1/6/2024 0 Comments Julia alvarez![]() ![]() And so by trial and many errors, putting my foot in my boca any number of times, I struggled to articulate what it meant to be a lived identity, not a performed or assigned or co-opted one. Many of us, uneasy with those erasures, shifted to “Latino/a” (although that term recalled no bigger colonizer than the Roman Empire) then came a more inclusive, gender-neutral description and more recently “Latinx,” each term an effort to define ourselves and assert control over our journeys. “Spanish origin” had morphed into “Hispanic,” which became stigmatized as a census-driven colonized term, one that ignored our Indigenous and African selves. On top of this was the ongoing quandary of what to call ourselves. Did my characters always have to be Latinx? Did my plots always have to circulate around Latinx issues? Why were most of the books sent to me to blurb by Latinx or other ethnic authors? (“You’ll love it,” editors promised.) It’s not that I didn’t want to claim my ethnicity it’s that I didn’t want to take on others’ limiting assumptions and scripts. But with our literary green cards came new identity challenges and assumptions for us to contend with. In the 1980s, like Columbus “discovering” America, editors suddenly discovered ethnic writers, though many of us had already been writing for several decades, our work published by regional magazines and small presses. Only when I started writing did I find the space to explore, qualify and give nuance to the many selves of my self, the stories of my story. “Intersectionality” wasn’t a word anyone used, though the place it maps was where I was living. ![]() How to say so? English was still a tongue I was trying to negotiate, and I had yet to find a term for myself that felt exactly right.Ī term like “female,” which described one aspect of myself, didn’t allow for the differences, contingencies and modifications that came from being the Latina variety of female. I was large I contained multitudes, like Señor Whitman. “To thine own self be true,” we read in my Shakespeare class, a mantra of my hippie friends. There was no vocabulary to light up the margins where my outlier selves were camped, waiting for the borders to open and let more of my selves in. We were vaguely of “Spanish origin,” which was better than the more deprecating slurs of the playground: “spic,” “wetback,” “greaser.” If we had to check a box, the sorry options we were given (“Negro,” “Eskimo,” etc.) didn’t include us. The hyphenated nationality (Dominican-American, Chinese-American, even African-American) hadn’t yet been invented. “Oh, you lucky dog! We went there for spring break!” At least Dominica was in the same neighborhood of islands. So when my family was asked where we were from, we couldn’t just say, “We’re Dominican, you know, like Sammy Sosa or Alex Rodriguez.” Our classmates often mistook our country for the other Caribbean nation of Dominica. Back then there weren’t that many Dominicans in the United States - the dictatorship made it difficult to emigrate. No one seemed to know where the Dominican Republic was. One of the baffling things that happened when my family arrived in the United States in 1960 was having to find a term for ourselves. This personal reflection is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What do we believe? You can read more essays by visiting The Big Ideas series page.
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