After my senior year of high school, I went south to a competitive, well-known institution. I liked the way people spoke in the South. I thought that saying y’all was grammatically efficient. I liked that people nodded as they passed each other on the sidewalk, instead of looking down like they did in the Northeast. I liked that the winter would be mild. I liked that when I graduated, I could tell future employers I went to an impressive institution. Some people are in love with their college; if anything, I was in love with where it could get me.
Going into college, I wasn’t sure what my major would be, maybe political science, maybe psychology. Once school started, I moved toward the psych route. The million-dollar question is, what will I do with my degree once I graduate? Originally, before I destroyed my GPA, the plan was to go to grad school and become a clinical psychologist. I wanted to take some time and be involved in research; I fell in love with research. Things haven’t exactly gone the way I wanted them to.
Even before I went to college, I had a history of depression. That part of the equation doesn’t fit into “girls like me.” My high school therapist said I have a “Barbie” version and the “real” version of my personality. When I’m in Barbie mode, I accept endless workloads and push myself to the limit. Barbie me is miserable and stressed, but she pulls it (and my résumé) together. “Real” me used to be very depressed. That version of me failed tests and didn’t turn in papers. The dual performances followed me to college. I kept them in balance for the most part until my junior year. Then all bets were off, even for Barbie me.
Barbie me knew how to manage regular depression (wanting to sleep all the time, low mood, forcing myself to get to therapy, etc.); she had no idea what to do about PTSD.
So during junior spring everything got sidetracked, majorly.
FABIANA DIAZ
I was born in Caracas, Venezuela, on March 1, 1994. We left Venezuela in 1999 when I was five—my mom and dad, sister, and me. I speak Spanish fluently, and a lot of my parents’ friends speak Spanish. Venezuelans are a very family-oriented culture, not go-go-go like Americans. Caracas is a chaotic city, with a lot of noise and street vendors, but it has a lot of beauty to it, too. Beautiful beaches. Everyone is so welcoming—their house is your house within thirty minutes of meeting you. I hung out with my cousins all the time. I miss the positivity of it.
I’m an American citizen now, and my mom’s Italian, so I have a dual citizenship with Italy. But my roots are Venezuelan. And that’s how I identify myself. I definitely identify myself as a Latina.
We left because of the political tension, the crime rate. My dad had more opportunities in the United States. He owns his own tool company and makes a lot of tools for auto companies. That’s why we moved to Michigan. Lake Orion, Michigan.
It was so different. I knew some English, but there was a still a language barrier. When we got to Michigan, it was snowing. I had never seen snow. I loved it, though. I always wanted to be outside, to make snow angels. My sister and I had seen that in a movie.
My mom was unhappy. She was used to having a lot of friends, and my dad was traveling. School was difficult for me. I was shy and not answering questions correctly. My mom would pack my lunch of black beans and rice and I’d get “Ooh, what is that?” so I told her to not pack me that lunch anymore. After that she packed me peanut butter, and I hated it. But I wanted to be like the other kids.
From middle school to high school I went to the same school, and things got smoother. I became very outgoing. I learned to adapt.
* * *
My mom would pack my lunch of black beans and rice and I’d get “Ooh, what is that?” so I told her to not pack me that lunch anymore.
* * *
I didn’t want to go to the University of Michigan. I wanted to study international relations. My mom speaks five languages, my dad speaks seven, and I speak four: Spanish, English, Italian, and German. I wanted to go to Georgetown, but I didn’t get in. I always wanted to be a diplomat, an ambassador.
My parents have instilled in me a respect for service. In high school I did more than a thousand hours of community service—in Mexico, New York City, Chicago, and locally, as well, in Michigan.
When I first started at Michigan, I didn’t have a major. Then, in my sophomore year, I ran across international studies and chose that as my major, with a focus on culture and identity.
ANONYMOUS XY
I was raised in New York—downtown Manhattan—in an expensive zip code. I’m from a big family. Both my parents are well educated; between the two of them they have seven degrees, five from Ivy League schools. It was an intellectual household, but not an emotionally nurturing one. I’ve had people say, “Oh, your parents’ style must be an Asian ‘tiger mother’ thing,” but I think the way my parents raised me was more based on who they are as individuals.
It was a strange, very extreme existence. With my dad, one second you’re the best, and the next you’re dead to him. He was also physically abusive. My mom valued what she thought of as “principles” over empathy.
My parents didn’t like me stepping out of the little box they had drawn around me. There was a tacit contractual arrangement: I take care of you, so you owe me. There was a lot of time spent fighting with them as I grew older and looked for independence. The fighting escalated sometimes. There was always a stated or implicit threat of violence in my father’s discipline.
My parents were very backward in terms of feminism and sex positivity.
No therapy. My parents were very antitherapy.
So honestly, getting raped was not the first trauma I experienced, but by far it was the worst.
I went to Harvard. Studied economics and math. Undergrads tend to lose perspective. I was so focused on work and studying that if someone had come up to me and said, “A Nobel laureate is coming to campus to speak tomorrow!” I would have said, “Sorry, I have a lot of homework.”
