In class and in coffee shops

This past semester, perhaps more than others, I have felt more American than ever before. The holidays mark my seventh year anniversary in the country. I came to Washington D.C. with my parents almost seven years ago this winter. Now, I am the only representative of the Fabre-Perez de Vargas family here (as can be noted by my winter break luggage which is almost 75 percent Amazon Prime orders for friends and family in Colombia). In a way, while my situation is definitely more unstable as an *official* international student, I feel my home is here more than before. At the same time, I don’t.

In the past year, I received a paper back from one of my classes where my grader’s comments focused on critiquing style and colloquial grammar misuses. While my grader had no critique on my content or quality, it still cost me a letter grade.

A couple weeks ago, at a café, I told the barista that my name was “MaJo” and spelled it out for her. It was a quiet day at an independent café, so I felt no need to use my usual pseudonyms “Jack” or “Steve." When she took my debit card, I saw her click return on the digital tablet’s interface to erase my name and replace it with “Maria," the first word of my compound name.

The barista did not misspell my name, and she was not just lazy about it -- she made an active effort to change it. Just like the boys I encountered in my younger years in the United States who decided they would call me “Maria” because they thought it was a pretty, and fitting, name for me. The name Maria carries a very different meaning than mine; it is digestible and iconically Latino. It is “I want to live in America” from "West Side Story"(1961) and the 2000 Carlos Santana song. More importantly, it’s simply not my name.

This semester, I have spent my time writing about Americans, as an “American." This allowed for an interesting column pitch and personal challenge, as my reality, politics and culture, have been normalized to me. While understandable, this is something I should challenge. I found myself often fearing to write about that which had to be discussed on my terms, as not an “American," where my history, culture and experience came as anything other than a point of comparison or interesting anecdote.

Throughout the semester, I thought about writing about (my) race and ethnicity in the United States -- what it means to be Latino and Hispanic, yet I didn’t.

I am a descendant (in part) of European immigrants to Argentina, a primarily white country with an erased indigenous population. In the United States, the terms “Latina" and "Hispanic” are often thrown around and conflated. Here, I am a shade of white. I am “white enough” where my cultural and historical grounding as both Latina and Hispanic can be erased when convenient, yet I am not “white” in the same way: I am not American, and I will always be reminded of it, in class and in coffee shops.