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For my parents, who made everything possible,
and for Palomita
I
EARLY ENCOUNTERS
WHAT WE PACK
It was a simple question, but we couldn’t find the answer in any of the paperwork the college had sent: How long was my family supposed to stay for first-year student orientation? This may seem easy enough to answer now, but this was 1999 and Google wasn’t yet a verb, and we were a low-income family (according to my new school) without regular internet access. I was the first in my family to go to college, which made me a first-generation college student as well as a first-generation American, because my parents were born in Cuba. We didn’t know that families were supposed to leave campus almost immediately after they unloaded your stuff from the car.
Together we made the trip from my hometown of Miami to what would be my new college home in upstate New York. Shortly after arriving on campus, the five of us—both of my parents, my younger sister, my abuela, and me—found ourselves listening to a dean end his welcome speech with the words: “Now, parents, please, go. Your child is in good hands. Time to cut the cord. Go home.”
Almost everyone in the audience laughed, but not me, and not my parents. They turned to me and said, “What does he mean, go?” My abuela asked my sister in Spanish, “What? What’s he saying?” a new note of panic in her voice because my sister had stopped translating. She didn’t know how, exactly, to translate the dean’s joke. She turned to me like something was my fault and said, “But orientation’s just started.” I was just as confused as they were. We thought we all needed to be there for first-year orientation—the whole family, for the whole week. My dad had booked their hotel room until the day after my classes officially began. They’d used all their vacation time from work and had been saving for months to get me to school and go through what we’d thought of as our orientation.
This confusion isn’t the most common or problematic issue first-generation college students and their families face—not by a long shot—but it shows just how clueless and out of our element we were. Another example: Every afternoon during that week, we had to go back to the only department store we could find, the now defunct Ames, for some stupid thing we hadn’t known was a necessity, something not in our budget, things like shower shoes, a bathrobe, a plastic soap holder (we hadn’t realized the bathroom situation would be a communal one—in fact, we hadn’t thought about the bathroom situation at all), extra-long twin sheets, mesh laundry bags. Before the other families left, we carefully watched them because they looked at ease, like they knew what they were doing, and we made new shopping lists with our limited vocabulary: Those things that lift up the bed, we wrote. That plastic thing to carry stuff to the bathroom.
My family followed me around as I visited department offices during course registration. “Only four classes?” they asked, assuming I was mistakenly taking my first semester too easy. And I’d agreed: Like most high schoolers, I’d taken six classes every year, so four seemed like nothing—this kind of assumption being one of the more common first-generation college student mistakes, one I thankfully didn’t make.
They went with me to the campus store to buy my books, and together we learned what the stickers on worn copies promised: Used Saves. They walked me to orientation events they thought they’d also be attending and to buildings I was supposed to be finding on my own. They waited outside those buildings so that we could all leave from there and go to lunch together. The five of us wandered each day through the dining hall’s doors. “You guys are still here!” the over-friendly person swiping ID cards said after day three. “They sure are!” I chirped back, learning via the cues of my hallmates that I was supposed to want my family gone. But it was an act: I wanted them there. We sat together at meals—amid all the other students, already making friends—my mom placing a napkin and fork at each seat, setting the table as we did at home.
I don’t remember the moment they drove away. I’m told it’s one of those instances you never forget, that second when you realize you’re finally on your own, a feeling of fear mixed with freedom, and also, I’m told, with relief. But for me, the memory of that moment just doesn’t exist—perhaps because, when you’re the first in your family to go to college, you never truly feel like you’re there on your own.
* * *
I’d applied to only two places for college, the University of Florida and Cornell University, because applying to college was (and is) an expensive process, and I didn’t know about fee waivers. My decision to apply specifically to Cornell—a choice that would eventually change the course of my life—might as well have occurred randomly. I was waiting in a high school guidance counselor’s office for a schedule change as she silently sorted through a pile of college-related junk mail (she wasn’t the college counselor, and that year, as far as I knew, my high school didn’t have one). When I saw a cover image flash by—that of a tree bursting red with color, in the height of its fall foliage—I blurted out, “What’s that one?” and lurched forward to put my hand on top of it, to stop her sorting. She handed it to me as an afterthought, without even looking up, and the rest of the brochures—all these other possible versions of my future—went into her recycling bin. I learned from that viewbook that Cornell was the first of the Ivy League schools to admit women and people of color. I thought that was cool, and that was enough to make me want to try and get accepted (but not necessarily go). This single experience, coming before easy access to the internet, constituted the bulk of my college research process. There was a paper application inside that viewbook, which I would eventually fill out and send off with all the other pieces of information Cornell required, including an application fee.
