Marcela Alcala on Identity, Motherhood, and Returning to the Things She Loves

by Jessie Wiener

I met Marcela Alcala over Zoom. Over the next hour and a half, we talked about beauty, social media, motherhood, and the career she's spent years building. A move from Mexico to New York at 14 eventually led her to Sephora, L'Oréal, Estée Lauder, and Glossier before she built the account many people know today as @mexicanbutjapanese.

As we talked, the conversation kept circling back to questions of identity—how she saw herself growing up, the career she built, and the person she's still becoming now.

Living Between Worlds

Marcela was born and raised in Mexico to a Mexican father and a Japanese mother. Spanish was her first language. Culturally, she felt deeply Mexican, but physically, she looked very Japanese, something people noticed immediately. Growing up, she often felt caught between those identities. Sometimes people thought it was interesting. Other times, it made her a target. 

Her mother was born and raised in Mexico, as was her grandmother before her. By the time Marcela came along, the family felt deeply Mexican, even if she often looked different from the people around her. While her parents knew other Japanese families, there wasn't a large community around them. Marcela spent much of her childhood navigating questions about identity on her own.

When Marcela was 14, her older sister was moving to New York for graduate school and asked if she wanted to come with her and finish high school there. Suddenly, she was living in the largest city she'd ever seen, armed with a MetroCard, $20 for emergencies, and a phone she could really only use after 9 p.m., back when free nights and weekends were still a thing.

The first time the subway unexpectedly stopped and everyone was told to get off, she panicked. "I thought I was going to get kidnapped," she says, laughing. Instead, a stranger helped her find her way to school. What she remembers most about New York, though, is how normal she suddenly felt. In Mexico, being Japanese-Mexican often made her stand out. In New York, everyone seemed to be from somewhere else. 

She attended LaGuardia High School for drama and threw herself into city life. “I owe a big apology to my teachers," she says—she was just having too much fun. Looking back, she describes high school in New York as her college experience. By the time she got to NYU, where she studied Media, Culture, and Communication, she was ready to take school more seriously.

The degree focused on media theory and criticism: how messages are created, interpreted, and absorbed. "It's so fascinating," she says. "Everyone should take a media class." At the time, she didn't know how relevant those lessons would eventually become.

Building a Career in Beauty

Long before she worked in the industry, beauty was part of everyday life at home. Her mother would bring makeup and skincare products home and teach her how they worked. Marcela still remembers the first time she saw a green color corrector and learned it could cancel out redness. "I was so into it."

When she turned 18, she got a job at Sephora and spent weekends working while attending NYU during the week. She took the job to help pay for school and ended up discovering the industry where she'd build a career. "Sephora was school," she says. The training was extensive, and she learned ingredients, formulations, techniques, and how to communicate with customers. It gave her a foundation that would shape the rest of her career.

She eventually moved into roles at L'Oréal and Estée Lauder before landing at Glossier in 2018. The timing couldn't have been better. Glossier was growing rapidly, Instagram was booming, and influencer culture was reshaping the beauty industry in real time. 

For years, Marcela had worked in education and training, helping connect brands to consumers. At Glossier, social content became an increasingly important part of that work. Around the same time, she started posting more consistently on her own channels.

Beauty had always been something she shared with her mother, so it wasn't unusual for her to come up in conversation or appear in content from time to time.

At one point, her husband pointed out what now seems obvious: people were responding to her mother just as much as they were responding to the beauty content. Over time, she started appearing more often.

Before long, what started as beauty content had become something bigger. People loved her mother's style, confidence, and humor.

"She was always down to do anything," Marcela says. “A concert in Brooklyn with a bunch of 20-year-olds? Sure. Blue hair? Why not?”

Marcela suspects New York had something to do with it. After her mother moved there, she seemed to become even more playful and experimental.

"Nobody cares here," Marcela says, laughing. "You can just do whatever you want."

Her mother never seemed particularly concerned with whether something was age-appropriate or expected. "It never felt like she limited herself," Marcela says. "And I hope I can do that as well."

One of their biggest moments came when Fenty Beauty reposted a video featuring her mother. The account exploded almost overnight. Marcela remembers sitting on a family vacation with her husband and her mom, all three of them staring at her phone as notifications poured in.

The growth was exciting, but what stayed with her most was watching people connect with her mother.

Losing Her Mother, Becoming a Mother

Marcela and her husband married young. She always thought children might be part of their future, but she never viewed motherhood as the only path to a fulfilling life. "If we can make it happen, beautiful. If we can't, that's okay too."

Then the pandemic arrived. Her mother died. Other losses followed. Like many people, she spent those years simply trying to get through them.

By 2023, life finally felt stable enough to start trying for a baby. Not long after, she got pregnant with her daughter. At the same time, Marcela was carrying another question she hadn't fully answered. For years, @mexicanbutjapanese had been built around both her and her mother. Suddenly, she was creating content alone while grieving someone who had become inseparable from the identity of the brand itself.

"What does @mexicanbutjapanese look like without her?"

She wanted to keep creating, but she wasn't entirely sure what it was supposed to look like anymore. "I went through a big identity crisis," she says.

