On naming ourselves,or: When I was a spic

I

When I was growing up in suburban New Jersey in the 1980s, my best friend was an Italian-American girl I will call Monica. We met on Halloween in the third grade, when we were both dressed as black cats and the teacher had us walk together in the school costume parade. Since then, we were inseparable, and because we lived only a few blocks apart, we spent most afternoons at each other’s houses, with weekend sleepovers. Monica’s mother had Monica at 18 and was on her second marriage to a much older truck driver who was very strict. But he was the only father Monica knew at that point, so she adored him, and I was fond of him too, even when I would go over to their house and hear him talking about “those dirty spics speaking Spanish all the time” as he sat with his wife in the living room.

I had never heard the word spic. But my family spoke Spanish at home, and so I understood that I might be a spic too. My parents are Colombian. I was accustomed to prejudices and sneers at the mention of their nation on account of the stereotypes related to the cocaine trade. I had been made fun of by neighborhood kids for the color of my skin, and because we were simply foreigners. But this blanket reference based on the language was something new, and I did not understand how it could be something negative. So I asked my best friend Monica if I was a spic and she shrugged. Together, we took the inquiry to her stepfather:

“Am I a spic?” I asked him as Monica stood beside me.

He nodded. “Yes. But you’re one of the good ones.”

Somehow, with my 8-year old logic, I accepted this. Monica and I went back upstairs to her room to play with the cat that her stepfather would force her to abandon on the side of a road a year later because he got sick of looking at it. A few years later, when we were in high school, Monica, who had been harboring an eating disorder since she got her period and who had become increasingly withdrawn and moody toward me, had a nervous breakdown. The guidance counselor got her to admit that her stepfather had been sexually abusing her for years, something she had never shared even with me because she later admitted, he had threatened to kill us both if she did so. Because her own mother chose to side with her husband rather than with her daughter, blaming Monica for trying to ruin her marriage, Monica was not allowed by Social Services to return to live in her home. With nowhere else to go, she came to live with my family, shared my bedroom, lived as my sister, and as another child to my parents.

As I am fiction writer, I am always looking for a character’s motivation and its origins. From what I have told you so far about Monica, you may not be surprised to learn she became obsessed with criminology and her dream was to become just like Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs and bring horrible men to justice. It took over a year but her mother eventually left her husband (only once he confessed guilt but not remorse), although she could now no longer afford the rent on her own, so she and Monica moved to another town where she finished high school. We remained the closest of friends even as we went to different colleges, and our lives took different turns. She majored in sociology and became a parole officer, and then began to work for the government in various federal agencies. During Hurricane Katrina, she worked for Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), making sure that disaster relief was disseminated. For a time, her job was to negotiate with First Nations tribal elders so that the government could use parts of their burial lands. Monica and I would see each other once a year or so, and she would tell me about her work. She felt immense pride at working for the government. She met her husband on a military base. For her, the government was home.

She had been heavily promoted, they had paid for her master’s degree, and she now was up for top security clearance. She told me she had been subject to extensive background checks and asked if she could put me down as a character reference. I said, of course, and one day the government called, and an official asked me several very personal questions about her but the one I remember most was whether or not I would trust Monica with my life. I said I would.

The last time I saw Monica, over dinner as we celebrated the release of my latest novel, because Monica will always come out to celebrate and is always the proudest person in the room after my parents, she told me about her new government role. Now, she works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). But she is no longer just deporting people, she told me, as if that work was menial. She was extremely high ranked, and her position involved overseeing the many suicides that happen within the division.

Apparently, an astonishing number of ICE officers kill themselves with regular frequency. Monica told me that almost weekly, it is her job to deal with the news of a recent suicide so that it does not interfere with surviving officers’ productivity. To ensure this, she implemented counseling programs and mental health enrichment. I have often wondered about ICE officers. I will admit it warmed my heart a bit to know they struggled with the dubious ethics of their work enough to contemplate suicide. You can decide what this says about me. But as we sat together over dinner that evening, I looked at Monica, who still has the same smile and the same mousy laugh of the girl I met in the third grade, who still greets my parents with warm hugs and endless gratitude for having taken her in all those years ago and treated her like their own daughter, and tried to reconcile her with the Monica, who at 40 years, is charged with managing suicide impact in order to better deport the masses that arrive at this nation’s doorstep.

