My Time Among the Whites

by Jennine Capó Crucet

  An example: At Smith Falls outside of Valentine, Nebraska, on a 2018 camping trip, I stood at the base of the state’s tallest waterfall (which is actually a legit waterfall), inhaled deeply, and exclaimed, “Oh my god, it smells like Pirates of the Caribbean”—conjuring that particular scent of not-yet-mold that lingers inside the ride’s fog. It’s such a distinct smell that a Los Angeles–based fragrance company created a perfume to evoke it. The perfume’s creator said in an interview with Fodor’s Travel that, “Some people buy it to bring back childhood memories and others (like Disney fanatics) just love water rides and use the fragrance to feel like they’re at a park all the time.” He describes the fragrance as “chlorinated water, musty mildew (because the water doesn’t get changed often), and the atmospheric damp fog in the air from the pyrotechnic/smoke effects.” It’s called Dark Ride.

  Another time, trekking down the Niobrara River with friends, the sheer crust of the Sandhills towering above us, I craned my neck and yelled, “That part up there looks just like Thunder Mountain!” Another time, I spotted a family of turkeys, a mother and three babies. I realized I didn’t know what a baby turkey was called—a chick? I tried a word out loud: turklets. This sounded very not right, and the silence in my mind following that ridiculous word was replaced quickly and reflexively by the song from Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room, which was often our first stop in the Magic Kingdom (our family being the kind that turned left after Mainstreet, U.S.A. rather than right into Tomorrowland). In the tiki-tiki-tiki-tiki-tiki room: On a loop, the memory of how the sound of the tiki birds’ animatronic beaks clacking worked as a kind of percussion as they fake-sang. A little louder! the one bird serving as our master of ceremonies sings, and the volume goes up in my mind. Everywhere I turned, there was Disney World, showing me just how much it had asserted itself as my framework for the natural world—one that deliberately omitted any disasters over which I couldn’t eventually triumph.

  When it comes to the reality of Florida’s most destructive natural disaster—the hurricane—the threat of one will sometimes actually get us to Disney: We bank on school being canceled, board up our windows, and drive north, annual passes in hand, dreaming of the line-less version of the parks we were sold when we bought those passes. The storm will turn at the last second and we’ll be at the park celebrating by riding Splash Mountain five times in a row. It’s the perfect plan if you buy into the fantasy that the storm won’t hit. And even if the storm does make landfall, where better to be trapped than a Disney resort, which, in the days leading up to the hurricane, has a ton of cancelations from out-of-state travelers who had just rescheduled their trips in compliance with Disney’s Hurricane Policy, which states you can rebook or cancel your room reservation with (mostly) no penalty if a hurricane warning is issued within seven days of your scheduled arrival date. All those empty rooms, some of them up to 40 percent off, and all you have to do is bet on what Disney’s been teaching us since before we were born: that whatever catastrophic storm is headed our way, the story will have, at least for Floridians, a happy ending.

  * * *

  When I was in elementary school, we once came back from five days at Disney World—the longest we’d ever gone—and I was a wreck. In the days constituting reentry into non-Disney life, anything that evoked Disney caused me to weep. I have the distinct memory of raising my hand during a silent reading assignment and the teacher nodding me to her desk, and as I leaned in to whisper my question, I spotted a black-and-white photo of Mickey Mouse standing in front of the Epcot ball on her desk calendar. She’d outlined his ears and the ball in red pen maybe dozens of times. I fell silent and couldn’t talk, just stood there crying and not breathing. When I couldn’t stop, she sent me down to a counselor’s office, where I cried harder (now that no one in my class could see me) and began to hiccup through my tears in a way that was disturbing enough that the counselor called my mother to come get me, telling her that I was sick. I don’t remember anything after that—only the crying and the feeling that I’d been so happy at Disney World and I would never be that happy again. Disney had nurtured my impulse for fantasy—an instinct vital to survival but dangerous and ultimately damaging if misdirected. Our fantasies are not fantasies if they are given to us rather than imagined by us. We pretend our way into belonging when we feel we don’t or can’t belong because of forces outside of our control—our race and ethnicity, our gender identity, our sexuality—and the Disney parks are happy to assert (and insert, via the vast reach of their movies) themselves as a clean, complete, whitewashed system in which our imaginations can engage. And because of Disney’s long-standing whiteness and the way that every cultural signifier in the parks works to affirm that whiteness, this means that built into its prescribed “magic kingdom” was my own erasure. Disney filled the openness it encouraged with its brand of false American optimism that pretends (and asserts) that nothing could possibly be wrong in this world as long as you believe in magic, a brand that perpetuated the very things my family was trying to escape by going there in the first place: a version of America where people like me grow up among water, mud, and factories.