By some measures, most of them financial, my choice to attend Cornell was not a smart one. And when I say “my,” I mean “me and my entire family,” because the decision never felt wholly my own to make, as I understood that my choice would impact my parents’ lives in drastic ways none of us could fully anticipate. What I did know was that, thanks to my good grades and various state initiatives meant to entice students to stay in the state for college, I had an excellent financial aid package from the University of Florida (UF): full tuition, room and board covered, the additional scholarships I’d earned through other channels all landing in my pocket to cover books and other expenses. I could afford to have a car. I could come home on weekends if I wanted. I was about to be the first in my family to go to college, and it wouldn’t cost us a cent. Thanks to rolling admissions, I knew by October that I’d been admitted, and by November, I was stockpiling Gator paraphernalia.
Then, in April, I got into Cornell. I now know that their financial aid package was also strong, but it didn’t feel that way then: There was a subsidized loan of four thousand a year that was in my name, and in addition to that, there was an “expected family contribution” (or EFC) of a
few thousand dollars—a gap in my aid package that my parents were expected to cover and that could (and would) change each year.
The questions for us became: Did I need to go to the more expensive school? Would it really make a tangible difference in my life?
I had the privilege of supportive parents who, while they definitely wanted me closer to home, had been convinced by both me and the school trying to recruit me that going to Cornell was an investment in a future that—though we couldn’t quite picture it—we somehow intuited we’d be foolish to pass up. We didn’t know what exactly we were investing in, only that the result of this investment was whoever I was going to be. I look back on it now and cannot believe what I did to my parents: They remortgaged their home, which they’d already paid off (hence the financial aid office seeing it as a resource they could tap) to cover what Cornell calculated they could afford.
Recently I called my mom in Miami to ask her why in the end they agreed to let me turn down a free ride to UF.
“Don’t you remember?” she said. “We went to that Cornell recruitment thing at that man’s house in Coral Gables. He was a lawyer or something. Me and your father couldn’t sleep that night. We were talking, thinking, okay, we’re two stupid people—not stupid, you know what I mean—and these people, they were just … we wanted that for you, for you to have all that, be all that.”
“But isn’t that wrong, the way that event made you feel? Wasn’t that manipulative?”
“Of course it was! That’s how the world works! You know that,” she said.
I only remember the inside of that house in Coral Gables (which is one of the Miami area’s wealthiest neighborhoods, and which is in fact its own city). The host had a whole room in his house just for his family’s books—a room I now know is called a study—and jutting out from one of the built-in bookshelves was a desk, and on top of that was the family’s computer. He’d used the internet to pull up that morning’s issue of The Cornell Daily Sun, the campus newspaper. He’d let me sit at the desk and read it while the rest of the house hummed with laughing and talking. And floating just under the talking, classical music, which emanated from speakers I couldn’t see, only feel. I remember looking around, trying and failing to find them.
I couldn’t understand back then that attending Cornell would plug me into a kind of access and privilege I didn’t yet have a name for. But my parents, having worked trade jobs their whole lives, knew better.
My mother said, “Do you really think you’d be where you are now if you’d gone to UF?”
I can’t say where I’d be had I not asked a bored counselor to hand me a brochure she was about to throw away. All I can possibly know is where I am now, which is far from home, living dependent-free, in a landlocked state, writing books and working as a newly tenured professor at a Big Ten school in a city where I am related to absolutely no one. My best friend from high school, who graduated second in our class and was supposed to be my Gator roommate, went to UF and loved it. She finished a semester early, married her high school boyfriend, and has two gorgeous children and an amazing house. She has rewarding friendships (she’s substituted me as her BFF with a woman whose life on Instagram looks equally amazing—by which I mean she seems to own a boat). She has a fulfilling career. She has a loving relationship with her parents and sees them all the time.
There is no “but” here.
* * *
At Cornell, the woman in the dorm room next to mine was from Iowa, from a family of pig farmers; she’d almost gone to the University of Iowa instead of Cornell. She ended up transferring there after our first year. As she put it, she just didn’t need Cornell (and its accompanying price tag) for what she wanted to do with her future, though I’m sure there was more to it than that. The girls in my hall—myself included, all of us from the East Coast—teased her mercilessly for being from Iowa and for coming from a pig farming background, behavior of which I am now ashamed. (At the Lincoln farmers’ market, there is always a vendor selling a T-shirt that says IOWA HAS BAD CORN, and I think that might be the meanest it gets out here when it comes to teasing people from Iowa. Also, the irony of the fact that I recently needed to take a class in Omaha on half-hog butchery—to write a compelling, believable scene for a new short story set in Miami—just to learn things my former hallmate likely came to college already knowing is not lost on me.) A year away showed her what she actually needed from her college experience, and when she chose to transfer, I couldn’t help but think she’d outsmarted a system into which I’d naively fallen without a firm sense of what to expect or demand from it.
