Another Mexican in New York

Last week, Andrea Viejo’s column (Mexican in New York, Jan. 29) whispered thoughts and reminded me of promises I had forgotten to keep. She wrote about the warmth associated with hearing your native language immediately after being thrown into the unknown. She wrote about divisiveness formed from a need to make sense of foreign surroundings. She wrote about overcoming that division. But there’s something deeper to immigrants—human beings, if you will—that was left unaddressed. So, as a second opinion, let’s get personal.

Perhaps the strangeness of my arrival to the United States had a lot to do with the unnatural ability of a six-hour flight to separate two worlds. From the moment I stepped into the sharp Minnesota morning, I struggled with the dichotomies associated with this country. You are fat or thin, rich or poor, smart or stupid (but proud of either one) and, most linguistically confusing, pretty ugly or pretty pretty. But the most important pairing, and the dichotomy you can’t see if you stay on one side of it, is that you’re either from here or there.

Those days, people who heard my broken English casually asked me how much I had already lost, and knowingly assured me I would lose much more. Did I even have the slightest idea of who I would become? It scared me beyond my years: The inherent contradiction from not knowing who I was going to become was terrifying. Soon, I became a human sponge for any and all anecdotes that had to do with my country. I was desperate for what became an elusive home, and I recognized that those who gave me a shadow of what I needed were chasing after shadows of their own.

I couldn’t shake off the feeling that I was in a reality show, in which at any time a white-toothed host would come out of a red curtain and say it was all a joke. I still can’t. I also formed “us” and “them” labels for Mexican-Americans, and illegal immigrants most of all. I must confess, my 13-year-old self was egocentric: I didn’t care about stories of hardship, as long as it remained clear that they were not mine—mine were better, of course. Distancing myself from “them” was never due to being unable to relate. In fact, it was because of an uncanny ability to relate that I rejected who “they” had become in my head. This will not be me; I won’t insert English in my beautiful Spanish or forget what real food tastes like. And I won’t hunger after fresh, off-the-plane authenticity.

Six years later, I have heard various solutions for the inevitable melancholy and resentful alienation resulting from emigration. Some go for conscientious activism for immigration reform and others go so far as to say that you don’t have to pick “here” or “there” because there’s an amorphous and cushioned “both!” The problem with the first proposition is that it is born not out of true dedication but leftover guilt in which the notion of “us” and “them” is a real thing. I think the second is a cop-out answer, though I will offer an approximation.

I realized this explanation while having dinner in a Japanese restaurant. The waiters hailed from more than five countries, and once the sake was passed around, someone thought to talk about where we had grown up. The initial nostalgia quickly turned into more sincere, playful mockery: “We all know that immigrant’s story!” They were right. After I had come to the states and before I applied to Columbia, my nationality and geography became everything. And so, having been on both sides of the river long enough, I can somewhat pompously say that it gets old. I am not saying that immigration issues are unimportant, because they’re more real than ever and screaming for our attention.

I merely limit myself to the words of gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka: “the whole is other than the sum of its parts,” and suggest that we all, immigrants especially, push the frontiers of a label. At Columbia, amid such rich diversity, appreciation of the individual can be as easy as being mindful that behind each international student’s journey are far deeper events and ideas.

Cecilia Reyes is a Columbia College first-year. She is on the board of the Artist Society. Reyesing Expectations runs alternate Thursdays.