What it’s like being a Latina in the Ivy League

The first time I heard any utterance of Spanish was when I was four years old, sitting in a pre-Kindergarten class in the basement of my Texan town’s old Methodist church. I remember mimicking the sounds coming from my mother’s lips as she went around the room, one by one, teaching my classmates how to roll an “r” by pronouncing “pero” and “perro”.

After polishing the rest of the class’ pronunciation, my mother called me to the front of the classroom and asked me to demonstrate the proper rolling of an “r”. Instead of hearing a beautiful ruffle of air flow from my mouth, I made a sound that could only closely resemble a broken transmitter.

Underneath my immediate cloak of humiliation, I became frustrated at my own tongue’s dissonance with what seemed to be my cultural duty and societal expectation. It was as if I were a case study for my astonished classmates: the Mexican girl who couldn’t even speak Spanish.

From then on out, I was aware of the stereotypes and expectations the non-Latinx (Latinx is the all-inclusive gender pronoun) community had about my own ethnicity, even before I was mature enough to know what being Latina entailed.

Moreover, after my acceptance and arrival at Harvard University, the outside opinions and typecasts regarding my ethnicity did not remain isolated to my ability to speak a second language, but extended to my capabilities as a student:

“You only got accepted because you’re Mexican.”

“Do you really think you can handle classes there? I mean, it is Harvard, after all.”

“How are you going to pay for it?”

“You sound so intelligent for a Hispanic girl.”

The young, college-age Latinx population in the United States has been a common source of interest from politicians to media outlets alike because it is the most powerful, up-and-coming demographic in the country.

However, despite the geographical, historical, socioeconomic, and racial variety among the 2.4 million Latinx currently enrolled in colleges, we are still treated as a single interest entity.

How, and why, do non-Latinx impose a monolith for the Latinx experience and identity on college campuses?

For Cesar Rufino, Dartmouth Class of 2018, being on campus meant having to dispel stereotypes from non-Latinxs about his own Latinx identity.

“In a sense, people on campus expect us to act in a certain way. For example, they expect us to speak slang or speak Spanish. There are views held by a large majority that we are completely different, but we are just trying to get an education. We’ve gone through different things to get on campus. When I say different, I mean that it’s not just money, traditions, or customs – it’s what we and others believe our capabilities are.”

At Brown, first-generation college student Brian Elizalde, Class of 2019, shared similar beliefs.

“I believe that across college campuses, there exists the stereotype that people of color, and this includes Latinx people, are academically inferior to the dominant race.”

Unfortuntely, Elizalde and Rufino’s experiences are not without standing.

In a recent study by Baylor University, it was found that white students believed Latinxs needed “to work harder to move up”.

“When we analyzed this perception with beliefs about Latino inequality, the same relationship found for beliefs about African-American inequality appeared also: these respondents tend to agree that Latinos do not work hard enough to improve their life circumstances and are less competent.” said Jerry Park, an Associate Professor of Sociology in Baylor’s College of Arts and Sciences and lead researcher on the study.

But despite having to disprove the stereotypes and low-bound degree of Latinx capabilities enforced by non-Latinx students, Latinxs on college campuses are also forced to address Latinx stereotypes that are perpetuated by fellow Latinx students.

At Harvard, and across campuses nationwide, cultural organizations sprang up at predominately white institutions in the late 20th Century as a means of unifying students of color at universities and colleges that were not built for them.

But what started as a fight for cultural preservation is now an ethnic civil war, at risk to dissipate the vitality of a new, up and coming generation of Latinx students. The difficulty that poses with categorizing Latinidad, a phase used to define one’s identity as a Latinx, as a monolithic culture is that there are varying degrees to which one can feel attached to their Latinx roots.

Two Septembers ago, as I introduced myself to a group of upperclassmen at an introductory mixer for one of Harvard’s Latinx organizations, I was met with furrowed eyebrows and tilted heads when I replied, “I don’t know” to questions regarding what part of Mexico my family was from. Despite the fact that I am a 4th Generation Mexican-American, my fellow Latinx colleagues had preconceived holdings about how strongly my roots to my culture should have been.

For Leticia Acosta, a member of the Class of 2000 at the University of Texas at Austin, going to Latinx student organization meetings was “isolating” and “awkward.”

“I didn’t speak Spanish and I remember feeling an isolation from fellow Latinx students because of that.”

Robert Martinez, Oklahoma University Class of 2018, explained how many Latinx students, such as himself, have faced ethnographic prejudice from fellow Latinxs on campus.

“The danger with the Latinx organization on this campus is that they feel as if everyone has had same background and knowledge and same conviction about their culture, even though that’s not the case. I come from a Mexican background, but I’ve never been to Mexico. A lot of people don’t even know I’m Latino until I tell them because I don’t have the typical dark skin or dark hair.”

“Other Latinx students have commented on the fact that I do not speak Spanish as a factor of my Latinx identity. I’m not ashamed of not being able to speak Spanish. I don’t reject my Latinidad because of it. That’s how I, and a lot of Latinx kids in my generation, grew up.”

In attempting to answer the question, “what is the college experience like for Latinx students,” my answers appeared as complex and multilateral as the classification itself.

Being Latinx on a college campus means to be told what to look like, sound like, dress like, and to take an interest in from every other voice but your own.

It means you have to defend your degree of “Latinidad” to those that may not agree with yours as fitting to your external appearance.

It means to be of an ancestry from one of the most beautiful regions of the world and to have a complexion that is not solely limited to one shade of melanin.

I am a Latina. My story, like many Latinxs, is complicated, but that is what makes me so damn strong and invincible and all-encompassing and beautiful. My inadequacies, in which they are plentiful, have never been and will never be from where I came from, nor will they stunt where I will go.

Nevertheless, it is a typical Sunday night in New England. As I turn my back on the dwindling winter scene outside my window, I crank up the dial on my radiator, dial my mother’s phone number, and begin to silently practice pronouncing “pero” and “perro” in between dial tones.