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?”

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?

“Ahh. You really are your father’s daughter.” My father’s daughter. Tía couldn’t possibly know how good those three words made me feel.

“We’re going to write a six-word autobiography.” A six-word what? “Here’s an example!” she said, cheery as all get-out. Supposedly Ernest Hemingway had written a six-word story, like a thousand years before. Miss Amber had memorized it: For sale: baby shoes, never worn. Then she explained what the words meant. The baby hadn’t survived, and so that’s why the parents had to sell the baby shoes. Get it? Never worn. I know.

So for my six-word autobiography, I wrote: Don’t ask me where I’m from. Yeah. And when Miss Amber asked us to share, for once I didn’t hesitate. I read it aloud: “Don’t ask me where I’m from.” Silence. Head nods. Me, exhaling. I felt lighter just having said it. “Liliana, thanks for getting us started. Can you tell us more about why you chose those particular six words?” Miss Amber encouraged. “Well…” I refocused. “I’m sick of people asking me where I am from. No—where I am ‘from-from.’ I am sick of people assuming I wasn’t born in this country or that I don’t speak English or that I eat rice and beans every night for dinner.”

Mas Poesía, Menos Policía. Cool play on words, that last one. More poetry, less police. I liked it. It was like its own line of poetry, about poetry.