  * * *

  The impulse that makes Disney World the go-to escape for so many Floridians is the same one that has doomed the future of the state to the sea. The last time I went, I couldn’t ignore what I’d already long internalized, in part because I’d loved the parks so much: the ways in which we’d been manipulated into ignoring and forgetting what was really happening around us both culturally and environmentally and calling such ignorance magic. Disney hides the trash, literally. The parks are run from underground, with maintenance workers and characters seemingly appearing out of nowhere. We don’t see the work or the mess. It just doesn’t exist, or it just disappears, and we pay good money for this bliss in the form of a three-, four-, or five-day pass. Of course we do, we go on vacation to get away from these things. And Disney helps us feel good about our choice to spend that vacation time in its parks, which have even begun to traffic in messages of conservation and environmentalism—a large thematic focus of Animal Kingdom’s newest world, Pandora, and one if its newest rides, Avatar Flight of Passage (the ride has a specific focus on habitat restoration, which is hilarious when you think of the miles of swampland the area that is now Disney World once was). While watching Pixar’s WALL-E for the first time (about a robot tasked with cleaning up Earth after giant corporations encouraged humans to trash it to such an extent that it becomes uninhabitable), I kept thinking, How did this movie idea get past the pitch stage? The movie is in many ways an indictment of all things Disney—all the humans in the movie are on an intergalactic cruise that’s helped them completely forget about Earth’s mess—and yet the day the DVD came out, I forked over my $24.99 so I could own a copy. Disney is so deep in me that I’d be first in line for a WALL-E ride.

  It’s not that I don’t see the irony—I absolutely do (the DVD boasts “Earth (And Space) Friendly Eco-Packaging”). It’s that Disney has somehow taught me that buying that DVD or standing in line for that as-yet-nonexistent WALL-E ride does somehow count as an acceptable and worthwhile response to climate change. Or that buying the Moana DVD, which of course I did, and then watching it multiple times with my niece and dozens of times on my own, somehow undoes the misogyny and racism embedded in the fantasy the parks perpetuate.

  * * *

  The first time my parents ever went to the parks was on their honeymoon. My aunt and uncle spent their honeymoon in Disney World, too. So did my partner’s parents, who live not in Hialeah but in Westchester, the same neighborhood Richard Blanco so lovingly details in his memoir, The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood. Blanco has a whole chapter devoted to his first visit to Disney World, a pivotal moment for any child, but especially for Latinx children who’ve never left South Florida—in part because of the gringo gauntlet you have to traverse to get there. Blanco describes how “Miles away from Miami, everything felt so exotic, so American” by cataloging t
he change in landscape and language, a dislocation that primes his childhood self for the wonders and relative safety of the Magic Kingdom. Blanco doesn’t mention them—because I suspect they went up after he was already grown—but ask any Miami kid about the billboards for Yeehaw Junction and they will tell you how many miles they signified you still had left to drive. Blanco does, however, describe an encounter a couple of hours into the trip between a gas station clerk wearing a Confederate flag belt buckle (a flag Blanco has never seen and can’t name as such) and Blanco’s father: The former is hostile toward the latter’s Spanish-accented English. This scene takes place when Blanco is eleven, in 1979, but it’s replayed itself thousands of times with different kids and different parents, mine included. Whenever our parents drove us all to Orlando in search of magic, they never explained why they refused to give in to our childish pleas to stop at something with a name as ridiculous as Yeehaw Junction.

  You didn’t have to go as far as Orlando to encounter Blanco’s exotic, fantastical America. In high school, some friends and I left the familiar palm-lined streets of Hialeah for the foreign city of Davie, about twenty-five miles north of us, in an attempt to go country line dancing. We dressed for the occasion: any shoe that looked like a boot, anything with fringe. The whole adventure felt a little like heading out to a cowboy-themed Disney park. I wore a choker with feathers hanging from it, deciding it was sufficiently “country.” But once we piled out of the car and saw the people in line, we did the opposite of Blanco’s attempts to try on Americanness: We acted even more Cuban. We became the loud spics everyone thought we would be, speaking in big Spanish even though we normally spoke to each other in English. The guy guarding the door spit into the dirt as we flashed him our learner’s permits, lowering his cowboy hat exactly the way one lowers one’s cowboy hat. Other people in line snickered and shoved as if being directed from somewhere off camera. That night, we became, like Florida itself, a peninsula of warring factions that, in the end, came just short of colliding on a Davie dance floor. We never got in; the doorman turned us away for reasons we didn’t understand. (It was a sixteen-and-over night, and we were all old enough.) Like Blanco, even just twenty-five miles north of home, I felt like we had entered another country. A cowboy spits; a carload of Cubans heads back to the country they came from.

  And growing up in that country—the imagined country of Miami in which I could pretend that every American was also Cuban—provided me with an experience similar to the fantasy world imposed by Disney, with one crucial difference: With Miami, the fantasy was of my own making, and therefore part of “the articulation of the possible,” Judith Butler’s claim that articulating our own self-designed/imagined fantasies helps us create, for ourselves, a place to exist and survive and even thrive in the face of a reality that dictates otherwise. No wonder we wanted to head back to our Miami the instant this foray into Davie contradicted the fantasy that had given us the confidence to head north in the first place.

