by Alisa Valdes
They’ll be here in a few minutes. I’m always early. It’s the reporter training—come late, lose the story. Lose the story, risk having some envious and mediocre white guy in the newsroom accuse you of not deserving your job. She’s Latina, all she has to do is shake her butt and she gets what she wants around here. One of them actually said that once, loud, so I could hear. He was in charge of compiling the TV listings, and hadn’t written an original sentence in about fifty-seven years. He was sure his fate was due to affirmative action, especially after the editor in chief of the paper had me and four other “minorities” (read: coloreds) stand up during a company briefing in the auditorium, just so he could say, “Take a good look at the faces of the future of the Gazette.” I think he felt quite politically correct at that moment, as all those blue and green eyes turned to me in—what was it?—in horror.
Here’s how my job interview went: You’re a Latina? How … neat. You must speak Spanish, then? When you’ve got $15.32 in your bank account and student loans coming due in a month, what do you say to a question like that, even when the answer is no? Do you say, “Hey, I noticed your last name is Gadreau, you must speak French then?” Nah. You play along. I wanted that gig so bad I would have tried speaking Mandarin. With a name like Lauren Fernández, they figured Spanish was part of the package. But that’s the American disease as I see it: rampant, illogical stereotyping. We would not be America without it.
I admit I didn’t tell them I was half white trash, born and raised in New Orleans. My mom’s people are bayou swamp monsters with oil under their fingernails and a rusty olive-green washing machine in front of the double-wide, the kind of people you see on Cops, where the guy is skinny as a week-dead kitten, covered with swastika tattoos and crying because the police blew up his meth lab.
Those are my people. Them, and New Jersey Cubans with shiny white shoes.
Because of all of this and more that I won’t bore you with right now, I have molded myself into a chronic overachiever, and have focused my entire existence on a singular goal: succeed at life—meaning work, friends, and family—in spite of it all. Wherever possible, I dress as though I sprang from a completely different and much more normal set of circumstances. Nothing thrills me more than when people who don’t know me assume I’m from a typical, moneyed Cuban family in Miami.
Sometimes I think I’ve made it to the other side, where well-balanced people without “issues” live; but then a bigheaded Texican like Ed comes along and I’m paralyzed yet again with the realization that no matter how perfect I make myself, I’ll never be as important as a Harley beer bong to my mom; no matter how much I sock away in my 401(k) or how many writing prizes I bring home, I’ll never be near as important to my dad as pre-1959 Cuba, where the sky was bluer and tomatoes tasted better. Men like Ed find me, because they smell the hidden truth of Lauren on the wind: I hate myself because no one else has ever bothered to love me.
I ask again: What the heck kind of therapist can help someone like me?
I sat in the editorial offices during that interview in my navy blue discount Barami suit and three-year-old pumps with a hole in the sole, and told them what they wanted to hear: Sí, sí, I will be your spicy Carmen Miranda. I will dance the lambada in your dismal gray broadsheet. But what I thought was: Just hire me. I’ll learn Spanish later.
FIRST WEEK ON the job an editor strolled past my desk and said in the deliberate, too-loud English they would all come to use on me, “I’m so glad you’re here representing your people.” I wanted to ask him just who he thought my people were, but I already knew the answer. My people, as far as his people are concerned, are stereotypes: brown of face and hair, uniformly poor and uneducated, swarming across the border from “down there” countries with all their belongings in plastic grocery bags.
I need another beer. Bad.
“Oye,” I call to the waitress. “Traeme otra.” She leans into her big hip and pushes the long black hair out of her pretty eyes. “Como?” she asks, looking confused. She was watching a Mexican soap opera on a small TV behind the counter and looks annoyed to be bothered with, you know, work. I have to repeat the request for another drink because my accent is so thick. Still confused. Crud. I finally hold the empty beer bottle upside down and lift my eyebrows. Sign language of a poseur. She nods, chews her cud, and moseys to the back for another cerveza. I learned Spanish later, all right, on the job. But the Puerto Rican waitress can tell I’m a fraud.
I watch the street again, and wait for a familiar suciamobile. You can tell a lot about a neighborhood by the cars in it, right? It’s an even mix around here these days. You got your short, crummy Honda and Toyota lowriders with the FEAR THIS decals and “peeing Calvins” in the back window, scraping along the gutters with ice all up in the engines (please, someone tell me why Puerto Ricans think Japanese lowriders are a good idea in New England) and you got your newish Volvo sedans transporting some mom to the pharmacy for meds while her ADD triplets rip chunks of hair from their scalps.
