Going away to college is momentous. Balancing dorm life, class demands, laundry, budgeting and nutrition are normal stressors. Navigating a new town and making new friends can be challenging, but my daughter thought she’d be prepared for that part. After all, she attended five different schools between kindergarten and 12th grade. She prided herself on being able to slide into new and diverse communities and make friends easily.
“If you’re an immigrant, you know you have to assimilate. I wasn’t prepared for being U.S.-born and having to assimilate,” she said.
In her new environment — a small town in southern Oregon — she is surprised to be viewed as a minority, the token Latina. “People don’t know how to take me,” she says, adding that she feels like an anthropological subject. Despite being light-skinned, despite speaking fluent unaccented English, despite having lived in the United States her whole life, she finds herself the center of discussions about race and culture for which she hadn’t bargained.
Many of the conversations are inoffensive, focusing on how her homesickness differs from that of her peers. She misses horchata, going to quinceañeras followed by quick stops at the taco stand, eating freshly refried beans from La Bodeguita, or buying school supplies in Tijuana because Calimax has more interesting notebooks than Walmart.
It’s challenging to explain how crossing the world’s busiest international border isn’t glamorous but rather something you do when you need to go to the orthodontist or take your brother to music lessons or buy more Cal-C-Tose for your morning milkshakes. “No,” she repeats frequently, “Tijuana isn’t scary. No, it isn’t dangerous. No, I’ve never seen a shooting there.”
Her friends are fascinated by her fluency in Spanish. It’s taxing to explain that speaking Spanish isn’t just a party trick but rather the language in which her mami has put her to bed every night for 18 years, the language in which she is praised, reprimanded or teased. It’s not exotic; it’s the language of home. It’s the language against which she rebelled in middle school, when “Habla español!” was the scolding refrain at the dinner table every night. “Oh, you’re so lucky you speak Spanish,” friends will say. “You’ve got to teach me,” as if it were something that could be taught over salad in the dining hall or in casual conversations in the dorm common room.
Some conversations border on arguments. She gets angry explaining why dressing up as a Mexican in a serape and sombrero is an offensive Halloween costume and, for that matter, “El Día de los Muertos” isn’t just Mexican Halloween. She raises her hand in class to remind her classmates that not all Latinos are Mexican; not all Mexicans are gangsters, cartel members, welfare queens or in the country illegally; not every immigrant comes here to receive government benefits. Some days she just seethes in silence.
Occasionally catty remarks reach her ears, petty musings among classmates wondering why she has to act so overtly Latina, why she can’t just act more white. “I can’t act white,” she protests, “because I didn’t know I wasn’t acting white.” She recognizes the possibility that she is clinging harder to her culture and customs, harder than ever, since she feels them under scrutiny.
Often she just doesn’t understand why her race is an issue. She’s also German, Russian, Polish and Jewish, about which no one seems to care. She is not asked questions about the Holocaust in class or expected to be an expert on borscht, or defend the philosophies of Marx and Lenin. Like many young adults, she would rather be recognized for her accomplishments rather than her ethnicity.
Navigating this unexpected assimilation often feels like a pop quiz for which it never occurred to her to study.
With the struggle to fit in come some valuable lessons. She is learning to separate her identity from labels about race or ethnicity. She fights to be more than a diversity statistic. She remembers the value of culture and familia, things perhaps she had taken for granted before. She realizes that in a pinch, powdered horchata mix will be almost as good as the real thing.
Like anyone away from home for the first time, she has good days and bad days. On the bad days she feels isolated and frustrated, an insect under a magnifying glass. On the good days, which are becoming more frequent as she finds her groove, she is thoughtful and philosophical. “Sometimes you’ll be an outsider. People won’t always get you, but you have to learn to navigate that.”
