Mi Voz, Mi Vida

Latino College Students Tell Their Life Stories

Andrew C. Garrod, Robert Kilkenny, Christina Gomez, Andrew C. Garrod, Robert Kilkenny, Christina Gomez

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780801463792
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Biografie nell'ambito delle scienze sociali

Amid the flurry of debates about immigration, poverty, and education in the United States, the stories in Mi Voz, Mi Vida allow us to reflect on how young people who might be most affected by the results of these debates actually navigate through American society.

The fifteen Latino college students who tell their stories in this book come from a variety of socioeconomic, regional, and family backgrounds—they are young men and women of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, Central American, and South American descent. Their insights are both balanced and frank, blending personal, anecdotal, political, and cultural viewpoints. Their engaging stories detail the students' personal struggles with issues such as identity and biculturalism, family dynamics, religion, poverty, stereotypes, and the value of education.

Throughout, they provide insights into issues of racial identity in contemporary America among a minority population that is very much in the news. This book gives educators, students, and their families a clear view of the experience of Latino students adapting to a challenging educational environment and a cultural context—Dartmouth College—often very different from their childhood ones.

LATINO IDENTITIES

BECOMING AND UNBECOMING LATINO

Alejo Alvarez The Strange Comfort of an Unknown Future

The tube of sun block had been sitting in the sun far too long. As I drip the lotion onto my body, it scalds the thin line of skin it covers until I rub it into my arms and shoulders with my hand. I drop a puddle of the white ooze onto my hand, smearing it onto my face and ears. The mixture of hot lotion and warm sweat instantly begins to drip down my forehead in narrow streamlets, inevitably bound for my eyes.

I wipe my forehead with the back of my arm before replacing the sun block in my backpack and looking up at my fellow lifeguard standing on the wooden chair eight feet above me. His sunglasses obscure his eyes, but they are clearly directed in an unyielding gaze at the stretch of brownish-green ocean in front of him. He raises his whistle to his lips and blows out two short, sharp blasts. His hand points toward two young boys wading in the water, throwing handfuls of sand at each other.

“No tire la arena!” he yells.

The boys, their attention caught, quickly stop their activity and run to another section of the beach. I smile and turn to walk down the sand. I’ve mastered that command, “Don’t throw sand!” I repeat the phrase slowly to myself, “No tire la arena,” the words rolling off my lips with ease, yet at once sounding somehow alien. I squint under my sunglasses as the sun assaults my eyes. I look down the line of beach, brown sand meeting darker brown water, the air above the sand rippling as the midday sun makes the day’s intense heat ever more oppressive.

As I walk, micro-dunes of sand flatten and crunch under my steps. My gaze drifts from person to person in the water of Long Island Sound, searching for anything out of the ordinary—flapping arms, bobbing heads, violent splashing. The music from a radio a quarter mile down the beach pounds a merengue rhythm, the volume so obscenely loud that the words are almost unrecognizable: “Algo en tu cara me fascina…me da vida…” I silently mouth the lyrics to myself. After spending hours on a lifeguard chair with radios tuned to New York’s Spanish music station, I have become well-versed in the latest salsa and merengue hits. Any meaning that the words to these songs have for me only came after a lot of thought—and some time at home with a Spanish-English dictionary. But I enjoy the music. It sounds familiar. It is all I hear, working at Orchard Beach in the Bronx, a summer haven for New York’s Puerto Rican and Dominican working class.

I stare across the water, eyes moving from person to person, couple to couple, one person swimming a sloppy back stroke, two others in the throes of a passionate aquatic embrace, two children wrestling. A drop of sun-block-tainted sweat rolls into my eye. The salt and chemicals begin to burn. As I struggle to rub vigorously enough so the burning will stop, another song begins on the radio: “Dime porque lloras…de felicidad…”

I also know this one. A little on the cheesy side, but I mouth these words too, looking at the water again, my eyes still burning, two men talking, a woman treading water, two children wrestling.

“No me ames porque estoy perdido…”

Two children wrestling.

