Magical Realism for Non-Believers by Fajardo Anika

Author:Fajardo, Anika
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000 Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2019-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

Spics. A word I hadn’t heard until a college friend—one of those Latinos who had grown up with a mamá who administered Vick’s VapoRub and recited rosaries—threw it around.

“Get a bunch of spics together,” she had said while we were cased by a security guard at the mall, “and you’ll get followed around.”

My white maternal family marveled at my tan skin, and classmates in my suburban school touched my smooth dark-brown hair. It wasn’t until I was forced to fill in the demographic information on the Pre SAT that I realized there was a designation for everyone. After shading in the little circles that corresponded to the letters and numbers of my name, birth date, and address, a question I’d never answered before stopped me. Race.

It was 1990, and these categories were, for me at age fifteen, new. Black? Not me and not any of the other students in this suburban classroom. Asian? Nope, although several of my friends would fill in that bubble. White (Not Hispanic)? Yes—wait. I looked at it again and then glanced around the room. No one else’s eyes were wandering. No one else seemed confused by the options. I was white, wasn’t I? That was the circle most of my friends would shade. My mother, my maternal grandparents, all my Minnesota relatives for generations. I moved my pencil, and the point hovered above the circle.

But what about Not Hispanic? I scanned down the list and found Hispanic. It said “of Mexican or South American heritage.” Was that me? I was born in Colombia, as I would tell anyone. I had undeniable South American heritage. But could that be me?

Most people are born into families who look like them with the family structure in place. Brothers, sisters, parents. Children adopted into families of different ethnic backgrounds must, at some point, have the realization that they are different from their parents, but I suspect that the realization of being different doesn’t usually come in a rush, is already known if not understood. Of course, the realization of being a sibling also isn’t something that usually has to be told.

Yet for me, that awareness seemed to happen over and over again. I would forget that I was different until suddenly someone would remind me. I was a freshman in college when Dr. Waters, an English professor obsessed with Milton and Chaucer, had offered to let me take the ESL version of the basic skills test.

“ESL?” I had asked him, confused. I was standing in front of his lectern as he packed up his papers and books. He was a small craggy man with a face so wrinkled it looked like his eyeballs would be sucked into his skull.

“English as a Second Language,” he enunciated. This was the same man who had read my essays all semester and scratched As across the top of the dot matrix printouts. This is the man who called on me in class as I (with unaccented English) responded to questions of comprehension and theme.

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