I was oblivious to how to really live. All this stuff other people figure out as teenagers, I was shoving into my brain suddenly as an eighteen-year-old, trying to fit into those grown-up clothes.
I was sort of stalked by this guy in college, which annoyed me, but I didn’t realize how serious it was. My mother said, “This is your fault this guy is following you. You were encouraging him,” even though that wasn’t true. I was not good at picking friends. Also I was trying to find myself. I met my Aikido sensei—my teacher, my martial arts instructor, my mentor—while I was at Harvard. Her support became very important to me.
The weird thing is that my assault happened in grad school. It’s usually young girls, that’s who we think rape happens to. Innocent young girls being jumped in the bushes by evil men. But I was a grown woman and knew how things worked.
It hit home to me afterward how messed up rape culture is.
From “The Elegy of I”
SARI RACHEL FORSHNER
As a child, I was defined by delicious, rollicking peals of silliness.
These were a source of great frustration for my elders:
“Get ahold of yourself!”
“Stop cackling, you’re piercing my eardrums!”
“Enough.”
They thought that unabashed joy would be an obstacle to my success, and that my success was more important, but I knew I could allow myself to revel in my wholehearted amusement in life, and still smile sweetly as I received my As, discreetly stuffing them into a folder in an effort to not hurt anyone’s feelings.
How utterly fun I was. In constant tintinnabulation, pealing throughout a room. The echo bounced off the walls and back into me. My personality was too big for the everyday, so I brought it to the stage.
My classmates voted for me to play Anne Frank. I was Ebenezer Scrooge, Poe’s Red Death, and The Crucible’s seductive Abigail Williams. I could be anyone but I delighted in playing the villain—it was so freeing to express fury without fear of repercussion.
I sought challenge. I sought criticism. “Thank you for the compliment, but tell m
e what I can do better.”
I ricocheted between silence and silliness. I was lustful; I was idealistic. I loved fiercely and hated little.
Although my dimpled face sometimes indicated a greater youth than I possessed, I was self-assured beyond my years. Although I wavered in my confidence, just as every adolescent, as every artist does, those waverings were not readily apparent.
I was buying a stack of folders and pencils at Target, and the woman in line in front of me assumed I was a teacher rather than a student. Taken aback, I doubled over in laughter.
By the time I left for college, I had worked at a cell phone store for just shy of two years; at eighteen, I was the employee with the most seniority and the key holder for two locations. No one else wanted to deal with the boss. One by one, they quit or were fired. I insisted he stop calling me babe and kept a private record of my own sales. When he tried to short me on my commissions, I argued on my own behalf.
I devoured books. That was who I was. Laugher, lover, reader, actress, student.
I’m Going to College
ANDREA PINO
Abuela was the first one to leave Cuba. It was over sixty years ago. She and my abuelo were in love, but knew that they couldn’t come to Miami together. Abuela had four siblings, and though the oldest, she’s survived all of them. At eighty-seven, Abuelo’s greatest joys are his granddaughters, Christmas cards from the Obamas, and Hillary Clinton. So, Abuela and Abuelo both worked hard and got their families out of Cuba and settled in Miami, but to this day, Abuelo tells me that he wished he could have gone to college.
“Quería ser enfermero,” he told me. He wanted to be a nurse, but he never finished middle school, and instead he painted yachts for a living. He told me that I was going to be the first one to make it, that I was going to go to college and run for office. “Vas a ser como Hillary,” he still tells me, because he thinks women like me should be in politics. “Nunca, nunca, nunca pares de luchar,” he says.
“Nunca, nunca, nunca…” Hearing those words still keeps me going some days, and it was fuel that helped me to put so much effort into my education.
* * *
I went to Miami’s Champagnat Catholic School from kindergarten until ninth grade. Many at Champagnat came from lower-income families. It was the only Catholic school that offered reduced tuition, and my parents saw it as a viable alternative to the crumbling public schools in Little Havana. But in ninth grade, I told my mother that I’d had it with parochial school. I’d had it with the overly gendered plaid skirt uniforms, the conservative politics, and the restrictive curriculum. In my head, for a long time, these frustrating experiences had been the price I had to pay to be in school at all. But, by ninth grade, I was ready to move on.
* * *
In 2008, I began my sophomore year of high school at International Studies Charter High School. ISCHS was located then in the Citibank building in Coral Gables, right on Miracle Mile, overlooking one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Miami. My favorite part of going to school was getting to venture through the stacks at the nearby Barnes & Noble; if I was lucky, I could read a few chapters of a book I was dying to read but hadn’t saved up enough to buy. It was then that my journey to applying to college began. I knew of five colleges, more or less: Florida International University, the University of Florida, Florida State University, Harvard University, and Yale—and the latter, I knew of only because of my obsession with Gilmore Girls. Since sixth grade, I had wanted to go to Yale. My first online purchase was, in fact, a Yale sweatshirt.
* * *
By the summer after my sophomore year, I was actively preparing for college, and it was a big fucking deal. It was such a big deal that nothing else mattered to me.