I have never watched anyone drowning before. For a moment of realization and disbelief, it is actually quite interesting to note how much the actual event resembles what I have been shown in videos during training. And then a loud, thoroughly intrusive voice reminds me that during training we were taught to do something when encountering such a situation.

I blow my whistle, two short, piercing blasts. I sprint, water splashing as my feet leave dry sand and invade the ocean, sinking deeper into the surf with each step. I swim. I grab the forms enveloped in the hail of splashing that I had seen as wrestling children, first a girl, then a boy, and then another boy I had not seen. Their small bodies feel impossibly light.

I kick my way toward the sand, my movements feeling sluggish. The music is gone, replaced by hysterical crying. Land comes quickly and I find myself standing, ankle deep, in water, three small children crying and stammering on the sand in front of me. The girl, apparently the oldest, speaks in Spanish, trying to tell me something, “Salvevida…gracias…mi hermano tiene miedo…papi…”

I cannot understand a word of what she is saying. I hear just that, words, but no meanings, no clarity…just words. I try to answer in my broken Spanish, “¿Dónde están tus padres, mija?”

She responds clearly. I can hear the words she is saying, recognizing them from years of high school Spanish. I simply cannot make sense of them. I can decipher meaningless pop songs, memorize short phrases, but I cannot communicate with the frightened young girl standing in front of me.

“She’s looking for her parents. Her brother is scared and she wants her father, but she can’t find either of her parents.” My friend, another guard, appears beside me and begins speaking to the girl. She understands him. He understands her. She meets his eyes and he meets hers. They are communicating. My friend says he will walk the kids to the lost and found. The three children toddle next to him down the beach. I stand in one place for a long time, water dripping from my body, salt water in my eyes, burning them again. I feel accomplished and proud, and incompetent and lost, all at the same time.

I am Puerto Rican. Yet, standing on the beach that summer day, as much as right now, I felt in many ways like an invisible presence within my cultural community, as if that culture were not entirely mine. Until recently, I never thought of myself as having “grown up Latino.” Growing up in a predominantly white, upper-middle-class world, I always considered myself, perhaps unconsciously, part of that world. For me, Latinos, Hispanics, and minorities were groups labeled them. I knew on some level that I was one of them, but for all my daily purposes, I lived in a world where my Latinoness was simply unnecessary. I had no need for a culture other than the one in which I was living. Yes, some people could not come to terms with my name. They mispronounced it, shortened it, Americanized it, and otherwise bastardized it.

Some assumed that I spoke Spanish as my first language. They were surprised to discover that until I was twelve, I could not communicate in Spanish, and even now my knowledge of what is supposed to be my language remains at an elementary level. “Latino” and “Puerto Rican” for me were concepts on a distant horizon rather than a culture close to my heart. Hence, for me, being Latino has been a recent process of creating a cultural definition that comes to terms with who I was, who I am, and who I hope to be. It is a journey both of being and becoming that allows for a cultural placement from which I can look toward everything that is Puerto Rican, while shedding my cloak of cultural invisibility so everything Puerto Rican can also see me.

Exploring the different directions in which my journey has taken me is a process that must begin by looking at the places and experiences from which I have come. It is difficult for me to define myself solely in terms of “me.” Self-definition, for me, is only possible by incorporating others into my perception of self. Perhaps this stems from growing up close to many members of a tightly knit family. Or it may be a result of my tendency toward solitude when not in the company of those close friends with whom I feel deeply connected.

If defining my life begins with others therein, exploring me, my life, my culture, my identity must begin with my parents. “Remembering” my parents is a concept alien to me. “Memory” seems to imply a past, a moment gone by, whereas my mother and father are anything but moments in my past. They are my best friends, my confidants, my heroes, teachers, guardians, and guides. My parents are present not only in all that I do, but in all that I am.

This is not to say that I am particularly like my parents. Often, at the most unexpected times, in a restaurant, in the car, on the beach, my mother has given me a quizzical look and asked, “Where did you come from? Two such nutty, fiery parents, and then you, subdued, level-headed, and low-key.” I have not the vaguest answer to her question because in so many ways her words ring true. It is at such times that I look at each of my parents and wonder how much of them I want, what of them I want to be? Not an easy question to answer, but strangely enough, one made easier to explore by my parents’ separation when I was ten.

