel B. Branch '01, whose mother is Navajo and whose father is part Spanish-Mexican, part Basque and part French, went to an all Native-American grade school in Arizona.
"It's really hard coming to terms with your own identity," she says, adding that people have told her that she is a "white Indian."
"You just don't have that validity that other people have," Branch says.
One major difficulty mixed-race students said they face are assumptions and misconceptions about their racial identity.
Rodolfo N. Cajiri '01, a Bolivian of Japanese, African, Spanish, Native American and Middle Eastern descent, says that people label him as Hispanic despite the many races represented in his background.
"Since I'm brown and have black hair, people assumed I was Mexican," Cajiri says.
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