That question lingered while she learned how to be a mother—through sleepless nights, feedings every few hours, and the exhausting reality of caring for a newborn.

For a while, she felt like she was trying to catch up to everything at once. "I was trying to catch up with my life, catch up with motherhood, catch up with social media," she says. "Catch up with how I even do this life as a mom, but also catch up with the industry and the standard."

It took her a long time to figure out how motherhood and work could coexist. By the time she finally felt like she'd found a rhythm, social media had changed again.

Looking back now, she can see how much of that period was spent simply going through the motions. She was still creating and growing her audience, but she was also trying to navigate one of the biggest transitions of her life while carrying one of the biggest losses.

Learning to Ask for Help

Marcela describes herself as someone who likes solving problems. When something isn't working, her instinct is to figure it out. Motherhood challenged that almost immediately.

Her first pregnancy brought relentless nausea that lasted nearly the entire nine months. She was still throwing up during labor. Some weeks were manageable. Others weren't. Then came breastfeeding. She wanted it to work, but she also wanted to return to work. Eventually, she found a combination of breastfeeding and formula feeding that worked for her family.

With her daughter, she didn't often ask for help. By the time she became pregnant with her son, something had shifted. The nausea returned, though not quite as intensely. This time, she wasn't trying to do it all herself. Her sister came over before work, her mother-in-law helped with her daughter during the day, and family stepped in wherever they could. "I don't think I would have made it without them," she says.

The same mindset carried into breastfeeding. The first time around, she waited too long to seek support. The second time, she hired a lactation consultant immediately, even though she'd already breastfed one child. "This time I was like, whatever. That's exactly what I'm gonna do."

Part of that shift came from her middle sister, whose philosophy is refreshingly straightforward: "If you need help, just get it."

Over the years, that advice has applied to everything from childcare to lactation support to taking an hour for herself. If something will make your life easier, do it.

"Money well spent and invested," Marcela says.

Now, she works part-time out of a small studio and credits much of that ability to her mother-in-law, who helps care for the kids during the week. "I would love to shout out my amazing mother-in-law," she says. "Everything is thanks to her."

Returning to Herself

After her mother's death and becoming a mother herself, she realized she'd slowly drifted away from the kind of content she actually enjoyed making. For years, she'd been asking herself some version of the same question: What does Instagram want me to do? What does TikTok want me to do? How do I get in front of people? How do I keep up?

"At some point, I lost what I really wanted to do," she says.

Lately, she's been trying to return to the beginning: the beauty looks she genuinely enjoys, the small pops of color that have always felt like her, and the kind of content she loved making before she started worrying about whether it would perform.

Beauty is still at the center of what she does. Motherhood is part of her life too. The challenge isn't choosing between them. It's figuring out how they fit together.

That same tension shows up in other areas of her life. Her relationship with her body feels different after her second pregnancy. She talks about rebuilding core strength rather than chasing a specific size, realizing she can't wear the same clothes she wore before, and looking at photos and recognizing that the image she carries around in her head no longer quite matches reality.

"I don't feel completely in my new skin yet. When someone takes a picture of me, I'm like, 'Oh, that's what I look like,' " she says.

The feeling isn't necessarily negative. It's just different. But she doesn't sound discouraged. Mostly, she sounds curious.

She also sounds more open than she once was. During her first pregnancy, she thought maternity photos were cheesy. By her second, she'd completely changed her mind. She took them and shared them online. Most people loved them. Some people unfollowed because they were there for beauty, and only beauty. She laughs about it now.

She enjoys working with baby brands and creating content with her kids. She's still figuring it out, but she's clearer on one thing.

"I just want to get back to things I love to do."

For Marcela, that has always included beauty, creativity, and a willingness to experiment.

"I didn't want to be a beige mom," she says, laughing. "I wanted a colorful life."

She wants music, color, and curiosity around her children. She wants a bright apartment and a home that feels creative and alive. The same instinct that once drew her toward beauty and creative expression now shapes the world she's creating for her littles.

Listening to Marcela talk, it's hard not to think about her mother.

She's not trying to recreate what came before. Still, it's easy to see traces of her mother in the life she's creating now.

And maybe that's what ties so many parts of her story together. The move to New York. The beauty career. The account she built with her mother. Motherhood. The constant evolution of her work.

None of it has been about becoming a different person. If anything, it sounds like a long process of returning to the things she has always loved and giving herself permission to enjoy them openly. For the first time in a while, she seems less interested in keeping up and more interested in creating a life—and a body of work—that feels true to her.

After we officially wrapped, our conversation drifted back to beauty. We started talking about makeup routines and how easy it is to keep doing the same thing for years. I admitted that mine hadn't changed much since high school: a cat eye with black liquid liner.

Marcela immediately lit up.

“What color are your eyes? Blue, right? Have you ever tried a purple liner?”

Within seconds, she was rattling off ideas and asking questions, completely in her element.

It felt like a fitting way to end the conversation. Throughout our interview, she talked about returning to the things she loves. And here she was, still talking about beauty with the same enthusiasm that had drawn her to it in the first place.