My Time Among the Whites

by Jennine Capó Crucet

  I say something different to the Americans in the room who look and sound like me, or the ones whose histories mirror mine, the ones who come find me after readings, the ones with parents as optimistic as mine were on the day they settled on my name. I tell those Americans, you and me, we have ancestors who have survived much worse. Not just ancestors: I’m talking about our grandmothers, our mothers, women who’ve held us and seen us for the dreams we are, even as they wanted so much more for and from us. We have privileges they never thought possible: We are standing inside that privilege right here, talking about this. We have conjured the key not from nothing, but from their sacrifices and from the futures we glimpsed that sat just beyond the limits of their dreams for us. We have yet to face anything as hard as what they’ve faced and overcome. They’ve left behind—some by choice and some by force and some through a combination of both—more than we have yet to leave behind. That blood: It runs through us. There is so much power in that, and so in us.

  * * *

  Ironically, in the end, my parents made the right choice: Jineane Ford, 1980 Miss USA Runner-Up, ascended to the throne later that year—through no work of her own—when the original winner went on to win the Miss Universe competition. Pageant world rules apparently dictate that you can’t hold two titles at once, so Jineane got upgraded, and as sudden as an accident, my parents had their beauty-queen namesake promise fulfilled. In America, as the dream goes, anything is possible. In 1996, a solid sixteen years after that night in Carol City where my fate was sealed, the grandson of German immigrants would come to own the Miss USA pageant. He would eventually sell it in 2015, just as he was ramping up his campaign to become the next president of the United States, a feat so many people were certain could never, ever happen. Not because he was the grandson of immigrants who maybe changed their family name so that it projected a power it did not yet wield. Not for the reasons that would stand in my way, or in the way of so many other newer or darker Americans. We keep learning, with every day bringing some new atrocity to light, that nothing is impossible in this America. Except perhaps eradicating the same long-standing bigoted forces, so well embodied by this country’s current leadership, forces that prompted my parents, when searching for a good American name, to look to—and to hope for—not justice, which still seemed to them so far out of reach, but something more attainable and lasting: a kind of beauty.

  MAGIC KINGDOMS

  “Fantasy is part of the articulation of the possible … The struggle to survive is not really separable from the cultural life of fantasy, and the foreclosure of fantasy—through censorship, degradation, or other means—is one strategy for providing for the social death of persons.”

  —JUDITH BUTLER, UNDOING GENDER

  In my childhood home, two photos adorned the shelf above the TV for years—one of my sister, one of me, each of us posed in front of Cinderella’s Castle in Disney World’s Magic Kingdom. My sister and I, ages two and three, are wearing matching overalls with yellow T-shirts underneath. I am smiling and have my head cocked, and my long ponytail (made of thick, still light-colored hair that had not yet been cut, a source of pride for my mother, her own hair dark and coarse) is pulled forward, draped over my shoulder in a way that clearly communicates the photo is a fiction: I’ve been posed by an adult, probably my mother, for this perfect shot. But my sister’s picture is the good one. She will not be posed. She barely has enough hair for a ponytail; her hair sits in two poofs on her head like a set of homegrown Minnie Mouse ears. She looks dead on at the camera, clearly overheating (denim overalls!), refusing to smile, her eyebrows a straight line across her head saying, Take your damn picture already and also I need a nap.

  This moment survives only because of the era: my dad’s heavy camera on a belt-like strap, lens cap dangling from the lens, he cannot afford to waste film. This is all happening before digital photos and their infinite-seeming retakes, so my sister gets maybe two or three chances to make a face that perpetuates my parents’ fantasy that she’s having a good time, for all time. Considering how cranky she looks in the one my parents chose to frame and look at every day, I wonder just how awful the other shots must have been.

