“Go back to where you came from” & Other Things I’ve Been Told
Reflections on Growing up Latina
Originally delivered as a talk at Worcester Academy on 10/15/2021
First grade. I was pulled out of class to pass an ESL test. I was in a predominately white school, and I remember hearing all the kids with Hispanic last names being summoned over the intercom. My mom had indicated on the school enrollment form that we spoke English at home, and I was already reading chapter books. None of that mattered as I sat in a room while a strange lady showed me flashcards with pictures, asking me to give her the English names for “bed,” “ball” and “cat.” The irony was that I barely spoke Spanish.
Third grade. We colored pictures of “Pilgrims and Indians” at school for Thanksgiving. Most of my classmates were given paper Pilgrim hats to wear. A few kids, including me, received headbands with feathers. This made sense to me, because I was brown. My mom had told me being Puerto Rican meant we were part “Indian,” too, just a different kind. That year the movie Pocahontas came out and I was thrilled to see a Disney character with dark skin and hair. I ended up doing a project I titled “The Truth About Pocahontas” when, upon my research at the library, I learned that the movie had gotten her story all wrong. I didn’t know then how often popular culture and even textbooks distorted and erased Black and brown people.
Fifth grade. I had the best teacher of my life. Ms. Johnson was a kind white woman who had come to our charter school from Boston. Unlike prior teachers, she never wrote on my report card that I was too loud or talked too much. She didn’t get angry at me when I read ahead in class. She had an amazing classroom library and would even lend me advanced copies of books from my favorite authors before they’d been published. That year, we raised caterpillars that became monarch butterflies, walked the Freedom Trail after a unit on the Revolutionary War, wrote and bound our own books, and did research on Civil Rights figures. We read Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and Bud Not Buddy and I became obsessed with historical fiction.
Around that same time, my mom and aunt — both big-time readers — began to seek out books by Latina authors. They would read the books first, and then pass them along to me. This mission of theirs lasted a few years, but left a permanent mark on me. The vignettes in Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street felt intimately familiar; in these stories I saw my tías, my primas, myself. In The Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez was my first encounter with a historical novel about Latinas. The story of the Mirabal sisters showed me how brave we could be.
When I was 11, I read Esmeralda Santiago’s memoir When I Was Puerto Rican for the first time (which meant a lot of it went over my head.) What I recall most is reading the author bio on the back of the book and realizing that this was an actual Puerto Rican who had graduated from an ivy league school and become an author. Up until that point, I didn’t know Puerto Ricans could be writers; I had never heard of one. Most Puerto Ricans I knew or saw depicted in the media were not educated. My teachers were white, the principals were white, my doctors were white, the mayor was white — I kind of assumed whiteness was a prerequisite if you wanted to be someone important. Since I didn’t have a lot of real-life role models, seeing that Santiago had achieved her dreams somehow validated mine.
Eighth grade. A new girl transferred to my middle school. Her name was Berlys Hernandez and I would learn, as we became friends, about the traumatic experiences she had faced growing up in foster care. The day she started, she was introduced in one of my classes and a white girl I’d considered a good friend rolled her eyes and said, “Great, just what we need, another Puerto Rican.” I didn’t feel better when she said to me, earnestly, “I don’t mean you; you’re different.”
Ninth grade. My English teacher accused me of plagiarizing my summer reading essay. I attended a diverse high school that was nevertheless stratified across racial lines — you didn’t see a lot of students of color in the more advanced classes. I remember her asking, voice dripping with condescension, “Now did you really write this?” I wrote a whole new essay to prove myself and after that I became her star student, constantly asked to stand up and read my work for the class. She loved to tell me I had potential but turned on me whenever I disagreed with her. I was still a girl who talked too much, and she even threatened to bring in duct tape to cover my mouth.
