My Time Among the Whites

by Jennine Capó Crucet

  * * *

  A couple of weeks into my first semester of classes at Cornell, after my parents finally abandoned me far above Cayuga’s waters, I received the topics for what would be my first college paper, in an English course on the modern novel. I might as well have been my abuela trying to read and understand them; the language felt that foreign. I called my mom at work and in tears told her that I had to come home, that I’d made a terrible mistake, that I should’ve gone to UF, where everyone seemed to be having a lot more fun than I was.

  She sighed into the phone. I heard the chatter of her two-way radio behind her, electricians asking questions about permits and supply deliveries, asking my mom (who the workers called Base, since she worked from an office) for updates. She turned down the volume and said, “Just read me the first question. We’ll go through it a little at a time and figure it out.”

  I read her the topics slowly, pausing after each sentence, waiting for her to say something, just an mmhmm or the conversational throw-me-a-bone of okay. The first topic was two paragraphs long. I remember it had the word intersectionalities in it. And the word gendered. I waited for her response and for the ways it would encourage me, for her to tell me I could do this, but I knew from my mother’s total silence that, like me, she’d never before heard these words: my first insight into how access to certain vocabularies was a kind of privilege.

  Of course, I didn’t know to call this privilege, not yet.

  “You’re right,” my mother said after a moment. “You’re screwed.”

  Parents who’ve gone to college themselves know that at this point they should encourage their kid to go to office hours, or to the writing center, or to ask the professor or a TA for clarification—that it’s not just a student’s right but their responsibility as budding scholars to do so. But my mom thought I was as on my own as I feared. While my college had done an excellent job recruiting me, I had no blueprint or road map for what I was supposed to do once I made it to campus, how I was going to spend the next four years. I’d already embarrassed myself by doing things like asking my RA what time the dorm closed for the night. As far as I knew, there’d been no mandatory meeting geared toward first-generation students like me. Aside from a check-in with my financial aid officer, where she explained what work-study was (I didn’t know and worried it meant I had to join the army or something) and where she had me sign for my loan, I’d been mostly keeping to myself to hide the fact that I was a very special kind of lost: What seemed obvious to many students left me flailing. This was a feeling shared by my parents, who had no idea what they were supposed to say, who couldn’t suggest I just come home for the weekend, and who didn’t know to offer solutions that seemed obvious to people who’ve been to college themselves. This, too, is a kind of privilege: the resource of people—people who love you—who have navigated a version of the very system you are now navigating.

  “I mean, I literally have no idea what any of that means,” my mom said. “I don’t even know how it’s a question.”

  I folded the sheet with the paper topics in half and put it in my desk drawer.

  “I don’t know what you’re gonna do,” my mom almost laughed. “Maybe—have you looked in the dictionary?”

  I started crying harder, my hand over the receiver.

  “You still there?” she eventually asked.

  I murmured, “Mmhmm.”

  “Look, just stick it out up there until Christmas,” she said. “We have no more vacation days this year. We can’t take off any more time to go get you.”

  “Okay,” I swallowed (my OK having that sharp a, a still present relic of my Miami accent that only okay, on the page, accurately represents). I started breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, calming myself. “I can do that,” I said.

  My mom laughed for real this time and said, “Mamita, you don’t really have a choice.”

  She didn’t say this in a mean way. She was just telling me the truth. “This whole thing was your idea, remember?”

  It sounded almost like a threat—and there it was: the beginning of a kind of resentment many first-generation college students come to know, one born from our families’ frustrations at no longer knowing how to help us. Yes, it had been my idea. I’d argued with them that going away to Cornell would be the best thing for the whole family in the long run, but none of us could predict how vast the distance would come to feel, how it would move me into a different class of people—out of the class that had forged me—and that this shift would remain a painful source of tension from that moment on.

  The racket of radios started up again—so much static and screaming—and my mom told me she had to go, that she needed to get back to work.

  So I got back to work, too, and Get back to work became a sort of mantra for me. I tackled the paper with the same focus that had landed me at Cornell in the first place. I did okay on it, earning a B-/C (I never found out how a grade could have a slash in it, but now that I’m an English professor I understand perfectly what he meant with that grade). The professor had covered the typed pages with handwritten comments and questions, which I took as a bad thing rather than as a sign of his engagement with my work and the kind of attention my tuition dollars were affording me, and so I never followed up with him about my paper as I should have. It was in his endnote (the first one I had ever received in my academic career, looking like its own small essay) where he listed the various campus resources available to me—the writing center, his office hours—that I first learned of their existence.

  My mom didn’t ask outright what grade I earned on the paper. She eventually stopped asking about assignments altogether. And I learned from my peers that grades were something I didn’t have to share with my parents the way I had in high school. My report card had transformed into a transcript, a euphemism I’d deploy in December when my mom asked when my school would be sending her the former.