I MYSELF DON’T have a car. I could afford one, okay, so don’t laugh. I’m past the fabled six-figure mark, thanks to that little national writing prize. But I got used to the city’s public transit system when I was a student, and I like the rumble of it in my life. Plus, in my position, it’s cool to get out and listen to the way people really talk.
I write a new weekly Lifestyles section column mercifully called “My Life,” created originally by Chuck Spring as “Mi Vida Loca,” a way, he told me, “to connect to the Latina people or whatever.”
It’s supposed to be confessional, my column, a (Latina) diary with “punch.” Would I rather run to the woods in stained coveralls and live like Annie Dillard, examining the brutal life of—what lives in the woods? Ants?—ants when I see Chuck Spring, bounding toward me with that “golly-gee” look on his face, dressed for another meeting of his Harvard Final Club, where square-jawed men drink martinis and throw change at strippers? Yes. Do I need this job too much to flee or complain? Double yes, with a cherry on top. So I make the best of it.
It’s not that I’m not appreciated at the Gazette. Chuck and the other editors value my “diversity,” as long as I think like they do, write like they do, and agree with them on everything. Far as I can tell, Gazette newsroom diversity means hiring “team players,” compliant as beaten dogs yet different enough in skin tone, last name, or national origin to be shut out of the little silly things, like promotion. It means sending the only black guy in the news department to Haiti to cover “unrest,” even though there’s a white woman reporter who sits ten feet from him and happens to be fluent in Haitian Creole; it also means labeling said woman an ungrateful, vitriolic banshee if she complains. I don’t want to talk about it right now. Ow, ow, headache in my eye.
Right now, me want beer. Ooga ooga.
It’s getting a little harder to take public transit because the Gazette recently put up billboards all over town with my huge red-brown curly hair and grinning freckled face on them, accompanied by the idiotic words “Lauren Fernández: Her Casa Is Your Casa, Boston.” This happened, of course, right after all those new census stories came out about how Hispanics are the “biggest minority” in the nation now. Before everyone published that oxymoron on the front page, the mainstream media could not have given a Chihuahua chalupa about Hispanics. I couldn’t get Chuck Spring interested in any stories about Hispanics to save my life. Now that Hispanics are big business, that’s all he wants me to write about.
Money talks, see. Hispanics are no longer seen as a foreign unwashed menace taking over the public schools with that dirty little language of theirs; we are a domestic market. To be marketed to. Thus, me. My column. And my billboards. Greed makes people do crazy things. Craziest thing of all is the way the promotions department had my face darkened in the picture so I looked more like what they probably think a Latina is supposed to look like. You know, brown. First day those ads popped up next to Route 93 and in the T stations the sucias started calling.
“Hey, Cubana, when did you get Chicana on us?” Answer: When I became useful to the Gazette, apparently.
In honor of Usnavys having christened us, we allowed her to choose the venue for tonight’s anniversary celebration dinner. In keeping with her general need to return to the ‘hood and prove she has made something bigger and better with her life than anyone there ever can or will, she picked El Caballito. A gray-haired Cuban guy with a warm smile owns it, and I swear he looks exactly—exactly, girl—like Papi. That means he’s five-six, so pale you can see the blue veins in his bowed legs, balding, and with a nose that reminds you of that Sesame Street Count Muppet. Every time I see that dude I get the sinking feeling I’m the product of centuries of enthusiastic tropical inbreeding.
Anyway, Usnavys—not a small girl by any stretch of the imagination—also likes El Caballito because each order comes with—no lie—four album-sized plastic plates. You get your meat or fish on one. You get your mountain of white rice on another. You get your soupy black or red beans on a third. And a plate of greasy fried plantains, either “maduros,” which are ripe, squishy, and sweet as candy, or “tostones,” which are green, fried in slices then smashed flat, fried again, and tossed in garlic.
Refried plantains, if you will.
That’s how we had to explain them to Amber, anyway, because she thinks all Latinas are just like her. She thinks we all eat the same dishes she grew up eating in Oceanside, California. She thinks all Latinas give a rat’s rear about menudo, a soup they voluntarily make with tripe, a line of little Mexican ladies rinsing corpse poop out of the pig intestines in the kitchen sink. Uh, no. Sorry. Not for me. She honestly thinks California-style Mexican food is universal among Latinas and so the only bananas she’d ever seen before coming to Boston were the ones her mom got at the Albertson’s and chopped over her corn flakes before taking her to marching band practice in the minivan.