My parents raised me together, though for much of my life they have been apart. They began to divorce when I was ten years old. The process finished when I was thirteen and remains one of the most powerful, deeply influential events in my life. It was a heated, spiteful, vindictive, searingly painful process that brought out the worst in the two humans I admire most in my world. For a long time they were able to live in the same house, my father on the third floor, my mother and I on the second, in a state of constant tension. Outbursts of loud fighting were frequent and unpredictable. During those times, which always seemed to last for an eternity, I would try to find a place where the voices were muffled, where I would not be able to hear the venom being hurled through the air. The worst battles were the ones at night, after I was in bed. I felt trapped, in a hole, absolutely alone. They yelled. I cried. All I could do was cover my head with my pillow and huddle deep under my blanket. Eventually their voices would become more fluid, words melting together into mere sounds, the vulgar symphony of their angry passion becoming my profane lullaby as I slowly drifted into sleep.

I have never questioned the depth of my parents’ love or investment in me. They have always offered me unconditional love, putting me even before themselves. Perhaps out of guilt, or maybe respect, I have never spoken with either of my parents about my single worst memory. Sometimes I think they still feel guilty for granting me such a recollection. One or the other may occasionally bring it up:

“What do you remember about that night in the house?”

I push the night away. It is never a good time to talk about it. Sometimes I think they look disappointed at my calm rejection of the topic. However, they never push. They simply move away from a door that is very clearly locked to them. The conversation simply moves on.

It was Sunday night. I do not know why the fighting began. I think that I should have clear memories of every moment, but I do not. I know I was scared, sitting in my room, trying so hard to block out the verbal violence with music. I played song after song on my stereo, hoping that by the end of the next one, the fighting would stop. The voice of a Disney character vied with the sounds of war in the hallway: “Well, master you’re in luck ’cause up your sleeve, you’ve got a brand of magic that never fails…”

I wanted magic. I wanted reality. I wanted silence. But the battle raged on. My music continued to fight the good fight. “Have a wish or two or three…” I only needed one. And then my mother’s voice. She was yelling, but I could tell she was crying too. She said something incomprehensible but for one word: my name. Immediately there was a sound like a person running down a flight of wooden stairs, but somehow different, higher and sharper. Hearing my name made me open the door to my room. I saw my father fifteen feet above me, at the top of the stairs leading to the third floor, an expression of stunned disbelief on his face. My eyes followed his. His gaze fell on my mother, sliding toward me down the stairway, the deep, dull, cracking sound of her skull hitting each stair echoing through the hallway. She slid to a stop at my feet on the second-floor landing, crying, reaching out to me.

The flow of tears from my eyes ceased. I looked from my mother, in a crying heap at the bottom of the stairs, to my father, frozen at the top. The moment’s silence was met only by the obnoxious glee of the music, still pulsing forth from my room: “You ain’t never had a friend like me!”

I stepped toward my mother, overly calm. Helping her to her feet, holding her hand as we walked toward her bedroom, I felt very detached from myself, thoroughly unlike an eleven-year-old boy. My father rushed down the stairs and touched my arm, trying to explain the inexplicable.

“It’s OK, Dad. Just stay,” I said to him. My own calm was asphyxiating me. I wanted to scream.

Emerging from my mother’s room minutes later, I found my father sitting on the steps, his head in his hands, staring at the floor. I put my hand on his shoulder, and he looked at me with tears in his eyes.

I saw the faces of my parents in the backseat of the police car in front of our house, not understanding the sight. I have no measure of how much time went by as I was standing on the sidewalk, looking at my parents’ faces through the window, close enough to the glass so the reflection of my own tear-streaked face superimposed itself on my father’s eyes.

A family friend arrived to collect me. The police drove into the night with my parents. I cried myself to exhaustion, standing on the sidewalk, lost in the arms of a mother not my own.

“What do you remember about that night in the house?”

