One of our first nights of orientation in Santiago, some friends from my program asked one of our “monitores,” the local students hired to show us around, if she believed that racism existed in Spain.

“Yes, yes, I like it a lot!” she replied encouragingly, not missing a beat.

Fortunately, it turned out that she was referring to the white asparagus that had arrived in our salad moments before. A classic mix-up. After an awkward moment of confusion, she clarified that, in her opinion, racism did not exist in Spain.

A country without racism? We all were suitably impressed.

But upon arriving in Madrid, it became evident that racism, or at least what we defined as racism, was alive and kicking in Spain after all.

Clue number one came more quickly than we anticipated. Eager to exploit our newfound freedom to buy alcohol, many of us inquired as to where we might purchase inexpensive spirits. The answer came back overwhelmingly uniformly: “Why, a Chino, of course.”

“A what?”

“A Chino. A corner grocery store.”

“What are they actually called?”

“…Chinos.”

We eventually found out that the shops were technically referred to as “alimentation stores.” But, across Madrid, any such store was universally considered a Chino.

Clue number two arrived several weeks later. Our new “Madrid Monitores” had divided us into smaller groups to show us around the city. To help them identify us, our program directors had given each monitor a sheet with our names and photos.

While waiting for all of the students to arrive, one monitor consulted the name-and-photo sheet. She pointed to a photo of one Asian girl on our program.

“We’re still waiting for her,” the monitor declared.

We weren’t. We were waiting for another Asian girl on our program. When we politely pointed out the monitor’s error, she laughed and shrugged off the comment.

“All Chinese look the same,” she said.

One of the girls was Japanese. The other was Vietnamese.

We found a third, particularly convincing clue a few weeks after that. My friends and I were at a “botellón,” a Spanish party in the streets, chatting with some locals our age. We were feeling pretty great about how our Spanish conversation abilities were holding up when suddenly disaster hit.

One of the guys in their group crossed over to a girl in our group who happened to be Vietnamese. He smiled at her and asked casually, “So do you know Mai Tai?”

“What?” she asked, caught off guard.

He did a few poor imitations of Mai Tai moves and then clarified.

“You know, Mai Tai. For Chinese people.”

“I’m Vietnamese,” she replied.

“Oh,” he responded. “So do you like Jackie Chan?”

At this point, we were beginning to realize that our monitor in Santiago had been incorrect: racism clearly and undeniably existed in Spain after all.

But perhaps a month later, the topic of racism came up once again in one of my Spanish language classes. When we indicated that racism obviously was prevalent in the country, our Spanish professor asked us for more examples. One by one, we began to voice our individual stories.

Our professor listened to our experiences patiently as we expressed our concerns. When we finished 45 minutes later, she began to answer.

“The Spanish are not as politically correct as Americans,” she said.

We all nodded. We had noticed. Would this be the anticlimactic end of the discussion?

“But,” she continued, “I don’t believe that we are more racist.”

We all looked at her as if she had just declared that she was the Mad Hatter. Exhibiting clearly racist behavior meant that the Spanish were less racist? Something was not lining up.

“We don’t tiptoe around racial differences,” she followed up. “We’d prefer to air the reality that they exist. But that doesn’t mean we feel that the Chinese are inferior to us in any way, and that doesn’t mean we’re discriminating. We’re just voicing things that Americans might think, but not say.”

She paused, perhaps triumphantly, realizing that she had caught our attention.

“The fact remains, that if everyone can feel comfortable speaking openly about their racial differences and stereotypes of one another, isn’t that almost less racist than harboring them in secret?”

She had a point. If openly discussing racial stereotypes was not intended to be hurtful or hateful but simply…open, was it a problem?

My host father offered further insight into the situation later that evening.

“In Spain, the non-Spanish communities often don’t mingle with the Spanish,” he explained. “So they’re a bit of a mystery to us. We don’t think badly of them, we just don’t interact with them. Maybe we’ll form misconceptions because we just don’t know. But they’re not malicious.”

I considered the implications of my professor’s and my host father’s explanations. Are all cultures, in fact, racist in one way or another? Could it be that the horrifying racial profiling we had experienced was just a different manifestation of the very same racism that exists in the United States?

The fact remains that many of my friends have felt discriminated against here in Spain. And many of my friends have felt discriminated against in the United States. Have the manifestations of the discrimination been different? Absolutely. But has the person being marginalized felt uncomfortable, angry, or hurt in both instances? As we would say in Spain, “Claro.” Of course.

Considering my Spanish professor’s argument made me wonder if racism is the same everywhere, in one way or another. Maybe when multiple cultures mix, racism simply is a natural byproduct. Although none of us (Spanish or American) want to accept that racism exists in our country, maybe it is time to admit that, whether we like it or not, racism is everywhere.

Subsequently, the question is not “does racism exist?” but rather how racism manifests itself in each specific culture. Both Spain and the United States have aspects of their cultures that one might consider “racist.” But, at the same time, both countries do undertake certain measures to try to curb racist tendencies.

Perhaps we are not as advanced as we would hope, but we also are not as far behind as we might fear.