My Time Among the Whites

by Jennine Capó Crucet

  Larsen’s Passing also taught me, at age eighteen and living outside of Miami for the first time in my life, that passing for white was something one could do on purpose. Years later, I’d find myself in Lincoln doing just that while looking at apartments, but only after having flat-ironed my curly hair and wearing my glasses instead of contact lenses, to hide, I guess, behind the frames. I’d told myself I was just trying to look professional, but I knew a euphemism when I heard it. Here is the ugly truth: I didn’t want to miss out on a good apartment because of someone’s ignorance, and that meant doing what I could to look whiter. On a walk-through of the place I eventually rented, the young white woman showing me around complained out of nowhere that the previous tenant’s food was really smelly, saying, “He was Indian, so … you know.” I said only, “Indian food is delicious,” which meant: Please continue to think I’m white and therefore as complicit in your racism, because I really want this apartment. It was a stance I could take in part because of my light skin and the privileges it affords, and I felt guilty for intentionally accessing such privileges. Now, this same light skin was keeping me safe at the rancher’s table—a protection I’d accessed unintentionally but that I was afraid to voluntarily give up once he’d made it clear how much he hated people like me. But in not giving up that protection, I was helping him perpetuate his ignorance by choosing instead to ensure my own safety.

  Which is another word for comfort. Meaning, something I could afford to relinquish, something we must in fact relinquish, if we have any hope of changing each other’s minds.

  I did not have the privilege of knowing which of those two words—safety or comfort—would prove more accurate.

  * * *

  The irony in the rancher’s anger about Mexican immigrants getting free passes for citizenship—an anger that is based on falsity spread through the propaganda he consumed along with every meal—is that there is a Latinx group that, at the time, did benefit from that kind of special treatment. That privilege, which could be described as a free pass to citizenship, had been extended (for many years and for many complex reasons) to Cubans. Meaning, to my parents. The rancher had no idea that the manifestation of one of his greatest fears—the American-born child of these immigrants who were taking everything, everything—was sitting at his dinner table. That she’d been hired, in fact, by the public university whose football team he followed as closely as his religion. Look at me, taking their jobs. From his perspective, by just sitting there, I was proving his point. And yes, I may have literally paid him for that seat, but didn’t my soon-to-be salary come from his own tax dollars? Lord, if he only knew what was right there in front of him. He had no clue how right and how wrong he was.

  I now look back on the trip and can’t believe I went up there alone in the first place. If I hadn’t been raised in Miami and thus tacitly taught to consider myself as a kind of white, I would’ve known to question my safety sooner. “I don’t think we’ve ever had anyone from Miami come stay with us,” the rancher’s wife told me when I’d called, and it wasn’t until I was driving back to Lincoln that I thought: If I were any darker, I would’ve learned a long time ago that the safest move is to avoid the kind of people I just left behind.

  There is no way I would make this trip now. I’m too scared to head into the rural parts of Nebraska, where I’m not sure I count as American despite being born here. More than that, in the time since the election, I’ve lost the desire to know what life is like for a certain type of Nebraskan, a certain kind of American. And that’s the scariest part of this story, learned in the aftermath of the trip: I’m as ready to make judgments about them as they did about people like me when they voted for the Republican candidate. The night of the election, after the race was called, a group of ten or so young white men wearing American flags as capes marched down the street in front of my apartment building, a main drag in Lincoln, cheering and chanting “Lock her up!” It was almost two in the morning. Their yelling woke me up. In my half-sleep, I heard the phrase a new way: The “her” they meant was me. I thought of the rancher, how his complaints about Mexicans were really about policies that applied only to Cubans, how I left that fact unacknowledged out of fear—I thought about how these boys could be his sons, and I felt grateful that I’d kept my mouth shut, that I’d left the ranch without any confrontation. The phrase I thought was, I left in time. I wondered how much longer my light skin would keep me hidden from them.

  * * *

  The rancher had only one thumb, the result of having swung a bad dale with a lasso. “The speed and heat from the rope take it clean off,” another ranch guest—this one a regular from Colorado who came back season after season for a work-vacation—explained to me. “You see a lot of old rodeo guys without thumbs,” he said.

  I never acknowledged the rancher’s missing thumb, or that the word “dale” (pronounced DAH-lee) is taken from the Spanish word the Mexican cowboys—vaqueros—yelled as they tossed their lassos. It’s a skill American cowboys took from them. I looked all this up once I was back in Lincoln because hearing this Nebraskan saying “Dale!” as if singing along to Pitbull’s latest made me think there had to be a connection between the words. I wanted there to be one; I wanted desperately to link these things—to show how history and language could work together to lead this Sandhill cowboy to yell a stolen Spanish word every day of his life without even knowing he was doing so. I wanted to find the right detail, make the right discovery that would open up his heart and make our lives seem less foreign to one another. Or, if that seems more and more impossible with each passing day—as he chose to keep Fox News on at the dinner table, signaling to anyone there what kind of America he believes in—at least it could open up someone else’s heart, perhaps yours.