  My grades were the first of many elements of my new life for which they had no context. With each passing semester, what I was doing became, for them, as indecipherable as that paper topic. They didn’t even know what questions to ask, which is also the quintessential condition of the first-generation college student experience—though I wouldn’t begin to understand this until long after I’d earned my degree. The question my parents were really asking when they wondered if I “needed” to go to the more expensive school was: Which option has the potential to open the most doors, and how much can we afford to hope she’ll walk through them? It’s a more complex question. And they knew more than I did that there wasn’t a straightforward answer, in part because of the word potential, which acknowledges the lack of guarantees, and in part because the answer depended on what I’d make out of whichever version of my education we bought into. My college education eventually taught me to pursue harder, more complex questions, that asking harder questions is one of the most important things a person can do. I was learning, with each seemingly more baffling paper topic, how to think critically—a skill I use on itself, to ask whether or not I could’ve learned it just as thoroughly without going into debt.

  My parents know for a fact that going to the more expensive school was the best investment they ever made in me. But I can admit that I’ll never know for sure. And I know enough to recognize my ambivalence as a sign that perhaps proves them right.

  ¡NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE IN AMERICA!

  When non-Latinx Americans meet me and learn my family is from Cuba, they often ask me one of two bizarre questions. The first is if I’ve ever been to Cuba, a question so layered and fraught for me that I’ve learned to respond by asking, “Why would I have ever been to Cuba?” and then just seeing what they say. I almost relish their awkward answers and the assumptions they reveal. I got this question a lot when I lived in Minnesota, a place where many of my students bragged about their Scandinavian heritage, and it never once occurred to me to ask, within seconds of meeting them, if they’d ever been to Sweden.

 
The second question, less common though still fairly fraught, isn’t even actually a question: Oh, that’s weird/interesting/funny, they say, Jennine isn’t a very Cuban name.

  You are correct, I say. It is not.

  I often want to fill the uncomfortable pause that follows with a story about the American Dream that goes like this: Two kids from Cuba meet as teenagers in Carol City, Florida. They have names—given to them by Cuban parents who mistakenly assumed that they’d live in Cuba pretty much forever—that mark them as ethnic minorities in the United States. These names, in their new home country, impact everything about their lives: their educations (and the premature ends of those educations), their job prospects, in what areas of the city they can look for a home. They marry young, start a family young. Because they are light-skinned they reason that there’s a chance their American-born offspring could avoid at least some elements of the systemic prejudice they encountered (despite having worked hard to learn English and almost eradicating their accents—this is, after all, a story about the American Dream, right? Which means that many things will need to be unjustly eradicated). In this version of the American Dream, they think that all it takes to change your destiny in this country is picking the right name for your child.

  They are not totally wrong. As John Oliver (on his show Last Week Tonight) pointed out when, in his pre-election efforts to “Make Donald Drumpf Again,” he told a (possibly apocryphal) story about the then candidate’s grandfather, saying he’d changed the family last name from Drumpf to Trump when he emigrated from Germany. Oliver asked viewers, specifically those thinking of voting for the man, to “stop and take a moment to imagine how you would feel if you just met a guy named Donald Drumpf.” It’s a joke that plays on xenophobia, and Oliver is only pointing out a reality for many Americans—a reality the couple in the above story had lived through and saw an opportunity to alter for (what they hoped was) the better.

  Because of the experience of living with their own names, my parents thought that giving their American child a distinctly ethnic name came with unfair, quantifiable consequences— they sensed this long before research studies would show which names on similar résumés got to count as qualified for a job—and having weathered those consequences themselves, they felt an understandable reluctance to have me inherit them.

  This is how I came to be named after the 1980 Miss USA runner-up. My parents had a loose plan to name me after the winner, and they had settled into bed on a May evening to watch the pageant with that intention, even though I wouldn’t be born until July 1981 (they’ve always been the type to plan ahead). I was to be not just their first kid but also the first born-in-America American in our family. Perhaps they felt a suitable American name was needed to commemorate this leap from Cubans to Americans. Should I happen to be born female, what better place to find that name, they thought, than an American beauty pageant?

  Bob Barker played host back then, and they must’ve liked the way the name sounded in his Price Is Right drawl. Yes, the man who made his living encouraging people to spin a giant wheel and asking them how much they thought random crap was worth (without overestimating!) helped determine the proper noun that would identify me for the rest of my life. I imagine that long skinny microphone topped with that perfect black ball, no harsh consonants to pop or s’s to hiss—jeh-neeeeeen—his pointy white teeth seizing that second syllable like a cartoon cat catching a mouse by the tail.

  Although my parents—their names are Maria and Evaristo—were rooting for her, Jineane Ford aka Miss Arizona didn’t win. The winner of the 1980 Miss USA pageant, the person after whom I was supposed to be named, was Shawn Weatherly, that year’s Miss South Carolina. I can almost hear my parents deciding, their pact to name me after the winner be damned, that Shawn was a boy’s name despite evidence to the contrary standing right in front of them, wearing a crown.