She should know better by now, but I honestly can’t tell if she really gets it yet. She’s still always up in my face with all that dated, 1970s Chicano movement, “brown and proud,” West Coast Que viva la raza jive. And when she’s not up in my face, she’s up in Rebecca’s face. Rebecca is her cause. Amber’s a trip. You’ll see.
Sometimes you get a fifth plate at El Caballito, too, filled with something we Caribbean Latinos call “salad,” a couple slices of avocado, raw onion, and tomato; to this you add salt, vinegar, and oil. There’s a reason, my friends, that all the Puerto Rican ladies you see on the street are wide as a damn bus. There’s a reason the Cubans down in Union City argue about politics while those sausage fingers jab the air. Cubans and Puerto Ricans don’t dig salad much, but they love anything fried, especially meat that once oinked. The people on those islands, isolated, you would think, for tens of thousands of years, seem to believe puerco makes you strong and healthy. I went to Cuba a while back, to meet my relatives, and they slaughtered a scrawny little sad-eyed yard pig for me, and I was, like, ick, and they were, all, what’s wrong with you, don’t you eat meat? You’re going to die de flaquita!
Papi always says he can’t get used to the American idea of salad as something full of “leaves” and “complicated as hell.” He still boils up a can of condensed milk for breakfast, too, and eats the sickly sweet paste with a spoon, in spite of a mouth full of caries. With my mom’s people, y’all, it’s bakinineggs (all one word and never one without the other) with white bread, coke (soda or drug, don’t matter none), and a menthol cigarette garnish. Fine, okay. I’ll stop talking about Papi now. My therapist would be proud of me. Cubadectomy.
And me? I don’t know where the hell I came from. I’ll take a good Caesar salad any day. And I eat bagels for breakfast, with a schmear of salmon cream cheese. Oh, and I am what you’d call a Starbucks addict. I think they put cocaine and ecstasy in their drinks, which is fine with me, and even though the whole deal with them being too good to use “small, medium, and large” like everyone else annoyed me for a while, I’m over it. If I don’t get my venti nonfat caramel macchiato every morning—yeah, I said venti, so what?—I’m useless. But don’t tell my editors. They expect me to be like those frisky Latina lawyers having orgasms while they shampoo their hair in court on the network TV ads. They expect me to reach up and pick mangoes out of the fruit basket I must wear on my head whenever I’m not in the newsroom talking about, you know, Mexican jumping beans. A Latina breakfast of mango and papaya—heyyyyy macarena, a’ight!
In reality, we sucias are all professionals. We’re not meek maids. Or cha-cha hookers. We’re not silent little women praying to the Virgin of Guadalupe with lace mantillas on our heads. We’re not even like those downtrodden chicks in the novels of those old-school Chicana writers, you know the ones; they wait tables and watch old Mexican movies in decrepit downtown theaters where whiskery drunks piss on the seats; they drive beat-up cars and clean toilets with their fingernails coated in Ajax; their Wal-Mart polyester pants smell like tamales and they always, always feel sad because some idiot in a plaid cowboy shirt is drunk again and singing José Alfredo Jiménez songs down at the local crumbling adobe cantina instead of coming home and fixing the broken lightbulb that swings on the naked wire and making passionate amor to her like a real hombre.
Orale.
Usnavys: Vice President for Public Affairs for the United Way of Massachusetts Bay. Sara: wife of corporate attorney Roberto Asís, stay-at-home mom to twin five-year-old boys, upstanding member of the Brookline Jewish community (yes, we Latinas come in “Jew,” too—shame on you for being surprised), and one of the best interior designers and party-throwers I’ve ever known. Elizabeth: co-host for a network morning show in Boston, current finalist for a prestigious national news co-anchor position, former runway model, born-again Christian (former Catholic), and a national spokeswoman for the Christ for Kids organization. Rebecca: owner and founder of Ella, now the most popular Hispanic woman’s magazine on the national market. And Amber: a rock en Español singer and guitarist waiting for her big break.
Then there’s moi. At twenty-eight, I’m the youngest (and only Hispanic) columnist the paper has ever had, but I don’t want to brag or anything. Eddie Olmos might as well just take a big old crap in his East L.A. outhouse, you know what I’m sayin’? The chicks be here, Eddie, so move your tired old zoot suit over.
