SAY I DO
Once upon a time, in proper fairy-tale fashion, a man asked me to marry him. This invitation was an excellent life development. It meant, among other things, that a wedding would happen, and I would get to plan it. I love planning, both in theory and in practice, and I hadn’t been given the chance to organize an event with this many moving parts since co-chairing my high school’s prom committee (though I take no credit for the vapid theme, “A Walk in the Clouds,” as that was voted on by the seniors). I would deploy all my event-planning skills, and my wedding would turn out even more amazing than prom had because this time I was totally in charge. I was twenty-three.
Our wedding budget was limited enough that we’d opted to forgo a DJ and instead create a wedding playlist we’d blast through a rented PA system. This choice ended up being the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back for my mom, who had already started to worry that our various money-saving choices (choosing a Sunday date, for instance, or having my uncle officiate an outdoor ceremony at the reception site instead of holding it in a church, or only having three bridesmaids instead of nine or ten) were undermining the seriousness of the event. We were doing weird things that would make guests uncomfortable, she argued, like handing out programs. She’d never been handed a program at a wedding! Why give out pamphlets explaining who everyone in the wedding party was when everyone should already know, because of course every bridesmaid is some guest’s adult daughter. When she said guests, she meant my side of the family: the Cuban and/or Miami-based guests. Cubans don’t have three bridesmaids, she claimed, they have as many bridesmaids as they have female cousins and second cousins, even if they barely know these women. Cubans didn’t do programs, only Americans did that. Did I think I was a gringa all of a sudden?
Maybe I did, now that I was marrying a gringo—the groom was a white man (we’d met in college), and I thought that meant we needed programs because an Emily Post wedding etiquette book, gifted to me soon after my engagement by an older well-meaning white woman, said so. She’d given me this book after indulging my riffs on ideas for the party (and it was, for me, above all else, a party—one where I just happened to be making a lifelong commitment to someone near the beginning). She was concerned, after hearing my money-saving idea of eliminating salad from the buffet (which no Cuban I was related to would eat anyway) that there were things I just wouldn’t know about how white American weddings were done, and she thought Emily Post would help. Which is why I found myself making wedding programs by hand, printing out the various pieces of them at work a little at a time, when no one was looking. My mother watched me thread ribbon through cardstock to bind pages together, shaking her head and wondering why I was wasting my time.
But not hiring a DJ, that’s where she drew the line. A reception without a DJ wasn’t a reception at all, she argued. Then she convinced me she was right by offering to cover the expense of one herself.
This development wasn’t exactly the best news for the groom. He’d looked forward to building a playlist with many of his favorite songs, which admittedly weren’t the jams I’d grown up hearing at receptions. (He has what many people would consider excellent taste in music and refuses to pander to popularity or nostalgia, two qualities that I’d come to learn characterize the go-to songs of most wedding DJs.) I don’t remember if we discussed what Spanish-language music would be on the playlist, but it went without saying that any substantial salsa, merengue, bachata, and/or reggaeton selections on the list would be there because I’d put them there.
Of course music is important at a wedding reception. But in the discussions with my fiancé about this particular aspect of the planning—we had very different tastes in music, to put it lightly—it was clear something weightier was emerging: He and his white monolingual American family had a very different idea of what a wedding reception looked like, the kind of music that would be played, the whole atmosphere. In wanting to control the playlist by doing the music ourselves, he was working against the idea of a cheesy American wedding DJ, a type I hadn’t encountered enough to even register as a type. (I’d been to only two white American weddings in my life by that point, and my concept of this DJ type was largely conflated with my memory of Adam Sandler’s character in The Wedding Singer, and so I imagined these theoretical DJs sporting slight mullets and too-skinny ties, their mouths pressed against microphones that amplified slick, faux-deep voices.) Yet in my experience as a Miami wedding goer, the typical wedding DJ either was currently or had previously moonlighted at Power 96 (aka “Miami’s Party Station” circa 2005) and/or had a residency at a South Beach club (assuming you weren’t already holding your reception at said club, in which case you’d want your DJ to have a residency at a different club). Ideally, your wedding DJ’s name would be Laz, and his equipment would include several barely legal pyrotechnical devices. He would be too cool to talk to, and—aside from announcing the names of the wedding party—he would not need to talk during your reception very much at all, because he understood his turntable skills would do the talking for him. Basically, I’m describing the DJs at the weddings of my various high school friends and cousins, who were all pricier versions of the DJs from their proms. These were not receptions my soon-to-be husband had yet experienced.
