How a Class at FSU Helped Me Claim My Identity

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I hate morning classes. Waking up before 10:00 a.m. has been a lifetime struggle for me. But, my after first day in Dr. John Ribó’s Latino/Latina Literature in English course, I knew I’d muster up the energy every Tuesday and Thursday to attend his class. I knew that class would change my life.

Nearly three years ago, I made the monumental decision to move from Miami, Florida, where I was born and raised, to attend Florida State University in Tallahassee. Unbeknownst to eighteen-year-old me, this decision wasn’t only huge because of the regular college stuff. Although independence, distance from home, and adapting to college life are things every freshman deals with, my experience had an unanticipated additional layer: culture shock.

Growing up in Miami, I was just like everybody else. In Miami, being of Hispanic and Latino origin, having parents and grandparents who immigrated to the United States, having mixed nationalities and cultures, speaking English and Spanish, having a huge family, listening to Spanish music, eating foods like rice and beans with plátanitos, being bold and straightforward, always putting effort into your appearance – are a given. These things are the norm. I never thought twice about being Latina, because almost everybody in Miami is.

Then I came to FSU.

Suddenly, I was confronted with the reality that “Miami white” and gringo (a white person without Hispanic or Latino origin) aren’t the same thing. Suddenly, I was different. Aside from my childhood best friend who also came to FSU, I didn’t have Hispanic or Latino friends. I also didn’t have Hispanic or Latino professors. I no longer greeted people by kissing them on the cheek. I no longer ate Colombian lunch with half my extended family every Sunday. It was no longer “cool” to wear my hair naturally curly with the help of “ethnic” hair products that I used to share with my friends back home. It was no longer socially acceptable to be loud and opinionated, to blast reggaeton music, to actually dance at clubs and parties, or to slip Spanish words into English sentences. For the first time in my individuality-complex life, I found myself wanting to fit in … and was failing.

The three years I’ve spent at Florida State have been a wild ride. Along this chaotic journey, though, I never thought a class would help me in the plight of self-acceptance. I never anticipated a literature class could impact me so profoundly.

As an English major, I had my pick of courses to fulfill yet another literature requirement (we have a lot of them). Scrolling through the list, “Latino/Latina Literature in English” caught my eye right away. I remember thinking to myself, “They have a class about that? At FSU?” as I added it to my schedule.

On the first day of class, Dr. Ribó played a documentary called Precious Knowledge. The film is about an ethnic/racial studies course that was taught at a majority-Chicano high school in Tucson, Arizona. It showed how learning about their ancestry, community history, and culture had a profound positive impact on students’ lives, motivating many to care about their coursework, to graduate, and to become active in their community and politics. The film was also about how the Tucson Unified School District banned the ethnic/racial studies course, and how white lawmakers in Arizona wanted to prevent Mexican American students from learning about their ancestry, history, and culture. The government tried to convince these students and teachers that the history of Hispanic people in America wasn’t part of the American story.

I sat in that classroom with goosebumps. Never in my life had I considered the history of Hispanic Americans as part of American history. Never in my life had I put myself, an American citizen who was born and raised in this country, into the story of America. Never in my life did I ask myself why.

Throughout the past four months in Dr. Ribó’s class, I’ve experienced transformational growth in my relationship with my ethnicity. This is the first class in my three years of college where everyone participates of their own free will. We all have so much to say about everything, taking every class discussion in so many directions. We talk about the class readings, of course, which are always filled with interesting stories, new perspectives, and universal themes. But we also talk about our own lives, our own struggles, and our own experiences. We talk about our families, our friends, our worldviews, and our belief systems. At the center of all these discussions, the Latino/Hispanic American experience is prevalent. I never thought I’d find a community of students at FSU who had similar backgrounds, upbringings, and struggles. I never thought I’d be in a class where everyone had so much to say about the same topics. I never thought I’d sit in a classroom full of strangers and know that I could talk about my deepest insecurities and be able to relate those deepest insecurities to real social issues, universal experiences, and the things that made our community special and nuanced and worth learning about in schools.

Without Latino/Latina Literature in English, I may have never understood the importance of putting firsthand experience into academic discussion. I may have never understood the importance of being proud to call myself Latina.

Strike Out,

Author: Cristina Angee

Editor: Jayna O

Tallahassee