  * * *

  In the summer of 2017, I visited Disney World after a long hiatus. I’d last been there fifteen years earlier, as a college senior with my parents. College had given me an awareness of how popular culture operated and which cultures got buoyed by it, and which ones didn’t. To put it succinctly: I made that trip super not fun for my parents by pointing out every instance of the patriarchy’s misogynist influence I could find. I usually did this in the middle of a ride or a show, blurting out my thoughts while we were trapped, the sweaty backs of our thighs adhering to the plastic benches of whatever boat, faux-log, or railroad car we were crammed into together. I used words like heteronormative to describe any and all things princess-related. I went back and forth on whether or not the “It’s a Small World” ride was unintentionally or intentionally bigoted; the former was forgivable and a place to work from while the latter was not, I argued aloud to no one but myself as the ride’s never-ending song attempted to drown me out. I wanted to show (and show off to) my parents how much I’d learned, how much I now saw and couldn’t unsee. They spent much of the time wondering why they’d let me go to college in the first place if all it made was a person who could no longer enjoy things, who could no longer easily engage in the version of fantasy Disney provides. They wondered aloud what happened to their easily posed ponytailed daughter, the one who could eat a Mickey-shaped ice cream without giving them a lecture on consuming and being consumed, the kid they’d taken to Disney dozens of times.

  Then, a decade and a half later, I read an announcement that the Great Movie Ride was being permanently closed down in early August and—after a good five minutes of utterly baffling but completely instinctual panicked crying—I booked a flight to Orlando with airline miles. My birthday, at the end of July, was a handful of days away, and that was enough of an excuse to ride what had been my favorite ride (because the Muppet 3-D Movie does not count as a ride) at Disney’s Hollywood Studios (which I still call MGM; my family went for the first time the year after the park opened, and that was its name then). Never mind that this is the kind of ride tired parents and old people always want to go on because the line is mostly indoors and air-conditioned. Never mind that it’s recommended by bloggers dedicated to “hacking” the Disney experience (a vast corner of the internet you will most certainly drown in and which I do not recommend you look into at all) as good for riding during a rainstorm because the ride itself is super slow and something like twenty minutes long. Those were the best twenty minutes of nine-year-old Jennine’s life!

  I booked a cheap Airbnb right off the rundown strip of hotels featured in Sean Baker’s 2017 film The Florida Project, a movie released in the United States a few months after this trip. My arms and legs and the sides of my stomach had begun to sear with newly sprouting poison ivy blisters. (Though I didn’t yet know that’s what they were. Having had no idea such an evil plant could exist in my Nebraska backyard, I spent a summer afternoon using my bare hands to pull up what I thought was just this weird ground cover.) The humidity and heat I was about to subject the rash to would make it so much worse, but I refused to allow any rational thoughts or actions to interrupt my enthusiasm. I must go there, was all I was thinking, and ride this ride … One. Last. Time.

  I can now see that I loved the Great Movie Ride because it told several big stories very efficiently by dropping you in the middle of them. The slow-moving tram seating dozens of people at a time in long rows dragged you through recreated scenes from Casablanca, Alien, Indiana Jones, The Wizard of Oz, and more. The ride would pretend to stall out in one of the movies, and your trusty tour guide “driving” the tram would be replaced by some menacing movie character who’d hijack your vehicle and narrate a portion of the ride in a safely threatening way before justice was restored and your original tour guide saved th
e day near the ride’s end, tricking the movie character somewhere in the Temple of Doom. I loved the whole thing because, yes, it was air-conditioned (which was extremely helpful on this trip, what with the July heat and the poison ivy blooming across my torso), but, much more important, it was the ultimate immersion in fantasy: I got to be simultaneously part of stories I loved and part of a new story happening in real time—a chaotic one that stemmed from the interrupted dream of the first one. The ride was, essentially, a metaphor for my existence as the American-born daughter of Cuban refugees.

