My Time Among the Whites
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When they are born, you give your kids white American names so that their teachers can’t tell what they are before meeting them, so that your kids don’t suffer the way you suffered in school, and so that they won’t eventually be “inexplicably” denied apartments and jobs despite their abundant qualifications. You hope they can sidestep that pain, that confusion, and you are confident it will work as long as they play along when they need to, so you don’t foresee these two children someday rebelling against these names and instead wishing you’d given them family names: Florinda, Hortencia, Milagros. One will eventually tell you she wished you’d named her Margarita.
If you happen to be male and straight, like my father, your American Dream involves earning enough money so that your wife (because you are married to a woman) doesn’t have to work, and you can give her the gift of being a full-time parent. If you are a straight woman, your American Dream is to marry a man, move out of your parents’ house, and then work as a nurse’s aide or a teacher’s aide for a little while before stopping that to have those two children. You therefore become part of someone else’s American Dream—your husband’s—where he earns enough so that he can give you the gift of being a full-time parent. Once those kids hit eighth grade, you can go back to work if you want, but only if the job has good benefits like un retiro bueno. Over the course of their lives, you take those kids on real vacations (meaning they last longer than the built-in breaks of a holiday weekend) where you drive to and from obscure American historical landmarks (a mountaintop in Tennessee, the site of the Civil War’s Battle Above the Clouds). When things go well in this dream, you can take advantage of those holiday weekends and haul those kids to Disney World where, while waiting in too-long lines, you fantasize about being rich enough to someday buy the annual pass with no blackout dates. You fantasize about staying in Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort for a whole five nights. You fantasize about being rich enough to buy anything you want just like that Trump guy on TV: a hotel, a golf course, a beauty pageant.
You fantasize about owning a boat. You go to boat shows. You fantasize about owning a Corvette. You go to car shows. One year’s family vacation involves driving to the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where you learn you cannot take the tour of the manufacturing plant because they are retooling the line for the new Corvette model. You get back in your van—the family road-trip-mobile you worked hard to pay for in cash—and you swear to yourself you will bring your family back here someday, only to forget about it for years and years (you’ve been busy working like an animal, remember?) until your wife, book in hand, maybe reads you these sentences.
* * *
My father’s sister renames him whenever he comes up in casual conversation: She calls him Everett. She claims Everett is the English translation of Evaristo. If you ask various internet sources to translate Evaristo into English, it gives you: Evaristo. The red squiggly line of death marks it as wrong every time I type it in Microsoft Word, until I add it to the program’s dictionary. Entomology says the closest English-language name to Evaristo is Evan, but even that is listed as a variant, not a direct translation the way, say, Juan is to John or Pedro to Peter. My aunt is wrong. In English, there is no Evaristo. In English, he doesn’t exist.
The name Evaristo means “well-pleasing” and therefore does not suit my father at all. He was named after his godfather, a man who got hit by a bus on the way to my dad’s christening, so the name was a last-minute switch. He was going to be called Reynaldo, after his father (my grandfather). Reynaldo instead became his middle name, and he undoes his parents’ accident-induced homage by introducing himself as Rey whenever he meets someone new. But he goes by E.R. when he signs paperwork or anything even vaguely official, as if announcing himself an emergency. The initials have the added side effect of eliminating any suggestion of his ethnicity.
I’ve been told I would’ve been named Rey had I been born male. That name—with its sound (though not its spelling) meaning a line of light radiating from a bright object, or a very strange and mostly flat sea creature known to populate hilarious memes by photobombing (and therefore disrupting) people’s Caribbean vacations—might’ve suited me better. And in Spanish, spelled the way they would’ve spelled it, it means king.
I have a sister, Kathleen, named after a nurse who’d been kind to my mother. That’s pretty much the whole story. My mom had wanted to name my sister Jennifer or Amanda. Both names were extremely popular around the time my sister was born, a little over a year after I showed up. My mother tells this story of the woman next to her in her hospital room having had a girl, and when my mother asks what she’s named her, the woman smiles and says, “Jennifer.” My mother, four months into being twenty-two and already an overwhelmed mother of a newborn and a seventeen-month-old, supposedly turned to the kind nurse in the room and said, “What’s your name?”
* * *
Jineane Ford aka Miss Arizona 1980 describes her girlhood self in a 2011 interview with The Arizona Republic this way: “I was not cool. I was not beautiful. My eyebrows grew together as a unibrow, and I had a big head of frizzy hair.” (She and I had this in common.) In high school, she was a member of the science club (same), and she took classes to become a registered meat cutter (not so much). This certification included proving you knew the right way to skin what you were processing (the beginnings of a metaphor for a writing career, probably). I am certain my mother didn’t know any of this.