  I don’t know if the rancher knows the origin of this word, of how it ended up in his mouth. The connection might seem to him as strange as finding a French film crew playing cowboy on his ranch. Or as upsetting as realizing that a few days in a saddle will actually teach you very little about the lives of many of the people you are about to encounter. Or it might be as jarring as something I felt on my last day there: sitting on a horse, my eyes closed, the Nebraska wind rolling over the Sandhills and thrashing miles and miles of waist-high grasses and sounding exactly like the relentless wash of waves against a Miami shore. There was no denying it. There was no drowning it out.

  THE COUNTRY WE NOW CALL HOME

  I.

  Over the past several election cycles, whenever discussion turns to Florida, talking heads can’t help but drift to the topic of the Cuban American vote in Miami. I used to be part of this vote, but my out-of-state move has me playing a new role in every election: that of an unofficial Get-Out-the-Vote advocate to a dozen or so very disillusioned Cuban voters, the two of most immediate concern being my parents.

  Months before Donald Trump secured the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, signs dotted lawns all over Miami-Dade County proclaiming “This is Rubio Country.” These signs might as well have just said, “A Cuban American family lives here.” Even if they weren’t exactly fans of Rubio, for many Miami Cubans the prospect raised in the Republican primary of having an American president of Cuban descent was too inspiring not to embrace. (Ted Cruz, of course, didn’t count.) Let Puerto Ricans have the first Latinx Supreme Court Justice; us Cubans would go down in history as being the first Latinx Americans to make it all the way to the White House.

  Because they rarely leave Miami, people like my parents took the literal signs in support of Rubio as a figurative one that he would win the Republican primary. As early primary states started coming in for Trump, my parents kept saying, How is this happening? Who are these people voting for this clown? Trump’s robocalls saying, quite literally, “Don’t vote for a Cuban,” were working. Then it was Florida’s turn.

  The electoral map of the Florida primary results showed the peninsula as a solid Trump red, punctuated by a big blue dot at its end—Miami-Dade County
, self-proclaimed Rubio Country. (The image of that spot of blue at the bottom of the state prompted a slew of jokes on social media about Rubio getting “just the tip.”) Gone was one version of a historical run at the presidency—one many Cubans were hoping to see.

  For years I’d bemoaned the fact that my parents were largely one-issue voters: the issue being a candidate’s stance on Cuba and the embargo, since anything directly or indirectly supporting the Castro government was out of the question. But I embraced this tendency once Trump locked down the nomination, urging them to please vote for one reason and one reason only: to prevent a Trump presidency. This urging, though, began before we knew for sure who I’d have to beg them to vote for.

  Brave is the daughter who tries to convince her Cuban parents to vote for any Clinton. “I can’t vote for that man’s wife,” my mother told me after saying she was considering not voting at all. Many Cubans (my parents included) hate Bill Clinton for several reasons, the most relevant one in this instance being that he was president when the Elián González deportation saga occurred. The Clinton administration is, in the minds of many Cuban Americans of my parents’ generation, solely to blame for the decision to send six-year-old González back to Cuba several months after he was rescued from a broken raft floating in the Florida Straits. Many speculate it cost Al Gore the election. In March 2000, then mayor Alex Penelas described Gore’s connection to the decisions surrounding Elián as “guilt by association” and warned that Miami’s Cuban population would hold the Clinton administration responsible should González be sent back. He was right: In Florida, 81 percent of the Cubans voted for Bush in 2000. Many of those Cubans saw themselves in Elián, in his story, in his mother’s wish to build what she hoped would be a better life for them in the United States. She drowned in the crossing.

  Historically, much of this hatred originated with the Kennedy Administration, which many Cubans blame for the failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion. This blame eventually translated into a general distrust of the Democratic Party—a feeling that was fading with voters my parents’ age until Elián’s deportation reinvigorated it, spawning a new generation of one-issue voters. (In December 2000, during my annual checkup while I was home from college, my doctor—a Cuban man in his early fifties—showed me a framed photo of a banner he and other men had hung off a Miami expressway overpass. It read, THANK YOU, ELIÁN. WE REMEMBERED IN NOVEMBER.)

  Elián’s deportation reignited that grudge, mobilizing Cuban Americans to go out and vote against Gore. This grudge, I learned from my mom and others, now extended to Hillary. Over the phone, I told her, “Mom, you have to vote for her, you can’t not vote, it’s too dangerous.”

  As light-skinned Cuban Americans based in Miami, we’d always had the privilege of being able to vote, perhaps in part because my parents’ demographic historically tended to vote with the party currently most interested in voter suppression. My parents have never struggled to vote or to register to vote in all the time they’ve been American citizens—a privilege denied darker Americans since this country’s beginnings, and which continues to this day. My own difficulties registering to vote only occurred when I moved to Tallahassee (where some supposed mix-up with my Social Security number got me temporarily kicked off the voter rolls), but this administrative hurdle was nothing compared to the extent of voter suppression impacting black and brown Americans. We had the privilege of not (yet) doubting whether or not we’d be allowed to vote, should we choose to do so.