Monica was saved by immigrants. She would tell you this herself. She told my parents and me, when she invited us all to her wedding that she would not have survived her youth had she not found refuge in our home.

In our house, she ate Colombian food and learned Spanish, she slept through the night, and learned to laugh and trust again. In our house, she learned the difference between what we were and what her stepfather, the man who abused her, had called spics.

II

I am often asked my thoughts on being referred to as a Latina writer. Anglo-American writers are never asked this question, and I have found that it is akin to asking for my “papers.” But more immediately, I offer that I did not grow up viewing myself through the term of Latino/a because it was not yet widely available or employed as a label. The term is so widespread now that it is hard to fathom that it was not officially adopted by the US government until 1997, at which point it replaced the term “Hispanic,” and the more loosely and incorrectly, although more popularly applied, “Spanish.” In 1997, I was a junior in college. I was 20 years old. I was a Colombian girl from New Jersey—the mere use of Colombian being a placeholder for indigenous and mestizo DNA. Courses at my college, which I was not even enrolled in, had names like “Hispanic Literature.” Latino, as viewed through North American eyes, was still a fresh and new concept, and thus, awkward on the English-speaking tongue.

“Somos Latinos,” sure, I heard this all the time in my home, where my parents’ closest friends were Cubans, Panamanians, Dominicans, and our Latinness and our displacement united us all. But we never surrendered claim to our defining national cultures. We may share a bond as a result of language and diaspora, but I have often felt categorizing us all by the same unified term of Latino is another colonialism, which implies that we cease to be of the earth that made us and, instead, are of the hand that claimed us or that points to us from afar, othering us by lumping us together.

How can I embrace all that I love about the common threads in our peoples while rejecting the need to be categorized, homogenized, sterilized for mass North American consumption, and labeled with a signifier which tells you, “This here woman that you are looking at is what one might consider a standard Latina,” when there is nothing standard about us—with different racial and cultural makeup, some entirely devoid of colonial influence, some entirely devoid of indigenous rooting, and some constituting other migratory lineages, all within the manifold traumas and trajectory of colonialism.

I am distrustful. It is within my rights to be resentful. It is also my right to point out that when we, who are now known as Latino/a in the United States, travel abroad and refer to ourselves as such, Latin Americans often look at us with skepticism.

Still, I must admit that we have found power in this label. It has not been a mere stripping away but has also provided us with armor with which to confront discrimination and silencing and draw strength from our peers in immigration and dislocation, those who are exploring and defining the new face of the Latin American identity in exile and diaspora. This is a beautiful thing. And if arriving at this point requires acquiescing to certain passive and primarily benevolent labeling, well, I guess that is okay.

III

If I sound conflicted, it is because I am.

IV

Last year, I was in a South American country for an important literary festival at which one of my books, recently translated to Spanish, was featured. I did several panels and events; signed many books; and did many interviews for print, radio, and television, all in Spanish. Invariably, I receive questions regarding my identity as both a citizen of Colombia and the United States. I am asked how I view myself, although I understand the question to be more accurately, an approximation of how I am viewed by others. I usually explain that I was made to understand very early in life by those outside my household that even though I was born in the United States and lived there all my life, I would never be considered an American the way an Anglo child would by virtue of my parents’ foreignness and what others determined to be brownness, which called for exclusion from the white American cultural power structure. I was also made to understand that to be Latino/a in the United States is to be constantly, perpetually, and politically humiliated.