In the seventeen months I’d given myself to plan the event, I began to worry that elements of a wedding reception that seemed totally standard to me and my family would be viewed as some kind of spectacle by certain guests. I’d never been to a South Florida wedding reception for a Cuban couple that didn’t have a cigar roller, for instance. A dude in a guayabera sitting at a table behind a stack of tobacco leaves was as typical at a wedding reception as that long line of female cousins all made to wear the same unflattering dress (another decidedly American wedding thing: allowing your bridesmaids to pick their own dresses). But having lived outside of Miami and gone to college and graduate school in predominantly white places, I knew how quickly elements of the reception could turn into edutainment for the white guests, how whatever we put in front of them could become a story that would represent all Cubans to them for the rest of time, because the wedding weekend would likely be their only experience being among us. I imagined them heading back to small-town Illinois or Nebraska, ordering a “Cuban” sandwich at an upscale midwestern bakery, and using that as an opportunity to launch into a completely unrelated story about my reception. I hoped the DJ we hired could help me at least complicate this probably inevitable moment by serving as the bridge between the two cultures, musically. If he played some solid white-people tunes, the white folks would have no choice but to feel included. (I want to acknowledge that I never imagined the DJ as a woman, which speaks to how I’ve been conditioned to think of the person in control of the whole event identifying as male, that only a man could do this job. If I were to do it all over again, that’s one of many things I’d change.)
When I told my fiancé we had the money to hire a DJ—and that if we were going to keep my mom happy, we didn’t really have a choice but to do so—we agreed that we needed one who would understand this cultural divide and figure out a way to bridge it. We needed a DJ who could, as the reception unfolded, anticipate and address both the possible discomfort of our white American guests based on their perception of being excluded; and also the tendency of the white American guests toward exotification: that the reception would be not an event to experience and enjoy, but to view from the outside as spectacle and, usually, with some judgment. In college, I’d seen my life and my approach to living it turned into white people’s teachable moments over and over again, and on my wedding day, I wanted none of that. I thought the way around it was to show them my awareness of and an appreciation for their norms. The complication here, I thought, was that this wedding was happening in Miami, where the wedding DJs seemed indistinguishable from radio and club DJs. Meaning, they weren’t exactly feeling out a crowd for its cultural norms and catering to them so much as they were setting those norms for t
he club-going set. I felt like what I was hoping for was impossible, and I worried—because I am a writer—that my concerns about this aspect of the wedding planning were really just a metaphor for something I wasn’t yet ready to admit.
Was I overthinking this? My mother thought so. But this approach of pleasing everyone some of the time had already informed another major decision, which was to conduct the ceremony in both English and Spanish, the same words said in alternating paragraphs, my uncle serving as our bilingual officiant. This choice meant a longer ceremony (which is not something Emily Post recommends), and it meant that for about half the time the groom’s entire family—himself included—wouldn’t understand what was being said. Most of the younger members of my family speak both English and Spanish, but the older generation—namely my grandparents and their siblings and cousins, who would all be there—only spoke Spanish. Though they’d be left out of the English portion, they hear enough English every day not to feel discomfort around it—that had been their reality since arriving in the United States. This was not the case for the Americans visiting from central Illinois or the suburbs of Omaha: Spanish was not, and had never been, a regular part of their lives. But it was also not the case for the white folks coming from California, who, like many whites who live there, had managed to construct personal and professional lives where—despite being in a state with a large percentage of Latinx people, many of whom speak Spanish on a daily basis—they seldom had meaningful interactions with anyone nonwhite. By having a bilingual ceremony, everyone in the room would understand at least half of what was being said. It was the most inclusive option, and so that made it the best one.