  So, close enough, there was my name: Jineane. But that spelling, they thought. Their Spanish-language origins got the better of them and they agreed this spelling was all wrong, the vowels in her name making little sense, that early i right after the j reading and sounding like ee to them. Let’s change that to an e. And while we’re at it, let’s keep customizing: Change the original e to an i, throw an extra n before that for (I guess?) balance, lose the a—what is that ah sound doing in there anyway?—but let’s keep that last e because in English people always put a silent e on the end, right? Jennine. Daughter named! They had no idea that in altering the spelling they were undoing the work of making the name something that would help me pass: Although I’m sure the sound of it has opened doors that might’ve otherwise been unfairly closed, when seen in writing, the spelling always flags for certain people—people looking for it—as a marker of my parents’ immigrant status, their alterations betraying the reason they went with that name in the first place.

  The first real short story I ever wrote as a college student for a fiction workshop tried to explore this moment between them, the negotiation of it. In it, a nineteen-year-old woman and her husband of almost two years are discussing what to name their baby if it’s a girl. The husband is confident it will be a boy. The woman decides to stake the name on a televised beauty pageant, one she’s never seen, and they proceed to watch it together, the woman feeling predictably huge at the sight of so many skinny white women floating across the stage. At some point the husband brings her a sandwich. He is used to having her bring him sandwiches, but she can’t get off of the couch. They very subtly bring up the racism they encounter because of their own markedly Spanish names. (One workshop critique from my all-white college classmates was that they didn’t think the scene was “loud enough” and wanted this conversation between the couple to be more explicit, their assumption being that people of color regularly sit around discussing their oppression outright as they watch TV at home.) They bet on their kid being light-skinned enough to eventually pass as white and decide they should give her a name that encourages her to do so. The winner’s name in the short story is Paige, which neither parent can pronounce correctly, and which doesn’t work in Spanish at all, so they go with Sandra, the name of a contestant who finished in the top ten but scored highest in the interview portion. The story ends with both characters burping, thus beginning my obsession with bodily functions as significant gestures in fiction.

  It wasn’t a great story, but it showed promise—at least enough to garner my professor’s attention and encouragement, which is sometimes all a budding writer needs. I told no one in class that the story was based on how I got my name, even when they discussed how improbable the scenario seemed to them, how pointedly symbolic it was, how totally unlikely it would be—these white classmates told me—for a Cuban couple not to want to honor their own heritage in the naming of their first child.

  Okay.

  Truth be told, part of me agreed with my classmates, and I never fully believed this was how my parents chose my name until college, when I looked up the pageant’s results, prompted by the workshop assignment, and learned, horrified, that my name’s origin story was a real fact of my life. What were my parents aiming for, naming me after a beauty queen? What were they trying to say about the kind of daughter they wanted? What were they hoping for—wishing for me, willing me to be—with this name?

  Or was it more about what they were trying to prove to the country that had taken them in as children? Perhaps their idea was more in line with names like Usnavy and Usmarine—the names Cuban refugees sometimes give their newborn American children as homage to the first words they saw upon arrival or rescue: U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine. Our names: a form of gratitude, or of allegiance, and in my case, a kind of skin-deep hope.

  * * *

  Who is this woman, Jineane Ford, the beauty queen after whom I was named, whose parents got just as creative with the vowels? Jineane Ford, born the same year as my mother, 1960, from Gilbert, Arizona. She allegedly tripped during the evening wear portion of the competition and hit the ground in view of Bob Barke
r. Perhaps this is what endeared her to my parents: that she could mess up so royally (pun intended) but still manage to finish (almost) on top. That she could play off what should’ve been a disaster—after all, the only real directive in the evening wear competition is WALK ACROSS THE STAGE WITHOUT FALLING—as something charming. Maybe they liked that she was resilient, tough, not easily embarrassed. Very American. And she didn’t take herself too seriously; maybe they would’ve named me after her even if she’d finished dead last. In my more generous moments, I let myself believe this.

  * * *

  The American Dream, commonly told: You can accomplish anything if you work hard enough for it. All you have to do is work hard. My parents really believed this, and I believed it long enough to get me to college, where I learned to see this idea for the dangerous lie it is, one that doesn’t take into account many things like, for instance, history.

  The American Dream as taught to me by example, from two people brought to the United States from a Spanish-speaking country as children by parents fleeing a dictatorship and eventually given asylum as political refugees: In America, you might work like an animal, but you mostly get to keep what you work for. In America, the goal is a good job working for a boss you don’t hate, maybe to be your own boss someday. This job has legit benefits, meaning health insurance and un retiro bueno that you never think about—the money siphoned off your paycheck each month and matched by your boss is just waiting for you, a pot of gold at the end of the workforce rainbow. The American Dream is buying a house in a safer neighborhood than the one in which you were raised, meaning your kids (the goal: two of them) will go to mildly better schools than the ones you went to, where you learned English the hard way and not through the invention of these ESL classes the more recent arrivals get—how unfair, you think, how un-American that these newer arrivals don’t have to suffer the way you suffered. Everyone (except my future children) should suffer equally, meaning: as much as we did and no less—that is the American way! That suffering is what earns us the right to call ourselves Americans! It made us stronger, you will someday tell these two children of yours after relating horrific stories of how in first grade you were made to pee in your chair for not having the English words to ask the teacher—who shook her head at your begging in Spanish and said, “Maria, you must ask in English,” her directive not even hinting at the noun you needed to say—to use the bathroom, the word bathroom a key you were to conjure from nothing.