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

by Jennifer De Leon

METCO is.” “Here.” He handed me a glossy pamphlet. “It stands for ‘Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity.’ ” “Huh?” He began again. “It’s a desegregation program.”

I heard about METCO when I was a kid in school but learned more about it while reading this book.

Dad was a hustler. A businessman of the streets,

I’d SEEN white people, especially in Jamaica Plain. That was another thing. White people called it JP, but we call it Jamaica Plain. Well, I used both now, to be honest.

just notebooks and new pens and highlighters I’d bought over the weekend with Mom’s CVS ExtraCare bucks.

Appreciated references to currency in the form of extracare bucks

“coyote” refers to a person you pay mad money to sneak you across the US border.

The hard times, he said, made you stronger. And, you know how you hear that stuff, and it all feels totally cliché? But then when you need it, it’s weird, yeah, I know, but it kinda helps.

Hard? I was used to hard. Like two weeks’ worth of laundry in one day because Mom never left the couch anymore. Like standing over Christopher and Benjamin until they brushed their teeth and flossed. 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.

“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.”

Get yours. Do you. They have this many AP classes at your old school?” She didn’t give me time to answer. “Don’t get it twisted. I love being Latina. I wouldn’t trade my identity or my situation for anyone else’s, and that’s facts, girl. Here, it’s actually an advantage to be different.”

I find this true sometimes as a female engineer.

Make the system work for you. You won’t remember these fools twenty years from now when they’re calling you up trying to get internships for their kids at the TV station you’re working at, writing scripts and shit. You’ll be spinning around in your chair in your corner office, being all like, ‘Who are you?’ ”

What was normal? I bet it didn’t involve worrying about whether Border Patrol was going to catch your dad.

I just kept imagining Dad riding the tops of the freight trains. And thousands of people did this—not one train, but as many as thirty!—to get through Mexico.… 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?

We ate at the picnic tables at rest stops, where puddles with gasoline rainbows dotted the parking lots.

vivid descriptions

Tío R. surprised us all by making pepián. It was totally something Dad would have ordered in the Guatemalan restaurant in Waltham that we used to go to sometimes on special occasions.

The streak of pink in the sky caught my eye. When I was little, Dad had told me it was the sun saying good night in sun-language. Good night, Dad.

why did it all have to be so divided? Like the cafeteria at lunch, for instance. Like Westburg kids and METCO kids. Like chocolate cities and vanilla suburbs.

A couple of texts and two honks let us all know he had arrived and was expecting Holly to pop out of the building and back to her world, where daughters were allowed to use tampons.

There I was walking free in this suburban neighborhood, but where was my dad walking—where was he walking to, or away from? It was like the latitude and longitude of your birthplace can ultimately determine your life’s borders.

Christmas lights and ornaments popped up on nearly every house in Westburg. These suburban folks love their Christmas lights—some strung lights around their entire house! All chic white, of course.

“Sixty years later, and the fact is, white kids still go to white schools and Black kids go to Black schools. I mean, except us. But like, there has to be a program for it.”

I thought of the question Steve asked me that day at the fire drill: Where are you from-from? Truth, when I think about where I’m from, I feel proud, like yeah, I’m from Boston. But then, well, I’m Latina, and my parents were born in Central America, and I’m from “JP” or “the city.” What people like Steve were really doing was not asking a question but making a statement: You must not be from here. 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.”

But… I was more and more convinced that if we didn’t say anything, then nothing would change. If we didn’t try to change it, we’d… we’d kinda be saying we didn’t matter, even to ourselves!

Especially JJ for your tips with slang. Lit, bomb, I’m hip… lol.