What I still find remarkable is that a decision I made at seventeen, with very little information or guidance, has gone on to shape my entire life. Maybe this feels remarkable to me because it’s a lasting characteristic of the first-gen college student identity, which can carry with it the knowledge of a shadow life, one where you’re equally happy having done something or gone somewhere else. Or maybe the decision still feels astonishing to me because I initially chose to attend a completely different university, its two biggest draws being that it was essentially free and that my best friend would be there—two reasons that seemed good to me and to my family, in part because none of us knew what we could or should expect from the college experience. Perhaps what needs the most consideration when college commitments are being made is not which college, but what you feel you need from a school, and that’s a tricky set of qualities to recognize (and an even trickier thing to trust) when you’re the first in your family to set off down that path. When I walked around UF’s campus, a visit I made with my mom after having already tentatively committed to the school, I didn’t feel anything, except some vague unease. I couldn’t explain it, and I’m glad I didn’t rationalize it away. I’m glad my parents didn’t ask me to try to articulate what, exactly, felt wrong for me about the place. They were teaching me to trust my gut.
I don’t know why UF didn’t feel like the right college home for me, but that feeling was strong enough to make me sign on for some major financial commitments at a school more than a thousand miles away at the ripe old age of eighteen, a school that may not have been right for me either, but which felt more right than my other option. I want to be clear: Debt was not something I took on lightly, and it would probably be harder for me to make the same decision today that I made in 1999, with the amount of debt feeling even more insurmountable because of fears about what the job market would look like when I finished. And excellent opportunities abound at public universities across the United States (I teach at one now, and I have amazing students who I know will go on to change the world). But at that Cornell recruitment reception, there was this vague promise being held out to me, to my family—not just of economic opportunity, but of the opportunity to transcend the limits of my imagination about who I might someday be. But only the economic one was visible from the minute we drove into that neighborhood to meet other students admitted to Cornell, many of them from private high schools, many of them seeing the financial aid as irrelevant to their decision: They’d be paying most if not all of the cost anywhere they went. For them, whatever came next was worth that cost, and that was the promise my family and I could recognize and want for ourselves.
A promise is not the same as a guarantee, but we couldn’t yet tell the difference.
* * *
When I started high school, my mother took me to the orthodontist. I had inherited my parents’ jacked-up teeth, and at the time when most of my friends were getting their braces removed, we were there to potentially start the whole ordeal, finally in an economic position that let us take on the debt of braces. After poking around in my mouth and taking impressions of my teeth, the orthodontist declared that I did not need braces—my bite was a little off but mostly fine, so braces weren’t necessary; they’d be purely for cosmetic reasons.
Because we’d already identified ourselves as the kind of people who would need help affording orthodontics, the doctor thought
this news would come as a relief to my mother. It did not. She started crying, and I was confused. (I was fourteen and happy to hear I could dodge the discomfort my friends had endured.)
“If she needed them, it would be easier in my head to pay for it,” she said. “Everyone is getting braces, someday they’ll all be people with straight teeth. I don’t want her to have crooked teeth when she’s thirty.” She pointed toward her own mouth.
My mother wanted to give me an advantage she never had, and this desire in and of itself counts as a need. Yes, it was rooted in unfairness—in her knowledge that people would make assumptions about me based on something superficial—but it was too deep in her gut to ignore. She needed to be someone who could give her daughter this gift.
I should mention that my mother has a beautiful, almost perfect smile. Her own braces came as an adult, after a car accident pushed all her teeth in. I never really noticed they were still a little crooked, though now that we live far from each other, it’s something that, when I first see her after months apart, I can’t help but notice.
My braces came off my junior year. I am in my thirties now and still sometimes wear my top retainer: I grind my teeth in my sleep, unconsciously undoing the work of making them straight. The bottom retainer no longer fits at all because I lost it for a couple of years, and when I found it in a move and went to pop it in, my teeth had already shifted too much, perhaps because of the wisdom tooth still in my lower jaw (though I hear that’s a myth), or maybe the nail biting I can’t curtail, or perhaps just time. In fact, my bottom teeth are almost back to where they started despite those braces. What a waste of all that metal, that pain, and that work. With that gift came the commitment to honor and maintain it, and perhaps because I was the first in my family to have such a gift, I didn’t know that things never stop shifting, that getting the chance at something better doesn’t automatically guarantee it.
My Time Among the Whites Page 1