* * *
When I was in elementary school, there was a girl—her name was Amanda Kindler—who was quiet and soft and wore a bow in her hair almost every day. She was on the jump rope team and had bangs that seemed impervious to Miami’s humidity. I can’t recall her voice, she was that quiet: She never talked in class and she whispered to her friends, of which I was not one. I was loud and joked around a lot, my best material straight rip-offs of the Muppets, mostly Fozzie Bear. (Gonzo’s material only made me seem more awkward than I already was.) Every day, on our walk from school to wherever my mom had parked her car, my mom would gently encourage me to be more like Amanda Kindler by praising her qualities as feminine and desirable. She was such a good girl (which I heard, as it was meant, as her being good at being a girl in a way that I was not). She would sigh and remind me, “I almost named your sister Amanda.” When I didn’t get the message and instead kept working on my Muppet-inspired personality (while also insisting on wearing baggy T-shirts, tights, and a headband the width of an ace bandage to corral my unruly frizz—which, admittedly, made me look like I was perpetually recovering from a headwound), my mom’s gentleness, in time, turned into direct provocation. “You should be more like Amanda Kindler,” she began telling me outright on our walks to the car.
I couldn’t understand why. While Amanda was very pretty in conventional white-girl ways (waist-length straight hair, ivory skin, the tiniest nose, gentle freckles), she otherwise did not seem particularly smart or witty or fun, or any of the qualities I valued in friends or in myself. She jumped rope like a robot: perfect, but she never smiled or broke a sweat, never seemed to be having any fun while doing it. She was, more than anything else, quiet. Very girly, my mother put it. Why can’t you be more girly, like Amanda Kindler? I’d answer, “So you want me to wear bows?” No, she would say, somehow dismayed at what I was: a too-skinny weirdo with buck teeth and a unibrow and way too much to say. I didn’t like being outside, and I spent many afternoons crying and writing, starting around second grade. I was sensitive in the ways that make many parents realize they have a budding artist on their hands. Those weren’t my parents.
One day when I was in fourth grade, after picking me up and walking to the car together, after our automatic seat belts snapped us into our Toyota Camry’s baked interior, my mother said, “I wish Amanda Kindler was my daughter.” I can’t remember what I said to that. I know I at least probably thought, Fine, go kidnap her, she won’t even cry. I was that kind of smartass. I also knew by then to keep my smartass
comments to myself. My mouth was always getting me into trouble. But now I understand that she must have seen us both—Amanda and me, within seconds of each other—that afternoon as she waited with other parents to retrieve me from my classroom, and the contrast between what she thought a daughter should be and the daughter she had was too much to hold in any longer. This was not what she wanted, and she had to say it out loud to see how it felt to admit it to the only person who she thought could do something about it. She was maybe twenty-eight when this happened; at twenty-eight, I would still be coloring for fun and making pasta for every meal. By fourth grade, I’d already disappointed my mom by not being the graceful, elegant epitome of a beauty queen runner-up who she had expected me to be: I was, of course, my family’s first manifestation of their American Dream, and she didn’t like what their America was shaping up to look like.
Only now does it occur to me as strange and sad that my mother’s ideal for a perfect American daughter was a white girl. Amanda Kindler did not speak Spanish, did not eat the same foods we ate, did not listen to the same music we listened to. Amanda Kindler needed to wear copious amounts of sunscreen to protect her from the sun we played under for hours without issue. Amanda Kindler was an American girl in ways I could never be, in ways my mother could also never be. Her ideal daughter was a white girl because she had long internalized the idea that as Latinx women, we’d be treated as lesser, that we were somehow lesser. And she just wanted better for me, which meant: whiter.
My sister named her daughter Paloma, and my mother celebrates the name, recently telling me, “Things are different now, you can be proud of being Latina, you can name your kids Spanish names.” It’s a position that strikes me as completely inaccurate from my place in Nebraska, where markedly Spanish names are still treated by most white folks with a sort of comic disrespect at best. (Ask my partner, Alejandro, how many times a Nebraskan has blurted out the chorus to that Lady Gaga song the second after he introduces himself.) At worst, the names are treated with outright disdain. (Ask him how many times someone has said they can’t, or won’t, say his name. Ask him how many times someone has suggested he use a nickname. Ask him how many times they suggested that nickname be Antonio Banderas.) But my mom’s comment tells me a lot about the kind of America she thought she was bringing a daughter into. Be like Amanda Kindler: Be safe, hide yourself in plain sight; live up to the gift—the promise—of your white-girl name.