  Visiting Disney is, for many Miami-raised Latinx kids like us, our first time leaving one fantasy world for another. Our first time around so many white Americans, it’s an experience that has the potential to erase and replace our fantasy for an unattainable homeland, planted in us by our parents, with an idealized white-centered version of paradise. It worked that way for Blanco. There’s a tender moment in his memoir when, as he enters the Magic Kingdom and sees Mainstreet, U.S.A. for the first time, he is so overwhelmed by its beauty and perfection that he turns to his mother and asks if this is what Cuba looked like. His mother responds with what any Cuban reading this knows is coming: Of course not, Cuba was even better. You have to wonder, though, if all those fantasies our parents and grandparents fed us about Cuba—especially about its idyllic, natural beauty—didn’t set the stage for a place like Disney World to swoop into our imaginations and become the kind of promised land we could actually visit (for a price). We could even take a boat ride through it, see and smell it, chase the phantom of that scent all our lives until we find it in an aptly named perfume. Thanks to the fantasy of Cuba our families built in our minds, a Cuba we could never know even if we grew up to someday visit it, we were well practiced in longing for places where, as the song promises, anything your heart desires will come to you.

  Honeymooning in Disney meant that my parents’ future visits would be caked in an extra-sweet layer of nostalgia. I can imagine them there, just barely out of their teens, newlyweds in line for Space Mountain. They’d never been on anything like a roller coaster before; imagine the adrenaline of that big unknown coming on the heels of another—their first night as married people, their first time together without a chaperone. Like many Cuban kids coming of age in the United States in the 1970s, they’d been vigilantly chaperoned for years by the time they married—they got engaged when my mom was fifteen—and the thrill and relief of finally being alone together after such a long and formal courtship really is the stuff of fairy tales, Disney or no Disney. Of course they wanted to take their children there as soon as those kids were potty-trained.

  * * *

  I have a new favorite ride, now that the Great Movie Ride is gone. It’s the aforementioned Avatar Flights of Passage, which I rode for the first time during that rash-addled trip, and which profoundly moved me—figuratively, not literally, as it’s a 3-D virtual reality-type ride that only makes you feel like you’re flying when in fact you’re just clamped down by the waist next to several other people. The brace that comes up behind you and squashes you into a center console initially irritated me, this time literally, as it pressed into the band of poison ivy, which, by that stage of the trip, circled my torso like a belt. The premise of the ride is that you will, via an avatar, be riding the banshees we saw in the film Avatar; we’re being given this opportunity as part of the Pandora Conservation Initiative (the video leading up to the ride tells us that we’re a part of some important conservation/population rebuilding research). The point is you go into the ride feeling great, so you keep waiting for the twist—the moment when everything goes wrong in the lab, or when your banshee loses its mind and tries to throw you off or something, a classic formula for many of Disney’s more formidable rides. But none of this happens. Over the course of this incredibly immersive sensory experience, you’re provided with a vision of conservation efforts that double as entertainment. Also, you will swear you are fucking flying.

  The result is almost transformative. The ride was like a recurring dream of flight I’d had and would have again, even that night, except that in this latest dream, there was now a magical creature doing the flying work beneath me. The fantasy Disney gave me overrode what had long been a version where I was doing the flying, a version I’d had since childhood. When the ride ended—a moment that is intentionally and disturbingly abrupt—I yelled, “No!” as if something precious were being ripped from my hands. Two other people in my group did exactly the same thing. As of this writing, there is nothing like it. Without a FastPass, the wait for this ride was more than three hours long. People suffer through it and afterward say it was worth it. They sometimes get right back in line.

  While strapped in, I forgot about my poison ivy entirely, but it was there waiting for me when the ride was over, searing in the places where the mechanism that had held me in my seat had just been, making it so much worse. And all the while, I hadn’t even noticed. By the time the fantasy was over and the adrenaline wore off and the tears cleared (yes, I cried at the ride’s end, much like I did at my teacher’s desk in third grade, when I first felt how Disney had both given me something while also taking something else away), the welts and blisters were so angry, there was nothing I could do but hope and wait for the pain to subside. It all took far too long to heal.

  * * *

  My niece is following in her mother’s childhood footsteps. Every picture we’ve been sent of her while at the parks has her squinting in disgust at whatever my sister has gleefully presented to her. Disney now has a service where they tak
e the pictures for you, perfectly staged at designated spots around the park, and my sister sprang for it for my niece’s first visit. As of this writing, the service costs two hundred dollars, but you can save thirty by purchasing it in advance. The pictures are magically delivered to her phone and viewable in the My Disney Experience mobile app.

  My sister dragged my niece back to one particular photo spot, in front of Cinderella’s Castle, three days in a row to get the perfect shot. My niece kept inadvertently ruining the fantasy this service promises to provide with her facial expressions, which repeatedly lead you to believe she’s either melting or actively shitting her diaper. One of the best photos catches her nestled next to her grinning parents and rolling her eyes. Her apparent distaste for the parks so far might stem from her sense of being overstimulated; she’s two, so everything is already a fantasy. She’s not ready for Disney World to override her already impressive imagination with its branded version of generic white American happiness. She doesn’t need to be told how to be happy. For now, she’s happiest back in the air-conditioned hotel room, with her diaper on her head as she dances to songs only she hears.

  For 2019, my sister and her husband bought annual passes, the platinum ones with no blackout dates. My niece doesn’t need one: Like all children under three, she gets in for free.

  II

  VARIOUS IMMERSIONS