Don't Ask Me Where I'm From (A LatinX Coming-of-Age)

by Jennifer De Leon

“Don’t ever let anyone make you feel like you don’t belong in the world. ¿Entiendes?”

With my new You Do You attitude holding my Where Is Dad Now panic attacks at bay, I admit I was psyched to see it was C day on the school calendar.

“That’s totally unfair. Didn’t Europeans bring over smallpox or whatever?” a guy by the door asked.

Yes siiir! Talk. That talk.

But explaining my perspective on immigration to a bunch of white kids in a richie-rich school? That wasn’t hard. Nah. That was just annoying.

You have to get this right.” She tapped the table with a fingernail. “So… this school right here is like the world. What I mean is, you have to act a certain way. Or, more like, you have to carry yourself a certain way—in order to get what you want, and what you need.” She looked me head-on. “When I first got here, I was all ‘This place is whack. I’m going back to Boston.’ But even after a whole bunch of shit happened, I realized that I didn’t want to go back. What for? I had so many more opportunities here, and I’m not bullshitting

It was kind of gross and kind of cool at the same time, you know, for your parents to be in love and all.

Sometimes I wish I could see more of that in my own family with all its failed marriages and single parenthood lol

because she also seemed to save everything, including the napkin she’d just folded into fourths and tucked inside her bra.

No😩😩💀that’s literally my tía she will not throw away anything

Blue Hills last year.

I’m in Blue Hills at the very moment haha

If people knew that it sometimes took over a year… If they knew that some folks went for days and days without eating… knew how migrants kept scraps of paper wrapped in plastic tucked into a shoe—scraps with telephone numbers of relatives in the US… If people knew these things, would they still assume immigrants just came here to cause problems?

Tampons. She couldn’t even say the word. Tampons lived in the same category as face piercings—gateways to hell.

It was like the latitude and longitude of your birthplace can ultimately determine your life’s borders.

“And another thing—the term ‘Latinx.’ Use it more. It’s meant to be inclusive.”

I thought that was common knowledge lol, especially among Latinx people who were Americanized. I knew this when I was an underclassman in high school in 2016-2018.

For real: I had really missed him.

Is this a love triangle, I sense?

Stranger things have happened,

duh duh duh dun dun dun

Google Doc.

uh oh this will age the book super fast

I shoved her so hard that she fell back on her butt, her books landing everywhere.

The reader was too stunned to speak

So… see you around, then,”

daaaamn he was waiting for this for a long time