For this reason, I understood my cultural identity to be unfixed, fluid, and rather than receive it as rejection, I took it as a way to be liberated by national or cultural loyalties, something that has served me well as a writer when our burden is to write truth without an agenda.

However, even though in my life I have chosen to be free of cultural constriction, I am constantly confronted by it.

At the same festival, during some downtime between my own events, I went to see a panel the featured several women writers, one of whom I consider a friend. The rest were women I admired in some capacity, if not for their work then by virtue of being women who manage to write and publish books within the male-dominated Latin American literary landscape. I was eager to hear their thoughts and found a seat near the back of the room and my friend on the stage gave a little wave to me in the audience.

The panel was moderated by a man and evolved into a spirited discussion about the challenges of publishing fresh and original work despite a corporate structure that leans conventional. For some reason, the moderator turned the discussion to the subject of Latino/a writers in the United States, framing them as rivals to the Latin American writers, as, he seemed to imply, Latino/a writers in North America tend to enjoy more commercial success. This set the women ablaze. They had opinions they had clearly been nurturing for quite some time. One writer from Argentina launched into a diatribe about how all the Latino/a writers in the United States write about the same thing—how sad and difficult it is to be a Latino/a in the United States, and have nothing else to say about anything. “That’s not writing,” she said. “They are not writers. They are victims of their own self-pity.” The writer from Chile chimed in, asking why everything has to be about identity for those Latinos? Why can’t they just write a story that is just a story, and forget about things like discrimination and immigration and all that hardship that goes along with it that has been written about to death already? “There’s nothing original in that,” she said. The Uruguayan writer shared how she has been unable to have her works published in the United States because publishers are unable to appreciate the sheer innovation in her prose, and how it exists independent of her national or cultural identity. The US publishing industry is full of cowards, she asserted, from top to bottom, editors to writers. “Those who call themselves ‘Latino writers’ are not even Latino,” she asserted. “They’re gringos with Spanish names, and they are not contributing anything new. They just want to cry into their pages.”

I could not believe what I was hearing.

Here, were my peers reducing another branch of our literary community to yet another oppressive stereotype: The Tragic Latino.

My friend, who was on the stage, looked positively trapped. She was born and raised in Colombia, but has always considered me just as Colombian, though through a different spectrum of experience. At least that’s what I thought until then. I watched as she squirmed on the stage and tried to avoid the moderator’s attempts at pulling her into the dialogue. However, it struck me that as uncomfortable as she appeared, it was likely mostly due to my being a witness, not because this discussion, which the other women writers were contributing to with such abandon, was something she had never heard before.

I shared this anecdote with some fellow Latino/a writers and editors while in Berkeley last spring for another literary festival. They could not believe their ears. Here, we, writers who comfortably participate in two languages, two cultures, who hold two passports, who have tried to describe this experience in a way that reflects both literary innovation and the truth of our time, are being deprived of our place in the literary imagination, and, in turn, are being denied our diaspora and our very identities.

V

There is a new term on the block. A new way for us to describe ourselves without describing ourselves. As the aims of the word Latinx are already well documented, I will move into other territory.

I admire the mission of the term. I think inclusivity is important. However, what leaves me unsettled is the potential tyranny of Latinx. In imposing, from a North American perspective, the X onto Latino/a, a term that in itself is still up for debate, we are denying the linguistic heritage of the word and ignoring the fact that the Spanish language already accommodates exceptions of gender when written in the masculine plural, and that using the feminine denotes a specifically feminine subject. It is looking at the Spanish language with its Romance roots from a North American and Anglo and Germanic ethos, taking the usage of the masculine and feminine literally and oppressively, male-dominatingly, when it doesn’t need to be so. We are, in effect, denying ourselves our own access to our linguistic inheritance, something that was already done to us when colonialism sought to deny indigenous existence and eradicate its culture, language, and claim to the land.

What are we really accomplishing, then, in this new self-erasure?