I push that night away as my parents offer it up to me. The guilt in my parents’ eyes is clear. They are aware of the impact that night had on me, and they feel responsible. Their eyes apologize each time they want to talk about it. Perhaps the most selfish side of me does a dance in the shadow of their guilt. The part of me that wants to blame them revels in their sorrow for the past. Those moments at the door of my room, at the foot of the stairs, on the sidewalk under a dark night sky deconstructed my life as no other event had before. I returned to school four days later feeling different, perhaps somehow darker if not deeper in the ensuing feelings of emptiness. For the first time in my life, if only for a split second in the night, I felt abandoned, alone, and irrevocably lost.

There are times when I want so much to pass judgment, to make a decision about what happened as I sat in my room. I do not speak of that night with my parents for many reasons. I would not know where to start, whom to believe, or why. I respect them too much to lay honest blame. I love them too much to forego understanding, even if I know it will never really come. For all that, I am torn, forever wondering. I do not want to know the truth. Moments come and go when a chain of events seems so very clear. But these moments pass quickly. As they come, visions of a single truth, I hear the voice of my mother or my father dispelling the ideas, speaking to me in a voice that I am compelled to believe. In many ways, it is in such confusion that I find a certain peace, peace in the unknown. Whereas I used to take refuge from my parents’ conflicts under my pillow, wrapped in my blankets, I now find asylum from the answers of which I want no part in the warmth of self-imposed ignorance.

A witness can only know so little, though. I can only deny so much. I try to hold that night at a distance. I intellectualize it and objectify it in order to reconcile it with what I wanted my life to be. I sugarcoat my putrid pile of rotting memory so that I will not smell the essence that lingers in my soul.

There are moments, though, when I hold that night close. I relive those minutes. They flood through my mind and wash out my eyes with quiet tears, long overdue. I feel the hurt, the anger, the loneliness, the love, and the confusion of a frightened young boy talking to me. For though that night does not define me, so much of who I am with myself and others has been shaped by those moments in my past.

I stood on the second floor in my house six days after my parents had been taken away. It was the same house, but so much had changed. I smelled the soft, sweet wood of the floor. I could hear cars slowly passing by on the street outside, the familiar sound of engines purring, sputtering, or roaring down the hill into the distance, telling my ears to believe that all was the same. The night-light in my room was still burning from nights before. On the floor lay a doorknob of heavy glass, rolling ever so slightly as I stepped toward it, sounding a deep, hollow rumble of glass against wood. I could not remember how it got there. I did remember the sound though, a soft, hollow drumroll as I walked down the stairs, hand in hand with a police officer.

My father stood behind me as I stared at the doorknob rolling at my feet, hearing in its deep rolling sound the voices, the screaming, the crying of the night’s bitter symphony. My father leaned down and kissed the back of my head. I did not move, but simply stared, listening to the rumbling, looking for what was lost.

I never wanted to allow myself to be angry at my parents. I was though. So angry. I felt betrayed, hurt, and damaged. And I hated feeling this way. I hated the fact that I was so angry at my parents, the ones who had always taken care of and loved me. They were supposed to be my safety, not my threat, the healers of my hurt and not the source. Whatever I told myself, the anger was still there and would be for months, perhaps even years, just under the surface, along with something else that had changed. My parents suddenly became flawed, fallible, and strangely human.

My parents’ divorce and all that went with it no doubt affected my relationship with them and with others. My anger caused me to distrust my parents for a time, to hold myself at a distance. I took pride in being quiet, in distancing myself from others. I did not want to have to trust anybody. Even now I grant my trust to very few; perhaps some part of me expects them to fail me. Although some wounds never completely heal, my pain slowly subsided. With more maturity I gained some understanding of my parents, and over time we were able to restore trust and develop the strong relationships we have now. Despite periods of detachment, I have always been very close to my parents. In the long run, this did not change.

Even when I most wanted to distance myself, I could only do so to a certain extent. In many ways, I remained anything but detached from my mother. Our relationship has always been wide open. I tell her everything. Sometimes I wonder if I tell my mother so much because I actually want her to know, or because I am c...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• RESILIENCE
• BICULTURALISM
• MENTORING
• LATINO IDENTITIES
• About the Editors