  * * *

  The 2017 trip was my first and only time at Disney declaring a birthday. I don’t know if it didn’t exist or if my parents were just too shy to ask, but Disney has a ready stock of giant buttons for you to wear signaling the significance of your trip to everyone else. Your wedding anniversary, JUST MARRIED, JUST GRADUATED, FIRST VISIT, and the catch-all I’M CELEBRATING. If it’s a life milestone, you’d best spend it with Mickey. When it’s your birthday and you get one of those mega-buttons pinned on you, Disney employees working the restaurants sometimes give you free desserts. Sometimes they let you get in the FastPass line even if you don’t have a FastPass. Sometimes they put you at the very front of a ride where having a first-row view makes a difference. Every single employee who sees you will say, “Happy Birthday!” and look like they really mean it. I didn’t think about whatever training protocol demanded this response from them until I pinned my button to a corkboard back home.

  The experience of celebrating something at Disney World is designed to make you feel like you matter, like strangers are sincerely happy you were born or happy you got married. Your own experience is forcefully and convincingly centered, while simultaneously, it’s coarse-grained in a way that strips you (and your celebration) of its uniqueness. The entire experience is grounded in whiteness and heteronormative gender roles, essentially the world Disney has trafficked in for decades. During the days you spend in the parks, Disney will pretend you are white, American, cisgender, and straight, and everyone and everything around you will pander to and assert this understanding of the Disney fantasy. You see it in the food options, the ambient music, the manicured topiaries contorted to look like the characters Disney has worked for decades to ensure we’ve all grown up watching. Disney only purports to intentionally shift these norms in Epcot’s World Showcase, where guests get to travel to countries like Mexico and Morocco without a passport, and where (some) parents can breathe easy knowing that a “safe” version of chicken nuggets—that quintessentially American kid pleaser of a meal—will always be on the menu, as opposed to, say, croquetas, or pastelitos, or any number of foods that, via their inclusion, would work to center something other than a purely American culinary experience. Still, it’s powerful and validating to be so forcefully seen over and over again, even in this inaccurate, whitewashed way, and especially when it doesn’t happen in real life, outside of the parks, where so much of our experience of American culture reminds us of how “other” we are in our America.

  The fantasy Disney constructs, and in which it envelopes each guest, makes you genuinely happy, even though it’s not a fantasy of your own design, but one intended to replace whatever you might’ve instead conjured for yourself; even though it’s one that, in its execution, excludes and erases who you truly are. More important, by congratulating you on your birthday or your marriage or your anniversary at every turn, Disney’s version of fantasy—one in which you are the center of their magic—makes you want to come back: to open yourself up again and again to everything Disney offers.

  On that trip, I overheard an exchange among a white American family—a father and his two children, a girl and a boy, neither child older than ten—on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride (which used to be one of my favorites, up until that college trip when I actually paid real attention). I was sitting in the row behind them. The following is how I recorded their exchange in the Notes app on my phone.

  DAD: They’re closing this ride down soon to change it.

  SON: Why?

  DAD: Some women said it’s offensive.

  DAUGHTER: What’s offensive about it?

  DAD: You tell me.

  [Watching as animatronic men hold chains attached to animatronic women, who are shackled by their wrists as they are sold off to other waiting animatronic men. Watching in silence now as the boat turns a little and animatronic women scream in terror as animatronic men chase them, the suggestion of rape clearly in the air. One or two of the animatronic running pairs have been switched since I was last there, so that the men are now being chased by the women.]

  SON: I don’t see anything wrong.

  DAD: [Pauses dramatically.] Well there you go.

  DAUGHTER: [Keeps watching. Keeps watching.]

  I wondered at the weeks of work it would take in my class someday to undo this small moment in these kids’ lives; the misogyny and violence inherent to it being normalized and so erased for them at such a young age, the way the father framed the offense being taken as something only women could feel. And I thought, if I say something—anything—it will totally ruin this ride for them, and I loved this ride when I was their age, the sense of adventure it inspired. I never thought to wonder why only the men got to have the adventure, or why, in a ride that pretends to be set in the Caribbean, the only language you heard was English. That Disney managed to convince a kid like me, with roots in the Caribbean, that this ride was more believable and real than whatever homeland my parents could conjure for me is a con job of the most magical sort. Disney simultaneously created and remedied (thanks to the ride’s immersive fun) our own erasure. But why bring any of that up now from my spot behind them in our boat, when god only knows how much money this trip was costing this family, and I knew firsthand—because I’d been behind them in line—how long they’d waited to sit through this ride-turned-blockbuster-movie-franchise. The son was completely enraptured by what he saw. He was open and vulnerable in this rapture, and that’s the exact moment when Disney fed him the same misogyny his father had just perpetuated.

