14 Nov 2008, Written by Monica Bologna-Huerta in essay, society, 18 Comments

The Dilemma of Displacement

Every late August, the temperature would be dry and oven-like. The leaves would turn a shade of lightly baked golden green. A sizzling heat wave reserved for the Sahara desert could be seen rising over the playground pavement midday and then school would begin at Our Lady of the Rosary. Tucked away in the quaint village of Greenhills, Ohio (a community not large enough to be called a suburb) there it stood unchanged since the 50’s. Mousy blonde-haired, blue-eyed conservatives would drive their mousey-blonde-haired, blue-eyed, children adorned with last names like Bergman, Hoffman, or Kaufman to the old OLR parking lot.

Their small classrooms would surely be decorated in primary colors, apples, motivational proverbs, and crucifixes where teachers would await dressed in ugly teacher jumpers displaying whitewashed smiles and large packs of Elmer’s glue.

The children would sit in their terribly uncomfortable uniforms, itching for release. The teacher would smile in the center of the thinly carpeted room, and hold out a sheet of paper. I dreaded that sheet of paper. That sheet of paper represented all that was evil to me as a child. I knew that sheet of paper would only lead to…

“Monica…Ba…Ba…Balony??” The teacher would say loudly after a few of the more clearly pronounced names”. The class would erupt in a laughter that would shake desks and rattle florescent light fixtures.

“It’s Bologna…like Bo-loan-ya,” I would say timidly, willing her chubby ignorant mouth a cavity.

Then the teacher would look at my name again, squint her eyes intensely, blink once or twice as if my name was causing her dyslexia, and say:

“Oh…well wow it sure is spelled the same as the stuff ya make sandwiches with!” As if to justify all the embarrassment she had just bestowed upon me.

“What kind of a name is thaaaat?” She would ask slowly after an unnerving pause.

“It’s Italian”.

“Italian? Well I could have sworn I thought I heard your mother was a Mexican lady.”

“She is”.

“So your dad is Italian?”

“His family is from Italy”.

“How neat! Class we have an Italian/Mexican girl in our classroom!” She would say with enthusiasm and curiosity, as if I was a small exotic animal that the class had the rare opportunity of studying. And it wasn’t as if they weren’t in the know; these were the same 29 kids I would be in class with every single year for eight years.

Eventually someone would begin to sing “My Bologna has a first name, it’s M-o-n-i-c-a, My Bologna has a second name it’s…umm what’s your middle name?”

It never failed. And the funniest part about it was that whoever sang it sincerely believed they were the first to invent this groundbreaking sing-a-long pun. Even as I grew up they’d look at me with a big smile and say:

“Have you ever heard that?”

I can best describe cultural displacement as being from a mixed background and not identifying with either ethnicity while feeling out of place in the environment you’ve been raised. Cultural displacement is something many people encounter in America, since our culture is made up of so ethnicities and we are always trying to deposit our nationalities into graphs, charts, and categories. The statistics of our cultural identity reaches a little further than marking an X on an application; it is a learning experience that swallows fits of confusion on a daily basis, as we hungrily search for who we are in life.

An event that has defined my cultural displacement and had a lasting impact on me today takes the stage of my parent’s basement, at a mere age of three. It was this crucial moment in my life that would cause me to ‘throw away my family’s heritage’ and become a gringa for the rest of my life.

At three years old I transformed from innocent, sweet, brown eyed angel: to the devil incarnate, a demon child sent to ruin my family’s history. I was predestined to infuse Americanism into my household, to throw away the Spanish language like week-old trash and steal my mother’s soul, forcing upon her the bland English language and shaming her and myself forever!

At least, this was how I was made to feel for many years. In my whiney child-like voice, I looked up at my mother while she was speaking in her native tounge, and verbalized in my mediocre child vocabulary something to the extent of…I don’t want to speak Spanish anymore. This shook my mother to the core. Her eldest daughter, deny her language? It was shame I had brought on myself, and as I stood in the partially furnished basement, in my red and green playhouse made of cardboard, I was unaware of the consequences that would follow me wherever I went, like a dishonorable shadow or a devil on one shoulder, constantly reminding me what an insensitive daughter I was. My mother has repeated, restated, reiterated and reinvented this story to myself, Spanish teachers in high school, friends, relatives, boyfriends, random store clerks, our pets, homeless people, ghosts, and whoever or whatever else would listen. We had sporadic outbursts of Spanish between us all. It was lingual limbo; I knew enough to understand everything I didn’t want to know, and not enough to fit in with my relatives south of the border.

