Edit: Wrote this a couple days ago. Forgot to publish it. Oops.

In colonial Latin America, there was a pretty extensive caste system in place based on one's skin color, and what it implied about the person's parentage. If you google it, there are some pretty specific categories, where one Black, one White, and two Native American grandparents made one a Wolf, and so on. It was also partially a breeding experiment using people and slaves. The most haunting image I saw had a little girl, with the caption (in Spanish) "Her fair face, every image of her fathers, without a trace of her mother's savagery." A "Torna-atras," the return backwards, was considered failures of the system, as Torna-atras were dark skinned children born to a light-skinned parent or parents.

But ever since I could tell stories, the torna-atras has been one of my favorite themes to work with. Not in terms of race of course, because I hardly think about race, especially where it applies to me, but in terms of the way a person sees himself.

For example, a few of my favorite songs:

"Jenny on the Block"

"Switch"

"Who Says You Can't Go Home?"

"Mississippi Girl"

"Gone Country"

"1985"

"'Fore She Was Momma"

All of these to one extent or another deal with the same theme, the "return backwards." The main character in the song, who is in many cases the singer themselves, is saying that they haven't changed from their roots, or in the case of the last two is forced to think about for far from her youth she has wandered. Country songs, with the inherent structure of the same event/image repeated throughout a person's life or across three different people, is naturally better equipped to deal with this idea, which is probably why they dominate the list.

In literature, this theme crops up with surprising regularity, and is as often positive as negative, just like the examples I gave above. Werewolves and the concept of original sin are both examples on the negative side, while all throughout the novel American Gods, not to mention the endless of the Sandman comics by the same author, deal with the concept as a positive. People in these Niel Gaiman's stories are at their most powerful and most vulnerable when they have revealed their true selves, and their torna-atras have revealed that, diminished, challenged, and on the surface changed, in the end they are still the same beings they were millennium ago.