Maria Loaiza Bonilla

Arrival

I can’t tell you what to do when you get to your PWI because that’d be cheating because no one told me because you have to make your own memories. 

Mine are uncomfortable. They’re gross-and-sticky-in-August, anxious-half-moons-in-your-palms, pretend-you’ve-seen-the-campus-before memories. Mine are memories of embarrassment because while I didn’t vocalize it, I’d wished that my parents would stop looking in awe at the money we saw walking around. I’d wished they didn’t because I thought it’d give me away. I wanted to look, too, but the fear of standing out wouldn't let me. 

We made our way to my dorm, a historic building with giant white columns holding up years of white legacy. I was to stay in a triple with two others. Nobody told me you could choose your own roommates. Instead, a random generator made its choice for me and I received their contact information in the mail. I didn’t even find out there was a Facebook page for the Class of 2021 until weeks into the semester, when I asked the two across the hall how they’d found each other. (To this day they haven’t accepted my request.) I was placed with two girls, Roommate #1 and Roommate #2, I’ll call them. 

Roommate #1 created the group text for the three of us. Hi! Nice to meet you! Roommate #2 told us how excited she was to meet the two of us in person. Omg hi! I told them that I couldn’t find room measurements online and had no idea what to buy. Ugh that sucks. They both thought it’d be a great idea for us to coordinate room decorations. Totally! I just didn’t know how much it’d cost. All I knew for sure was that they were white girls and into white girl decorations. No big deal, I thought. I’d gone to school with girls like them my entire life. 

I’d already learned how to assimilate. In middle school, I hid my Spanish away whenever I left home to blend in with the white kids around me. It was where I learned to code-switch. In high school, when I realized that my parents didn’t quite know how to, that they couldn’t quite communicate the way I wanted them to, I hid them away, too. On move-in day I let them reveal us, just for a minute, while my parents mingled with their parents, but when they left, I was back to sticking my Latinidad in a box. I thought I could do it as I’d always done, blend in with rich white kids in spite of their privilege. 

But Roommate #1 had money. Like real money. Like daddy’s-credit-card-will-pay-for-this, casual-vacation-in-Sri-Lanka, it’s on me don’t worry! kind of money. I might have grown up with well-to-do girls, but this was different. Her father was an investment banker in California; mine lost his engineering license when we immigrated from Colombia. Roommate #2 I was more comfortable around. She had money, too, but it was the upper-middle-class, lake-house-in-Connecticut, don’t worry you can pay next time! kind of money, and while I didn’t know what her father did, I knew her mother was a teacher. My mother worked at a factory where she never had to speak English—with this plus my father’s salary, we at least reached middle class. 

Worlds collided on move-in day. We arrived at the same time both of my roommates did. I couldn’t hide anything as everything was taken out of the boxes they’d been packed in. My face turned red as the investment banker, the lawyer, the who-knows-what, and the teacher greeted my parents, the two of them stepping over broken English to make small talk, while I met #1 and #2 in person for the first time. I wish I’d been less on edge, nicer. There are things I know now that I didn’t know then, like the way growing up in systems of white supremacy had turned me against my own parents. 

I can’t tell you what to do when you get here but know that there’s a Facebook page. There are rich white girls with their daddy’s credit cards and girls with lake houses. You’ll start to feel a double-consciousness as you slowly go undercover as an insider. You can stick your Latinidad in a box but don’t forget where you put it. You’ll find your people eventually but it takes time. I hope you get to choose your own roommates because I didn’t. I hope their parents speak Spanish because theirs didn’t. I hope your parents don’t feel your shame at their broken English when they make small talk because mine did, and it hurts me to know that I couldn’t hide it well enough to not hurt them, too. I hope you enjoy your move-in day because I didn’t because it still makes me cry when I think about it because you deserve to enjoy it.  

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Middle Years

When you get to your PWI, major in what your grandma won’t scold you for what your parents won’t say is a waste of money whatever you want to major in. I came in as a pre-med student. I didn’t do it because my family pressured me to—like a lot of my classmates’ parents had—but because I really was interested in it. I enrolled in all of the courses everyone calls “weed out” classes, classes I spent years trying not to be weeded out of. I’d wanted to be a doctor since third grade. (If you flip to the last pages of my third-grade yearbook, my teacher signed it I hope you make it to Harvard medical school!) So, I tried my hardest during my first two years. I took biology, chemistry, calculus, organic chemistry, neuroscience, labs for each of them—all of it. What they don’t tell you is that it takes a lot more than just passing a class. There was an entire hidden curriculum that I was left to find out on my own.