* * *
I am trying to remember when my mom stopped holding up Amanda Kindler as the epitome of girlhood to me—when she let go of her dream of a perfect American daughter and instead accepted the one she had. Amanda and I would go to the same middle school and the same high school, where a shift in our neighborhood’s demographics meant she would come to be one of the few white students in our high school’s population. She would end up a star on the volleyball team and the soccer team, physically stronger and taller than any son my parents could’ve produced. She would also come out as a queer woman. When this happened, I asked my mom if she still wished Amanda Kindler were her daughter. I meant it in a mean way, a way I now deeply regret, a way that positioned Amanda’s queerness as something that should make her less desirable as a daughter. I didn’t think of Amanda as less than human because of her queerness, but I knew my mother might. I knew her version of the American Dream included having a devoted daughter who would go on to marry a hardworking man—a man she could brag about and love as the son she never had. My mother’s American Dream included being a grandparent someday. And although the latter was absolutely still possible if Amanda were her daughter, I wasn’t going to be the one to point this out to my mother on Amanda’s behalf. I wanted to rub my mother’s nose in all of it, for having conflated what she wanted for herself—to be a white American girl who moved through the world with more ease—with what she’d wanted for me. The motivation behind my question was wrong, but the question itself would still elicit from my mother what I wanted her to feel: I wanted her to understand what a mistake it had been for her to hold in her heart a picture of the perfect American child that was not also a picture of me.
She didn’t answer me. She hadn’t brought up Amanda Kindler to me in years. Unlike me, she let go of it a long time ago.
* * *
According to her 2011 interview, Jineane Ford has her own business now. She restored Arizona’s oldest lodge, and now she runs a restaurant and an antique store out of it. She struggled with her weight for years and eventually elected to have Lap-Band surgery and became a sort of spokesperson for the procedure. I don’t know where Amanda Kindler lives or what she’s doing, though I’m sure I could find her easily enough via social media. I’m not on Facebook, and I’ve avoided looking her up. As for me, I am a writer and a professor. I am still extremely fond of the Muppets, though I have long since accepted that I am more Gonzo than Fozzie. I go places and read from my books, and sometimes my parents are in the crowd and they look a little baffled. They seem surprised that the audience isn’t solely comprised of people who know me personally—who are all these people and why are they here? While they understand that by many measures, I’m successful in ways they’ve learned to recognize, they don’t totally understand how I did this while asserting—rather than muting—my ethnic heritage in my work. They don’t understand why I would do this work when they’d given me what they thought was a key to escape it, a way of avoiding the work entirely.
At these events, people eventually ask me questions about things much more pressing than whether I’ve been to Cuba or why I have a misspelled white-girl name. I am sometimes asked by people who’ve read my fiction, what can we do to be better to immigrants? How optimistic are you about our ability to bridge divides between the new, Trump-fueled sense of tribalism emerging? I say to these mostly white crowds, this tribalism is not new, not for many Americans from marginalized backgrounds who’ve survived bigotry and hatred for so long. I point out that Donald Trump is a powerful manifestation of white supremacy; he and his administration’s rhetoric and actions are not the start of such forces in this country, and my name is one small choice of perhaps millions made under their terrifying influence. I say, I am a novelist, a Latinx woman, a first-generation American. I am someone whose parents taught her that to survive and thrive in this country, I would have to work twice as hard as a white person. They never took issue with the unfairness of this; they said that’s just how it is until the work itself leads to success that allows you to transcend the unfairness somehow. As a writer and an educator, I live in a similar nexus of reality and idealism, but I am not optimistic. If I stop paying close attention, academia can be a comfortable, recognizable place, one where I am encouraged to buy into the falsehood of a meritocracy that promises the American Dream to anyone willing to work hard. But I’ve come to see the American Dream for what it really is: a lie my parents had little choice but to buy into and sell to me, a lie that conflated working hard with passing for, becoming, and being white. I believed the lie for long enough to acquire the tools needed to dismantle it. I believed it for long enough to find the lock, to imagine my real self the key. I’ve turned it and the door is opening. The American Dream: a key you conjure from nothing.
I tell readers that I see it as my job to tell stories that encourage people to act on their empathy—not just to feel something, as feeling is not enough, but to be moved to do something substantial with those feelings, some action that works to fix the systems that required the need for books like mine in the first place. It’s a vital job, one I love, and I know my answer is giving the person asking the question hope I don’t feel. In 2017, at a library in Washington State, I said all this and other things, and then I stopped and rubbed my face. Then I said, look, a lot of times I feel this pressure to tell all you white folks that it’s all gonna be okay and that you’re all doing a great job. You’re sitting here at this event, aren’t you? You’re good people. You want to be reassured. I’m not going to do that for you today. I can’t a
nd it’s a lie. The real truth is that people of color didn’t create these problems, and we don’t have magical solutions to them that we are keeping from you. We’re in more vulnerable positions than you are. We need you to solve these problems because it is costing us our lives. You are part of these systems yet refuse to believe how immensely you benefit from them. Losing privilege can feel a lot like inequality. If something feels unfair to you as a white person, it’s likely that equality is actually being achieved in that moment. I told them about the gender imbalance in some of my classes, how there are usually many more men than women in the advanced workshops, how an exercise I created that ensured an equal distribution of time to speak felt, for those who identified as male, like it was skewed in favor of those who identified as women. I told this crowd, be aware of how you perceive things and how those perceptions are skewed, how you’ve been trained to skew them. I said all this and knew at the same time how little of it would sink in, how it is human nature to think of oneself as the exception, always.