The groom and I agreed I would interview DJs in Miami while he continued preparing for his Ph.D. preliminary exams in Illinois. The first guy was recommended to my mom by her hairdresser; she’d already met this DJ at the salon and, as was clear to me from her repeated claims of his hotness, had developed an instant crush on him. (To be fair, he was pretty hot.) She invited him to her job over our lunch hour—I was working the front desk there that summer—so that I could meet him, but she was already sure he was perfect. He went by DJ Freddy J, he was Cuban, he shaved his arms, he had a slick-backed thicket of black hair with an admittedly excellent fade, he spoke both Spanish and English, and so, in short, my mom thought this was a done deal despite having no idea what he was like as a DJ.
At both of the white American receptions I’d been to prior to my own wedding, at some juncture the DJ played a couple of country songs in a weird, nostalgia-laced way. This never happened at Cuban weddings—at least not at the ones I’d been to. While I didn’t want the DJ I hired to bust out Garth Brooks (the only country artist I could name at the time), I did want to know what he would do, what he knew about white American weddings and what he could bring from that knowledge into this one, seeing as many of the guests (most of my college friends included) were white.
I planned on asking DJ Freddy J of Hialeah Gardens if he knew, for instance, of the chicken dance. I knew nothing, but I had heard about this poultry-themed display as a thing some white people liked to do at their weddings (Emily Post must’ve missed this, but I’d heard about it from some of my groom’s relatives). I didn’t need Freddy to play whatever the chicken dance was, but had he at least heard of it? Say one of the groom’s uncles, three sangrias into the party, asks him to play it: Could Freddy show me how he’d politely and respectfully decline the request?
I began the interview by asking Freddy the following paragraph of a question (which I’d written down beforehand, proof of the extent of my worry): “So, Freddy, many of the guests will be Americans not from Miami. My future husband is a white dude from California whose parents were raised in the Midwest, and some of his family is flying in from places like Illinois and Nebraska. As you already know thanks to my mom, we are super Cuban. All I want is for the reception to be an amazing party. What will you do to be sure everyone has a great time on the dance floor?”
Freddy wasted no time. He tugged on the cross hanging from the gold chain around his neck and answered in Spanish, which he was more comfortable using, but I will provide the answer in English, though it loses much in translation: “Look, okay, the first thing you gotta do is,” here he placed his hands on the arms of his chair, lifted his body out of the seat, pulled his right knee into his chest, then kicked a flexed flat foot high into the air between us while making the impact sound from Mortal Kombat, “kick all those Americans out of there. They don’t dance. They don’t nothing. They are dry and they’re just gonna sit the whole time anyway, so that’s step one, forget about them. That’s a lost cause.”
At this point, the interview should’ve been over, but my mom was giggling like a girl in love, wiping at her eyes and saying, “That’s true, I tried to tell her!”
Many white people I’ve met often think of themselves as culture-less, as vanilla: plain, boring, American white. What they are revealing when they say this, which they often do in jest, is how little race impacts their lives, how whiteness is ubiquitous to them, and they mistake that ubiquitousness as a kind of neutrality or regularness that renders their race and culture invisible to themselves. But from the outside, we see their culture in a way they don’t—or maybe couldn’t, at least not until after the 2016 election, when the majority of white people who voted did so for Donald Trump, who essentially ran on a version of whiteness. That election compelled some white people to look at themselves, at their whiteness, and to wonder what being white—something they’d never really thought about at all—might mean. Good for them, seriously, but it’s an evaluation that DJ Freddy J of Hialeah Gardens had, in 2006, already concluded about white people as reception guests.