OH, SWEET JESUS. I should have known Usnavys would pull a stunt like this. Look at her. She just slid up to the curb out front in her silver BMW sedan (leased), driving super slow with Vivaldi or something like that blasting out of the slightly open windows so all those poor women with all those kids and shopping bags from the 99-cent store hunching away from the wind and snow at the bus stop could stare at her. Now she’s opening the door, slowly, stabbing a little black umbrella out into the air so she won’t get her precious hair wet. She’s on her cell phone. Wait, take two: She’s on her itsy-bitsy cell phone. It gets smaller every time I see her. Or maybe she gets bigger, I can’t tell. Girl loves her food.
I doubt she’s even talking to anyone, just wants it stuck on her ear so everyone around here can go, oh, wow, look at that! What a rich Puerto Rican! And how would they know she was a Puerto Rican? That’s easy. Because she’s shouting in Puerto Rican Spanish (yes, there’s a difference) to someone, real or imagined, your guess is as good as mine, on the other end of the line.
But that’s not the worst part. She’s got a fur coat on. That’s the worst part. A big, thick, long, white fur coat. Knowing Usnavys, I would bet the Neiman Marcus tag is still attached inside so she can take it back tomorrow and get all that money back on her poor abused credit card. And that precious hair? It’s ironed flat as a Dutch cracker, twisted up like she just stepped off the set of some telenovela, the heroine, only she’s too dark to ever get cast in that kind of role. Don’t tell her she’s dark, though. Even though her daddy was a Dominican, ebony as an olive in a Greek salad, her mother has from day one insisted that Usnavys is light, and forbids her from dating “monos.” (Read: monkeys.) If her African ancesto
rs had been shipped to New Orleans instead of Santo Domingo and San Juan, she’d be black in the U.S., not even high yellow, but we won’t get into that right now. As an American “Latina,” she’s … white? Go figure.
In case you were wondering about her name, you say it like this: Ooos-NAH-vees. She was born in Puerto Rico, and her mom had this idea that she wanted to take her daughter away from the island once and for all and make a better life for them in “America” (which, I assume, she didn’t believe she was already living in when she was living in Puerto Rico, an American territory since 1918). She wanted her daughter to be American, in the Leave It to Beaver sense, because then maybe she’d have a chance, you know, a chance at a good man and a good life. So she wanted to name her baby something patriotic. On slow afternoons (there’s no other type in Puerto Rico, okay?) Usnavys’s mother used to go to the docks and watch American ships come and go on their way to bombing the hell out of the island of Viequez, amazed that the gringo sailor boys used brooms and mops on deck without shame. That, she thought, was freedom. Men with mops. So that’s where she got the idea for the great name for her daughter—from the side of the ships. U.S. Navy, girl. I am not joking. That’s what Usnavys is named after. You can ask her yourself. Now and then she tries to front like the name comes from a distant relative way back, you know, that it’s Taino or something. But we all know the friendly, naked, peace-loving Taino Indians were wiped out by the Spaniards. Usnavys was named after an aircraft carrier.
Now she’s taking her Tiffany key chain out, aiming the lock button at the car, triggering the little alarm whistle. It peeps three times, as if to announce: Bo-RI-cua! A couple of neighborhood tigres walk by in their Timberland boots and puffy parkas and stare at her long enough to turn their heads right around on their thick necks. She drinks in the attention, plays it up like a star. Always was like that. And, look. I don’t begrudge her any of it. (Remind me never to use “begrudge” in any of my columns.) She’s the only one of us from Boston, and the girl grew up in messed-up stereotype come true, in the red-brick projects, on welfare. She watched her older brother—the only father figure she ever had after her real dad split when she was four years old—get shot in the neck as he walked her home from school. He died in her nine-year-old arms. In spite of all that, she had a brain under that tightly tugged, truly tortured Afro. A brain. So smart, Usnavys, it scares you. She graduated at the top of her public high school class, got a scholarship to Boston University, where we were dorm mates. She graduated cum laude at B.U., and went on to get a master’s degree from Harvard, also on a scholarship. Now she supports her mom; she bought the woman a condo in Mayagüez, and gave her a credit card all her own. All that after growing up poor, dark, and Puerto Rican in New England, speaking Spanglish. Tell me she doesn’t deserve to gloat a little! The woman is my hero. I like to tease her about all the materialism, but that’s just because I love her so much. She knows it’s funny. She laughs at herself, too.
