Never Latino Enough. Never American Enough.
The liminal spaces occupied by the children of immigrants.
Disclaimer: I use the term “American” in this piece even though I usually avoid it, as it is an exclusionary, U.S.-centric misnomer. It’s relevant in this piece, however, because it’s the term we used growing up. I don’t want to play revisionist in the telling of this story.
Going to school in Union City, New Jersey, a Latino-majority city, I never felt Latino enough. I wasn’t secure in my Spanish, and I looked a little different. Part of it was my light skin, I think, but I wasn’t the only light-skinned kid. Maybe there was something about the cut of my jib—the clothes I wore, the way I combed my hair—that made me look more “American.” I’m not sure. Some called me gringo. I found myself having to prove my Latino-ness. Kids tested me.
“Say something in Spanish,” they’d press, as if it were the secret password that admitted entry into the culture.
The threat of harassment from kids in the neighborhood always loomed. One day after school, a group of kids jumped my friend, Fernando, and me. At first, they called us names. We tried to ignore them, picking up the pace, but when they started hurling glass bottles, which exploded at our feet, they became hard to ignore. One of them ran up to Fernando and clocked him in the face.
We booked it to the nearest bodega, our attackers in pursuit, but the owner ordered us to leave when we barreled inside. Panting, we pleaded with him to let us stay, but he was resolute: He didn’t want any trouble. The neighborhood kids bided their time outside, jeering and salivating over the imminent beatdown.
A nasal, reedy voice—the unmistakable tone of discipline—pierced the taunting. Mrs. Cortijo, one of the teachers from our school, shooed the kids away, wielding her strident voice like a club. Even the neighborhood kids recognized her authority and ran off. She saved us from an ass-kicking that day.
Those kids never told us why they had an issue with us, but they didn’t need to. They were dressed in street clothes. We were dressed in navy, baby blue, and plaid—the Catholic school uniform of Holy Rosary Academy. We were the fancy, prissy kids from the private school. Rich kids. They would’ve been half right.
Fernando’s family had money. Their hacienda-style house on a corner of Boulevard East had an unobstructed view of the Manhattan skyline. By contrast, PSE&G cut off our electricity frequently enough for me to get used to the sighing of the propane lamp we used to see in the dark.
I digress. Point is, I always felt I had to defend my Latino-ness. I had to prove I belonged. I think I always will.
Meanwhile, my sister tried to conceal her Latino-ness. She was undocumented through young adulthood, which she kept a secret. She was ashamed of it. Latino-ness, or at least its appearance, she feared, might expose that secret, so she leaned into her whiteness. She erased her accent. She looked and sounded “American.” Despite the subterfuge, she harbored the gnawing feeling that she never quite fit in, that there was something about her that actual Americans could see, like how old money can always spot new money—or so I’ve heard. I wouldn’t know.
Her whiteness was both a hindrance and an asset, encapsulated by her border crossing as a child, a harrowing experience she documented in a wonderful essay she wrote for Newsweek. Following a few of her formative years in Argentina, during which she forgot most of her English, she and my mother crossed the border to reunite with my father.
The coyotes set them up in a shack in Tijuana near the border, from which my sister could see the searching headlights of Border Patrol vehicles atop the embankment at night, just north of them. They had to stay there for a month because the coyotes said their skin color drew too much attention.
Every day, my mother and my sister watched as fellow migrants, with whom they shared the shack, left to cross the border. They waited, until there was no one else left. When they finally crossed, they did it by pretending to be American. My mom and my sister got in a car with an American guy, orchestrated by the coyotes, and acted as his wife and daughter coming back from a jaunt in Mexico. They waltzed right in.
I didn’t have to prove my Latino-ness in high school, which was predominantly non-Latino White. My “Hispanic” accent did that for me. That I had an accent was news to me. I thought I spoke in a neutral American accent (no such thing, of course). Apparently not, as my new classmates loved to remind me, calling me Mexican, meaning it as an insult. I still wanted to fit in, but now in the other direction. I wanted to be more American, like my sister did.
I went to Boston College, whose demographics were similar to my high school. A north Jersey accent replaced by Hispanic accent. The kids from the Midwest thought how I said “water” and “coffee” was funny. I thought how they pronounced their As was funny. The differences noted were geographical, not ethnic—except for my pesky name, which continued to draw unwanted attention. I won’t rehash that, since I wrote about wanting to change my name in last week’s post. After a while, I fit in. I was American first and foremost.
My sister and I had inverse trajectories. She wanted to be more American. I wanted to more Latino. She was drawn to Americana, infatuated with the southern gentility depicted in Gone with the Wind (Yes, she knows it’s problematic now). She wanted to do American things and go on American vacations, like visit Colonial Williamsburg. I took salsa lessons.
Those diverging paths crossed and winded as we got older. She set her sights on tracing our roots, even hiring a genealogist in Spain. She took tango lessons, a dance form that famously emerged in Argentina, where most of our family lives. In the decade following college graduation, I also gravitated toward Americana, but a specific brand of Americana: New England Americana. Changing leaves. Stone buildings. Tweed blazers. Tailgating in the cold. Apple picking. Weddings on the Cape. Wholesome New England stuff.
The drive to prove my Latino-ness may have dimmed, but it hasn’t disappeared. When I see old friends from Union City or my wife’s family in Miami, I feel pressure—to speak more Spanish, better Spanish, to be more Latino. The self-imposed pressure has an adverse effect, discouraging me from speaking Spanish, which erodes my command of the language over time. Whenever I’m introduced to a new Latino and I see them see them perk up when they hear my name, I dread the inevitable, “Ohhh, where are you from?” What I hear is, “Pop quiz! Let’s see how Latino you really are!”
I fear the answer to that question.
When I was 10 or 11, I went on a whitewater rafting trip on the Delaware River with my mom and my sister. It’s one of my favorite memories. Four hours of rafting, camping overnight, and another four hours the next day.
The river was at a low water mark, which made the rafting a bit of a slog. Fewer rapids and less of a current. We kept getting stuck on protruding rocks. They told us to stick to the channel, but we threw that memo overboard.
Toward the end of the second day, we were exhausted. Sometimes, it felt like we were fighting against one another, paddling too much one way or the other. A few times, my sister lacked the will to paddle hard against the raft if it yawed too much toward her side, opting instead to reverse-paddle with the drift instead of against it, coaxing the raft into a spin.
This became her calling card, giggling like a gremlin every time we screeched at her for sabotaging our progress. In the end, delirious from the heat and exhaustion, my mom and I caught a virulent strain of the giggles from my sister, howling at the unblinking sun as we spun over and over, drifting south.
This piece landed just as I have been thinking lately about being caught between worlds. There may be a post in there from me somewhere or not, but I'm not sure. Suffice to say, although not from a Latino background, I can relate.
It becomes better over time. For many children of immigrants, the tension between assimilation into the host culture and affiliation with the home culture can feel acute during adolescence. Later, however, the dual attachments cease to function as mutually exclusive. You learn to carry both cultures without apology. Of course, adolescence can expand into old age; the experience of not being enough is also never just internal because discrimination and exclusion know no age limits. But you learn to deal with it differently and, as you do here, become your own author.