The thing is, my parents came to the US in 2001. They were asylum seekers, undocumented for the first few years before we were granted asylum and became permanent residents in 2005. My mother procured Social Security cards and work permits. They both used to be engineers, but their degrees didn’t transfer. For the first few years we were here, my father worked at a furniture moving company. My mother started as a waitress at a Mexican restaurant, then started working at a factory that produced PVC pipes for fifteen years after that. My father’s English got better and he was able to get an office job, but it was far from being the two professionals they used to be. 

As much as they wanted to, my parents couldn’t help me figure out the U.S. education system. They couldn’t help me with weed out classes, or even know what weed out classes were. They couldn’t tell me that to get into medical school you have to have hundreds of hours of shadowing, observing doctors for free when I needed that time for work, because my parents couldn’t support me financially, either. A lot of the kids in my classes, on the other hand, had parents who were doctors or grandparents who’d been doctors—all who knew exactly what it took to get into medical school. They may have had to work hard too, but they were strides ahead of me, and eventually it just fell out of my reach. 

This isn’t me telling you not to major in it, but rather to warn you that there are a lot of people who already have a foot in the door before you find out where the door even is. Nobody told me that. So major in what’s easiest what’s most attainable whatever you want because I really do believe we have just as much of what it takes as everyone here, as long as we know what the barriers look like, know what we’re up against. We can be doctors, too, even if we don’t have doctor parents. Even without all their resources, even if we have to work twice as hard. 

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Departure

Every year, my school hosted a graduation ceremony for Latinx students. They called it Raíces y sueños. They gave me a stole and it was all very cute and sweet, but the registration form made me cry for several reasons. There were happy tears when it asked me to write a message to dar las gracias to my friends and family, a thank you to the people who’d helped me make it to graduation. There were sad tears when it asked me for a phonetic spelling of my name and I thought back to second grade, when my white teacher asked seven-year-old me How do you even say this? and whose forced anglicization of my name I still haven’t shaken. There was one final question that really made me stop and think, though. It asked, “How has being a part of the Latinx community impacted your experience in college?” It took me a couple days to think of a response. 

They wanted me to put into 200 words all the things I’ve barely said in these 2,000. Truth is, it took me a year to realize there was even a Latinx community at my school in the first place, and that I couldn’t have made it through without it. It took me another year to shake the feeling that I still needed to hide my identity from my peers, a late start to defining what that identity is for myself. It took me yet another year to start to take pride in my Latinidad and surround myself with people who embraced theirs with pride, too. It wasn’t until my last year that I could put into words the pain my community felt, and the pain that I’d felt because of my identity, in every part of the campus. The worst part about this kind of pain is that once you can put a name to it, it hurts twice as bad. The microaggressions, the racism, the everything. I hope you never do. Feel it, I mean. But I want you to realize that it takes on a thousand forms at a PWI. 

It’s being the only one the white girls don’t invite to sorority interest meetings, looking down on you when you ask if you can pay the fees with a scholarship. It’s professors putting racist memes on their class slides, a mugshot of Dora the Explorer holding a sign that says, “Illegal Border Crossing/Resisting Arrest.” It’s the telling you that you’re an exotic hookup, that because you are South American, you must be their cocaine queen. It’s committing microaggressions, not changing their language when you tell them it hurts you, then gaslighting you about the pain it causes. It’s being watched and followed in the stores near your dorm. It’s going out to eat, going to class, looking around, and seeing that you are the only BIPOC in the room. There are a lot of rooms like that. 

Being a part of the Latinx community at my school was so incredibly rewarding once I found my people, other Latinx students whose friendship made me feel at home. But it was also incredibly taxing. They don’t tell you that before you get there. The white kids will tell you that you’re there to fill a diversity quota, but you’ll look around and ask, what diversity? Stick with it, though. At the end of the day, you’ll have the same diploma as the kids who had it easier than you did. Be proud of that. So don’t go to a PWI in the first place don’t make the white kids uncomfortable don’t feel like you’re alone because you’re not. Your whole community is rooting for you. That much I will tell you.