There are practical issues to address. For one, we can see where it begins, but where does the replacement of the X in a language that is entirely rooted on the masculine and feminine end? Do my abuelos become my abuelxs? When I have children, do my hijos become my hijxs? What about my Italian-American friend Monica, who I mentioned earlier? Does she become Italianx–Americanx? What about the French language? Do les français become les françaix? And if we take it all the way back to Spain, do los españoles become españolx? Or will we leave the rest of Romance languages alone and only hold ourselves accountable in this new standard of inclusivity?

By this rational, why is it permitted to accept the non-gendered English default of American over Americanx which would then leave space, within that extra letter X, for self-determination rather than the language’s implicit denial of gender identity altogether?

Another concern is that Latinx is virtually unpronounceable in Spanish (although some may argue for its connection to Nahuatl). We can try it in different ways. I have heard it pronounced Latin-X, La-teen-X, and La-tinks, but these are English-influenced attempts. Staying true to Spanish, a more accurate pronunciation would be Latin-equis or Latin-sh. Either way, the label feels entirely North Americanized, reliant on the privilege of access to the English language. And even if the term can exist between these two languages, it still remains unpronounceable in pretty much every other language in the world.

I must mention that as a writer who travels often within Latin American literary circles, while issues of gender inclusivity are receiving enormous attention, the idea of a replacement term like Latinx is almost entirely ignored. Again, this may have to do with the North American tendency to lump ourselves and all our Latin American-descended counterparts into one safe sack so that our non-Latinx peers know how to view us, while in Latin America, national and/or cultural identity holds precedence. Even so, there is no rush to self-identify as Colombianx, Bolivianx, or Argentinx. And among Latin American writers seeking gender equality, there is no call to be known as escritorx.

While I think all our conversations around it are useful at illuminating the limitations of binary linguistic gender models, perhaps, because I have always felt that terms are more constricting than liberating, and that we, as individuals, should not need to depend on them for our own identity construction and validation, I do not believe that Latinx will save the day or that it will not be replaced by some other term in a few years.

VI

Last week, I wrote a proposal for a project in which I used the word Latinx a few times. It felt right to do so. And last month I was at a conference for which, in preparation for a panel, several Latinx writers exchanged correspondence spliced with Latinx here and there. However, when it came time for the actually panel, the word did not leave the lips of a single person during the hour and a half of heated discussion about Latino/a narratives in US literature. Instead, while there were writers on the panel and in the audience who exist beyond the gender binary, all opted for usage of Latino/a.

Is this because we are mere creatures of habit, not nearly as progressive as we think, too accustomed to the sound and feel of Latino/a already? Is it because Latinx is still too new or because of its awkward and near unpronounceability?

Is it because, at the end of the day, we are all thinking about other things more than we are thinking about this, or is it because we have found that Latinx serves us well in the written form, carrying important weight, and is an implicit call to consideration and political thought; however, it has not yet found a similarly adequate place in oral discourse? If this is the case, maybe we can accommodate it with Latino/a/x.

I live in Miami, a predominately Latin city, where the term Latinx is seldom used outside of a college campus. Among young people, many of whom are first- or second-generation immigrants of Latin American descent, you would be hard-pressed to find one who refers to themselves or their friends as Latinx instead of Cuban or Peruvian or Ecuadorian. In perhaps the most pan-Latin city in the world, the tendency is toward individualism, and in that individualism exists the inclusivity.

But I admire that the Latinx initiative is a way to claim our identity rather than accept what has been served to us on a platter or shoved down our throats. In this way, I hope it does catch on, so that singular surrogate letter X can offer more ground to stand on, and at the very minimum, a space with which more discussion on the matter can occur.

VII

Naming ourselves is important, lest we be named by others. There is the risk that despite its best intentions, with Latinx, progressives are simply performing their inclusivity for each other, while the mainstream will ignore this effort toward identity expansion. I finished reading a nonfiction book just yesterday, written by a Latino/a author, which referred to Latinos as Hispanics.

