Hijas Americanas

My first kiss was over a chainlink fence. I didn’t realize the significance of it then, but the fence that stood between my seventh-grade boyfriend and me was a metaphor for the otherness that marked my life. It separated homes that, back then, were worth more than half a million dollars from homes that were worth more like seventy thousand, and it divided an almost exclusively white neighborhood from a mixed neighborhood that was more minority than white. The fence would come to symbolize the division I would feel in my life until I could finally comfortably settle into myself. But until that time came, there we were—a beautiful white boy on one side and me on the other. As I turned away to walk home, my mother drove by in her wood-paneled station wagon, and I wondered whether what I had just done was something that would make me more gringa than Puerto Rican.

In the fall of my sophomore year in high school, I spent many of my evenings sitting in the car of a boy named Wade while Jerry Garcia crooned about black muddy rivers. I’d stare innocently up at the infinite Milky Way while Wade whispered about the mighty Orion, my eyes trained upon the three studded belt, more mystified by the boy than by the sky. On Saturday afternoons, he and I would curl up in the game room at his house and watch college football.

When Wade called to ask me on our first date, I felt a rush of warmth spread through my cheeks as I cradled the phone between my shoulder and my ear. I checked myself in my parents’ mirror, my mouth gaping at this news: Wade Wilson was calling me. “I was calling to see if you wanted to go to a movie tonight,” he said casually. I wanted to respond just as casually that yes, of course I could, but that wasn’t how things worked in my house. I had to get permission from my parents first. “Can you hold on a second?” I asked. “Hey, can I go to the movies tonight?” I asked my mom in a flurry, having rushed across the house and wanting to make it quick. “¿Con quién? ¿Qué película? ¿A qué hora?” Mamacita’s words came flooding over me with the heaviness of confession. I shook my head, forcing the overwhelming feeling to pass. In that moment, I knew how this conversation would evolve. I could see in Mamacita’s eyes that she was not going to give in easily. When she dug into a discussion, I had to commit myself to winning, and this one would take much longer than a few minutes. I ran back to the phone. “Can I call you back in a minute?” God bless him for not reacting, for being gracious, for having a deeper awareness than the average eighteen-year-old boy. It was the same grace that I would see him demonstrate over and over again in the time we spent together, navigating first love and our very different families, cultures, socioeconomic classes, and experiences.

“No problem,” he responded, and I found myself back in then kitchen with Mamacita. She continued with her questions, and I played the role of good daughter, answering each one as thoroughly as I could. Then, “Por favor, Mami, please let me go. I hardly ask for anything.”

At fifteen, I worked and took care of my own expenses. I was also responsible for buying all my own clothes. I didn’t ask to go away for spring break with my friends. I didn’t party the way other teens did. “All right, m’ija,” she answered, “but just remember, you are not a gringa.” I nodded. Those instructions were an echo of an almost daily reminder she issued.

“You are not a gringa” was my mother’s party line, whether it was in reference to going out on a date, sleeping over at a friend’s house, or cruising the mall. Each time she denied my requests with this phrase, I had to come up with a better excuse to give my friends for my inability to do things that they didn’t even have to ask permission to do. This reminder was in stark contrast to the other chorus in my life—one that I heard almost as regularly. In English class, a girl once told me I was not Puerto Rican because I wasn’t like the other Puerto Ricans she had known in Boston. My face grew hot as I argued. I felt like I was arguing for my life, arguing for the only identity I knew. But she responded that I wasn’t pregnant or strung out like those “Reekins,” as if that disqualified me. When I visited my cousins in Puerto Rico, they always called me La Gringa. I wanted to challenge them, but my explaining that some Americans didn’t see me as gringa hardly seemed like it would elicit the validation I was seeking. I remember standing there in silence, wondering how I’d become an Anglo without any birthright. In college, a friend once denied my ethnicity as we talked about my upbringing. I was telling her how the rules in my family were based on God, culture, and machismo; about how my mom’s response to everything I wanted to do was, “You are not a gringa.”

“But you aren’t really Puerto Rican,” my friend insisted. This denial rendered me silent, frozen on the borderlands between my Latina and my gringa, wondering which face to look to and which to turn from in order to find myself. Why did she believe this so absolutely? How could she determine what made up my whole? How was I betraying my truth? Ultimately, I learned that the way people labeled me was often more about their own preconceived notions than about what I did or said. I slowly began to understand that the one thing I did have control over was how I saw myself.

In high school, Ryan—a boy I’d been friends with since middle school—turned on me. One night we were all hanging out at Wade’s house. When I got up to leave, I found a pool of spit inside my shoes. I had noticed Ryan starting to throw out racist sentiments here and there, and this action was evidence to me that, despite our previous friendship, I was not exempt. Something arose in my normally mild, nonconfrontational nature that night, and I called him on his actions. I shook as I confronted him, terrified that I would not find the words to tell him that I had worth, that I did not belong in his kitchen, that I could participate in his world or any other that I chose. At that point in my life, I was very aware that some people had an opinion about my place in the world and what opportunities I could access, and that these opinions rarely allowed me a choice or a preference. In ninth grade, my guidance counselor, after reviewing my perfect report card, wanted to remove me from honors classes and enroll me in work-readiness courses… I remember leaving his office in shock, my red face drawing the attention of another counselor, who listened to my predicament with compassion and added me to his own caseload. Years later, he encouraged me to apply to multiple colleges and helped me waive the application fees. “Let’s see how we can do,” he’d said. He smiled as I nodded and took on the challenge, fueled by a desire to prove my first counselor wrong.

For years, finding balance and settling into a peacefulness with my duality was difficult. But it was imperative to my identity and my development to figure out how my Latina and my gringa could share space in the mirror, how they could find union within the one reflection that stared back at me. And while I navigated these complexities in solitude for many years, I wasn’t alone. My range of experiences is a representation of the experiences that so many Latinas in the United States have as they grow up in households with parents whose cultural and traditional values differ from those of the mainstream culture in which they are raised.