  “I can’t believe Marco Rubio actually endorsed what’s-his-face,” my mom said, Trump having taken on Voldemort status for us. “I hate Marco Rubio now. He didn’t show up for things because he was too busy running for president and then he gave that up. He didn’t do his job.”

  “But you have to do your job,” I said, skirting the cheesiness of that segue. She caught it, though, and made a farting sound with her mouth. When Obama was running for president, my sister and I both made calls on his behalf using the tools he provided on his website; we were using those skills, however rusty, on her, and she knew it.

  I told her to think of a vote for Hillary Clinton as a vote for herself, for all the times in her life when a man with less experience or training ended up as her boss. I asked her to think of it as a vote for me, or for my sister—two women whose commitment to their careers had sometimes caused conflict with the men in their lives. I told her a story about my old job, how a more qualified woman had been passed over for department chair in favor of a man who’d once referred to her as “the old girl” in a department meeting—this happening while she was serving as assistant chair. I kept stories like this coming (any woman reading this and/or that you know has tons of them). I even asked her to think of a vote for Hillary as a vote for her forthcoming granddaughter (my sister was pregnant with her first kid, who we’d learned would be a girl). Imagine her being born while a woman was president, I said. I didn’t care if this tactic was cheap; short of anything illegal, I did or said whatever it took to get her to go out and vote against Trump. I had no qualms about playing the gender card with her; besides, hadn’t she been willing to vote for Marco Rubio out of similar allegiances? Isn’t that the truest explanation as to how Rubio got just the tip?

  As 2016 wore on, I heard from more and more friends back home that their parents weren’t voting. We were afraid their apathy would translate into a Trump win. Our families didn’t seem to recognize all the times in history—as recently as 2000—that their own votes against a candidate have been a crucial deciding factor. They didn’t realize that not voting—the ultimate gesture of complacency—was a privilege they didn’t actually have: It only felt that way because they lived in Miami, a place where it was easy to think, if you were Cuban, that you were white and therefore not part of the immigrant groups Trump was making a campaign out of promising to deport. It was a complacency that went against their very presence in the United States, a complacency they sometimes incorrectly attribute to Cubans still in Cuba or Cubans who left the island long after they did. All my friends and I did between then and that November was urge our parents not to stay home in protest on election day. That staying home was no protest at all, but a relinquishing of the very freedom their families had left Cuba hoping to restore. All we did was urge them to do what they already knew how to do in moments like that: make their disgust for a candidate known by voting instead for whichever candidate had the best shot at beating them.

  II.

  Less than a week after Trump won the 2016 election—including Florida, by a very slim margin—my sister gave birth to her daughter at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. I’d booked a flight that had me in Miami seven days before and seven days after her due date, the hope being I’d be there even if the baby was early or late. She arrived nine days early, which means she was three days old when I met her. I spoke with my sister over the phone her first night as a mom, while she was still in the hospital. She was whispering because the baby was in the room with her. She told me the whole birth story and said that just after the all-woman staff helped her deliver a healthy baby girl, before they’d even cut the cord, the first thing my sister said to her daughter was, “Go back inside, Trump’s the president.”

  Three days later, I met the girl whose impending arrival had helped me convince my mom that Hillary Clinton was the better role model for her new granddaughter. My timing was off for the official arrival of my niece, but I was home in Miami for another life-shifting event late that November: the death of Fidel Castro.

  I am always somehow back in Miami when something monumental happens in our community: the first time Fidel supposedly died; Celia Cruz’s death; Obama’s 2015 visit to Cuba; the Elián González chaos. The events of the González ordeal all coincided with my breaks when I was home from college, a year of events that I had to turn into a novel in order to write through the media’s inaccurate and incomplete portrayal of frenzied Cubans throwing themselves at the feet of a young boy-turned-symbol.

  T
he first time Fidel Castro died was on my birthday in 2006. I’d been living in Minnesota but was in Miami when the announcement went out that Castro had had an operation and was temporarily ceding power to his brother. This being the first time ever that Castro had voluntarily stepped away from his dictatorship, speculation ran wild, and Miami Cubans took to the streets to celebrate the death of a tyrant, a symbol of terror and loss for exiled Cubans of all races and faiths. What better birthday present, my parents joked.

  The morning after his latest death was confirmed, my sister texted, “Fidel is dead … again,” one of twenty-six mes-sages from friends and relatives sharing the news. But I’d already heard—around midnight, Cubans of every age poured into the streets of Miami to celebrate the death of a dictator who’d had a profound effect on our lives, who was, in many ways, the reason we were here in the first place. I was in Westchester, a south Miami neighborhood that’s arguably the heart of Miami’s Cuban community (and as a Hialeah native, I’d be the first one to argue).