That same summer, 2009, while enrolled in an English 101 course at Miami Dade College, through a program that offered college classes to qualified high school students, I was accused of plagiarism. Four times.
“I’m going to submit it to Turnitin.com,” my professor said, expecting a panicked confession from the youngest student in her class. “You shouldn’t be able to write like this. You cheated.”
I didn’t know whether to be upset or flattered: it appeared that my first college professor thought I wrote too well. She proceeded to accuse me of plagiarism three more times, including on a paper I wrote during an in-class final. Despite these interactions with my first college professor, I earned one of the highest grades in the class.
I took nine more college classes before I finished high school in 2010, along with just about every Advanced Placement course ISCHS offered. My school day began at four a.m., when I woke up to study for the SAT, and ended well after ten p.m., when I arrived at home from my evening college classes and sat down to do my high school homework.
* * *
While reading campus brochures, it’s easy to get discouraged if you know that Latino students make up less than 10 percent of many campus populations; it’s easy to think that you’re not going to be able to compete with applicants who are legacies, or who spent most of their childhoods in prep schools that, by definition, were preparing them for college. Those students started the race before I was reading, probably. I knew that I had to work really hard to make up for where I was in the race. People like me, from families with no previous college graduates, didn’t go to Yale. People like me barely graduated from high school. My mom almost got her college degree after starting community college, and as a first-generation American she had opportunities that my grandparents didn’t have. But, like my father, who left Cuba at four years old, she wasn’t able to get her bachelor’s degree. So that—getting my bachelor’s degree—was the finish line, and class, race, and money were the obstacles. Proving my worth to people like my English 101 professor—that was always my motivation.
* * *
When I asked my parents to give me a college road trip for my seventeenth birthday, the prospect excited me much more than my quinceáñera had, and it was a request that was just about the strangest thing my extended family had ever heard. For many young Latinas, wearing that special white dress and a tiara on the day you turn fifteen is among their most treasured memories; it still is for my mom. But I cared more about wearing a robe that was too big for my body and a cardboard cap that could barely rest on my head. Graduation day would be the day that I would never forget. My mom and dad and sister and grandparents were supportive of this endeavor, but no one else in my community understood it. Why would a girl my age spend so much time talking about school and politics instead of boys and telenovelas? My family has always embraced me, but I feel that they have always had to apologize for my actions and attitudes. I’m not sorry, though, for becoming a woman who speaks up and fights for what I believe in, even if it makes people uncomfortable.
* * *
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill happened to be the first college I visited on my tour.
“What schools are you applying to?” I asked my fellow prospective students as we circuited the campus in the summer of 2009. “Oh, just all the Ivy Leagues, and maybe Amherst College and Notre Dame,” said one prep-school-type white boy, with a look that held no doubts about his ability to pick from any one of those schools. “But I’m hoping my recommendations come through, because I want to go here, and it’s going to be difficult since I’m out of state. Good thing I have a high SAT score.”
I turned away from him. I tried to focus on the beautiful trees surrounding an old stone outdoor theater across the street from the admissions building.
As terrifying as the idea of competing with this boy was, I’d fallen in love with Carolina the moment I saw the Forest Theatre (a stone amphitheater built into a hillside on the edge of the campus), and I felt a connection. “I belong here.”
* * *
The day I applied to Carolina? I drank quarto coladas that morning—four of the strongest espresso shots on the planet. American coffee just wasn’t going to be enough. I needed the elixir of my ancestors. “Tonight
is the night I’m going to do it. I’m going to apply to the University of North Carolina.” And in January 2010, when I was accepted, I proceeded to almost destroy my laptop pounding out messages of joy.
“I did it. I’m going to college.”
* * *
“Quiero ser abogada,” I said on my first visit home, for Thanksgiving.
“Just make sure the boys know you know how to make pie,” my late Tia Digna said in Spanish.
“¿Cuantos años te faltan ahora?” Abuela wanted to know. When would I move back home?
“Acabo de empezar, Abuelita.” But I’d only just started.
I had only been gone one semester, but for her, my leaving was heartbreaking.
My family didn’t understand why I chose to move eight hundred miles away to go to UNC.
* * *
I love my abuelita, and I often think of what I’ve never told her. I think of all the conversations we’ve had and all those we haven’t had. I think of all the things I wish she knew about the woman I am today.
Colleges
High school students and, even more often, their parents ask us, “Which colleges are the really bad ones?” or “Which campuses are rape free?” or “How rapey is this place?,” as if there’s a way to avoid going to a college where sexual assaults occur. As far as we can tell, people are sexually assaulted on and around every college campus. In recent years, students and other stakeholders have filed complaints with the U.S. government against nearly two hundred colleges and universities for mishandling reports of sexual assaults on campus. Here is the list of colleges and universities that are or have been under federal investigation for possible Title IX violations as of December 31, 2015:
Allegheny College
Alma College
American University
We Believe You: Survivors of Campus Sexual Assault Speak Out Page 2