Freddy went on to tell us that what I wanted was impossible and therefore I should cater only to the Latinx guests, who were the only ones who knew how to party. Freddy also, it should be noted, kept referring to himself in the third person as DJ Freddy J.
I told Freddy that his response was not an acceptable answer. He said, with more authority than I’d ever said anything at that point in my life, “Well, my bad, but it’s true.”
He laughed big and so did my mom. I knew then I wouldn’t hire him. But it turns out the hiring wasn’t up to me, and Freddy figured that out faster than I had.
He proceeded to flirt with my mom in a way I recognized, because it was the way I knew Miami guys to flirt: leaning forward, shoulders and traps flexed, head held at a slant as he winked and scrawled his sentences in the air with his hands. He encouraged her to bond with him over how ridiculous he found our chosen wedding song, “It’s Only Time” by The Magnetic Fields. He hadn’t heard of the song or the band and dismissed both with a wave of his hand as “white people shit,” and my mom sighed in relief and agreed; she hadn’t heard of them either. They also bonded over berating me for thinking I could “get away with” putting Daddy Yankee’s tired and mildly misogynist reggaeton hit “Gasolina” on my no-play list. Freddy took issue with the fact that my fiancé and I had created a no-play list at all—he claimed he’d never heard of the concept and felt it would hinder his craft, because no song should be even theoretically off limits to a real DJ. He waved his hands at the paper and said he didn’t need to see it. When I insisted he look over the list, he smiled at my mom and asked her what my deal was. She rolled her eyes and shrugged and said, “See what I’m dealing with,” as if she’d already warned Freddy about me.
Strange things were happening in that room, and one of them was that I was starting to see myself on the white side of things. I wanted a DJ who would help center a white experience—the particular white American experience of a Midwestern-in-origin American who Freddy could not imagine because he’d never encountered it. Because in Miami, the white experience is also typically a Cuban one: To be Cuban in Miami was to be a kind of white, with all the privileges and sense of cultural neutrality whiteness affords. Of the three people in that room, I was the only one who knew this, because I was
the only one who’d left Miami for long enough to see what being Latinx meant from the outside. I was the only one who had known the feeling of being a nonwhite adult. (I specify adulthood here because it bears mentioning that my mother’s first years in the United States, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, having left Cuba in the Revolution’s wake, were a crash course in how nonwhite she was; Freddy, though, had come from Cuba fairly recently, as a teenager, to a Miami already colonized by people with the same last names and language as the people he’d left behind.)
I wasn’t able to articulate any of this thinking then, but even if I had, I wouldn’t have felt the need to do so, because I was not letting this dude anywhere near my wedding. He’d insulted half of my soon-to-be family, mocked me in ways that made me feel like I was in middle school again, and saturated the room with his Drakkar Noir cologne—also a 1990s Miami middle school throwback. I think the only question my mom asked him was if he would be so kind as to take out his earrings for the event—his earrings being the only thing about him I wasn’t opposed to—and he told her, for her, anything.
Once he left and I began the chore of airing out the office (lest the smell trigger a second puberty), I was very clear with my mom: No way were we hiring DJ Freddy J. No way were we taking any more recommendations for DJs from her friends. I’d find some names online and set up times to meet them once I was back from that weekend’s bachelorette events in New York City, where my sister was living.
She waited until I was out of town to hire him. She mitigated my anger about this by telling me she’d talked to him and made my expectations clear. My fiancé was rightfully upset, as was I, but there comes a time in the planning of any wedding where you stop giving a shit and just hope for the best. Also, she was paying for it. I did start to worry that I had made a bigger deal out of it than I needed to, that maybe the way the reception unfolded would not turn into a metaphor for larger cultural divides in my relationship that felt insurmountable. Maybe it would all be fine if I just ignored it—more proof that the brand of whiteness my almost-husband practiced was taking solid root in me.
My Time Among the Whites Page 6