Eleventh grade. My family moved to Clearwater, Florida. My high school there was extremely segregated, and I had never been around so many teachers espousing conservative values. I was lucky to meet a Dominican girl from New York named Amaris who became my best friend. We bonded over similar cultural identities and experiences. We both knew what it was like to have other Latinx kids accuse us of talking or acting “white.” Together we interrogated society’s labels, examined our own assumptions and explored what it meant to be Latina. I gave her books by Latina authors, and she gave me Latinx films I’d never heard of, like Raising Victor Vargas. Most importantly, she gave me a sense of home in a place that made no sense to me.
It was there, at Clearwater High, that a teacher told me to go back to where I came from. A lover of politics and member of Youth in Government, I was having a debate with a classmate after school about President Bush’s policies in the Middle East. This teacher overheard part of our conversation and strode over, red-faced, yelling “if you don’t like this country, go back to where you came from!” When I tell this story, people always want to know what I replied. But the truth is, in that moment, my eyes filled with tears and words failed me. I had never been told so clearly that I did not belong. For years, when I thought back on that moment, I felt ashamed for not speaking up. Now, I mostly feel sad for all the kids she taught that she could not truly see.
College. I had the chance to join a Latinx affinity group for the first time. I remember being nervous to attend a meeting, worried my lack of fluency in the Spanish language meant I wasn’t “Latina enough.” It turned out, I wasn’t the only one grappling with those kinds of feelings. Over my years involved in the group, first as a member and then part of the board, I heard many variations on this theme: both light-skinned and dark-skinned Latinas worried they didn’t look the part and wouldn’t be accepted; mixed Latinas worried that having a non-Latinx parent invalidated their claims to identity; Latinas who’d been adopted and raised outside the culture, worried they wouldn’t fit in. We made space for everyone.
I don’t want to leave you thinking college was some kind of utopia. I attended a predominately white, private institution with almost no Latinx faculty or administrators. I still was called “loud” and sometimes “too much” and even “exotic” by the girls in my dorm. One housemate who’d grown up in Maine told me I was her first “colored” friend. I remember awkward conversations in the dining hall, when people assumed I must love spicy food because I’m Latina (FYI, Puerto Rican food is savory, not hot) and I once called out a girl who said she was surprised I wasn’t better at wrapping a burrito. I met students with white savior complexes who bragged about sponsoring poor families in Latin America and others who went out of their way to tell me how well their (Latina) maid was treated.
Junior year. I studied abroad in Greece. It was an incredible experience for a history lover like me. It was also the time I was most frequently told I didn’t “look” American. I remember walking around a market on a school trip to Olympia with my friend Anastasia. A friendly shop owner asked where we were from, and we said “the United States.” He looked at us like we were a puzzle and said, “no, but where are you really from?” Anastasia obligingly explained that her parents were from Greece, and I said I was Puerto Rican. His eyes lit up and he exclaimed: “Ah, Puerto Rican! Like Ricky Martin!!” as he sang the chorus of “Living La Vida Loca,” a song many of you are too young to be familiar with. I said “Yeah…” and walked away so he’d stop singing. Mostly I found this situation funny, but in the back of my mind I wondered why being perceived as authentically American somehow meant you had to fit a certain look.
During my college years, I took amazing courses on race, class and gender, complicating the histories I’d been taught — or, often, not taught — in my public school education. This didn’t stop the classmate who shared, during a seminar discussion about Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands, that she’d always ignored the Hispanic laborers in her hometown, and how the book made us have to really think about Hispanics for the first time. She spoke using the words “we” and “us” as if myself and the other Latina in the class didn’t exist, or just didn’t matter.
But undergrad was also when I had my first Puerto Rican teacher and took my first classes on Latino and Latin American history and literature. I met and read the work of Latinx scholars and activists, attended conferences for and about Latinx issues, and became confident in my own identity as a brown-skinned, Puerto Rican woman who refuses to choose just one race on any form with a checkbox. I embrace the labels Latina or Latinx but never Hispanic, because my mom raised me to reject the word that sounded like the slur she heard so often growing up. Don’t call me Spanish, either; because Spain is not where I’m from. I’m American, a New Englander, a first-generation college graduate and a woman of color from Worcester. I’m a loud and proud Latina, and I have always been enough.