The other day, as I eavesdropped on a political argument between family members at a restaurant, I heard, after a son pointed out to his father that he was Latino, his father responded, “I’m not Latino. I’m Cuban!”

Out of curiosity, I wrote the word Latinx down on a napkin and showed it to the waitress, asking her how she’d pronounce it.

“¿Eso qué dice?” she asked. “¿Lateen-kees?”

During a discussion among Latinx writers not long ago, one Latinx writer debated the need for the term while another argued in favor of linguistic gender neutrality.

“What if I don’t want to neutralize my gender?” the first writer wondered. “My gender, after my ethnic makeup, is the most significant aspect of my human experience.”

In adopting Latinx, allowing her identity to be folded in with so many others, she argued that her own claim to being known as Latina, a term she embraced, would be eroded, and that Latinx was somehow a negation of the spectrum of her feminine experience on this earth.

Another writer observing the debate suggested that Latinx should only be considered and used as a broader third option, rather than occupying all gendered terms and eliminating the usage of Latino and Latina entirely. But neither of the other two writers involved in the discussion were satisfied with this alternative.

The writers could not agree, and the conversation turned to other things.

I thought of the self-identified gender-fluid child of another writer friend of Guatemalan descent, an 18-year old who prefers to be referred to by the pronoun they, and has changed their name to one that is gender neutral; someone who, with their fierce pride in their mother’s heritage and their fluency in Spanish, has finally found a refuge and acceptance in a mere word—Latinx—and a place within their community where it did not and could not exist before. For this person, Latinx means they do not have to acquiesce to a label that does not fit them and that one may argue ignores them altogether, and instead is able to choose one that is more honest and authentic to their experience.

By the same token, one wonders if an individual’s right to demand usage of Latinx means denying another individual’s right to opt out of it. I have noticed some backlash against those who are resistant, skeptical, those who bring up questions or gaps in the logic of promoting Latinx usage, and it strikes me as unjust, another tyranny.

Perhaps, we are bound to get it wrong, but this does not mean we should not keep trying to find language for all our common ground, to keep probing until we get it right.

Latinx may not be the quickest way to get there, but it is a start.

VIII

These days, I am thrilled when I see a call for Latinx authors or Latinx books, or when I see a new gallery show featuring Latinx artists announced, because I feel an undercurrent of energy, and I know that we are using this term as a way to unite us even further, although I hope we will always remain suspicious of its limitations.

As a writer, stories come to me in different ways. Sometimes with a single image, a feeling, an emotional note that translates into a split second of reading on the page, yet that thread is enough to support the thousands of words that will come after. Before language, there is a character: a voice, an individual and specific psychological panorama consisting of rooting and environment and experience, and before that, there is simply a self-defined, sovereign soul.

My characters are from different backgrounds, countries, cultures, and with very different minds. They carry traumas, sorrows, and desires unique unto themselves. Most often, they are of Latin American origin, and their identity is being explored in this context in relation to or in the absence of community, although I do not think of them as flag-wavers; my creative process does not involve asking my own characters for their papers. I do not write country or citizenship or culture. I simply write lives, and I write people.

Perhaps, my characters are like me, in that they reject and distrust labels, seeing them as temporary, like masks or visors one might use to block out the sun; to be used as needed, to be discarded when not.

IX

It’s been decades. I have been called other names. Somehow I got the idea that nobody said spic anymore. But not too long ago, while speaking Spanish on the telephone as I waited for a flight in the gate area of a west coast airport, I heard someone seated nearby mutter, “Spic.”

I looked over and saw a man in a button down and sport jacket, looking every bit the urban professional, staring back at me.

“Did you say something?” I asked the man.

He kept his gaze fixed on me, yet without acknowledging my question.

I let it go because I recalled then what I have always known, because I was made to know it from as far back as I can remember: it’s not what they call us that matters, it’s what we call ourselves. And we must be the ones to define ourselves and give ourselves our own names rather than simply submit and receive names as they are assigned to us.