  Control the fantasy, and you control the people. The ride kept going and I said nothing.

  * * *

  When you say “park,” I don’t think, space with lots of trees and grass where people play outside until they get too hot. I think, word-association style, Disney. That I so deeply and intrinsically link Disney with the natural world might be a consequence of growing up in Hialeah, a city whose official slogan is “the City of Progress” and whose unofficial slogan is “Water, Mud, and Factories,” though in South Florida, you’re more likely to hear the slogan in its original language, where it rhymes: “Hialeah: Agua, fango y factorías.” The tagline is in part a shout-out to the regular flooding that occurs in the city after it rains, especially in its industrial areas and around its canals. As reported in the Miami New Times in 2018, a survey company called WalletHub, which regularly ranks the hundred largest U.S. metropolitan areas in different categories, rated my hometown as one of the worst cities in America for recreation (ninety-eighth out of a hundred—Orlando took first place), largely because it has close to the lowest percentage of parkland of the cities ranked (ninety-seventh on that front). It’s not that I have no memories of playing outside; it’s that all those memories also involve scraped knees, bloodied from the concrete that seemed to be everywhere. The public park we sometimes went to (Amelia Earhart, which we visited mostly for birthday parties, as they charged a fee to get in on the weekends, and my parents worked during the week, when it was free) is bordered on the north by the Gratigny Parkway, so the swoosh of traffic always hovered close by. In the interest of providing complete information, Hialeah has also ranked as the worst city in other impressive categories, including financial security, living an active lifestyle, and celebrating Valentine’s Day. According to WalletHub, there’s a lot about Hialeah you might want a break from. (I can’t help but disagree and think that someone at WalletHub has some kind of vendetta a
gainst Hialeah.) Regardless, when you’ve had enough of Hialeah’s water, mud, and factories, a world of magic and ease (and free of cars, once a tram whisks you away from the parking lot) awaits just under four hours north on the Turnpike.

  It wasn’t until I saw The Florida Project, a movie about a girl and her mother struggling in every way possible to avoid homelessness, that a lot of my thoughts about the powerful role the parks played in shaping my experience of nature coalesced. In fact, it wasn’t until the movie’s final scene—which I won’t completely spoil for those who haven’t seen it—that I recognized this “shaping” as a manipulation. Disney has supplanted—and degraded—our own instinct for fantasy-as-survival with a ready-made version that fuses escapism with commercialism. The final moments of The Florida Project (which for the first hour or so I mistook for a documentary—if you’ve seen it, this tells you something about both me and the film) depict the escapist role Disney holds for many people so stunningly and so perfectly that the first time I watched the movie, my heart (but not my head) got the ending all wrong, feeling a surge of joy and hope for the two girls—the opposite of what anyone should’ve felt. The characters in that film cannot afford—in every sense of the word—the ending they’re given.

  For many Floridians, when it comes to getting away from it all, the Disney World parks are the equivalent of one-stop shopping. A big reason I didn’t go camping until I was thirty-five is because, for Florida residents, park admission is drastically cheaper, so my family’s idea of a weekend adventure was Adventureland at Disney. (Please note that “Disney” is what everyone I know from Miami calls all the parks and all of Orlando and whatever’s around Orlando. As in, “I’m driving to Disney this weekend to go to my abuela’s cousin’s funeral.”) Thanks to all that Park Hopping, Disney became—and sadly still is—my nature touchstone.