I don’t want to lessen my crime or have the jury feel sorry for the culprit child that I was, but in my defense…I was three! Might I add that this was a city that ranked 2nd at the time, for the least amount of immigrants inhabiting it, right behind Pittsburg. That number has improved since 1988 but at the time, I had not encountered anyone who wasn’t white, I had not understood why I was the only one speaking Spanish in school. To me, it was all very confusing and instead of my parents explaining my differences to me, or what it meant to be an immigrant, or force me to speak Spanish (since I’m sure I would have forgotten about my predicament a week later) they chose to listen to their three-year-old daughter and allow her to cast aside a large part of her cultural identity. This subtracted Spanish from the equation of my life.

Cincinnati Ohio has some nice parks, some fine museums, a couple charming University campus’s, but it is widely recognized as the place where race riots broke out, and as a conservative, sheltered suburb type city with a lifeless downtown only kept barely breathing by its sports fanaticism. Everyone in this town of German descendents refers to themselves as German by eating bratwurst and drinking imported beer. They even dedicate a weekend to it by shutting down a major city street.

For me at the time, not being white or black in Cincinnati was considered different, but being considered different in Greenhills (AKA Mayberry USA) was a singular and distinctly odd experience for me. I can account for many times that my oddness was pointed out and made public for a classroom full of cruel children. The day we were to talk about the Alamo, I would try to feign an illness. But alas, I was a mediocre liar and Alamo talk would lead to asking my ‘Mexican’ opinion or how my ancestors could do such a thing. Someone would always shout out “Remember the Alamo!” that day at recess and trot away from me on their fictitious horse.

It wasn’t until I was considered ‘popular’ that the torment froze down to a minimum. Not that all of it was cruel, sometimes it was a teacher merely pointing out my differences in an example, but being singled out in class was out of line for any kid in grade school. You see, to be different as a child, as I’m sure many of you can agree with, is not cool. It is the same reason the kid who knew the answer wouldn’t raise his hand, you don’t ever want to be singled out or create a reason for kids to made fun of you. I, however, could not hide my black hair, or olive skin, or dark bushy eyebrows, it was out there, all the time-for everyone to be aware of. I had to work hard at being the same as the other girls, in order for my outsides to go unnoticed and my insides shine brightly in red, white, and blue.

And I did just that. It was the same gym shoes, the same hairstyles, the same CDs, and the same clothes. If I could have wrapped myself in a swaddle of American pop culture I would have, just to appear normal. Ironically now, that identity couldn’t be further from my personality.

Part of that normalcy was Abercrombie and Fitch. Abercrombie & Fitch, a company who employs sales associates based on the way their face is structured, the height of the cheekbones perhaps, the slenderness of the stomach, the bone structure of the hips, the texture of the skin, and especially the coloration of pigment. According to the Abercrombie & Fitch “Look Book” sales associates need to look ‘All American’ and have the ‘Abercrombie Look’. This is a company who decrease sales associate hours based on heightened acne fits, weight gain, or…being a minority. The company best represented by small town frat boys and anorexic, pill-popping teenage cheerleaders. It isn’t a wonder they’ve been hit with many lawsuits and discrimination charges over the past decade.

However this is not the reason I have become disgusted with Abercrombie & Fitch. Abercrombie had an effect of me at a young age, an experience that at the time seemed slightly embarrassing, but hardly then could I recognize its significance. It is only now; looking back at the humiliation that coated my mother’s face in that store do I recognize the nauseating experience of first entering Abercrombie & Fitch. Part of my eighth grade desire to shop at Abercrombie stemmed from the longing to fit in among my very normal friends; acceptance was brought in by image, an image I would have to uphold if I was to be considered normal. The writer of “The Alpha Teenager” may have put it best: “Abercrombie & Fitch’s success depends on the teenager’s basic psychological yearning to belong. (Remember, the Columbine shootings happened at a school some reportedly called “Abercrombie High.”) And that means more than just selling the right kinds of clothes.”

My mother, hearing my pleas for new clothes, against her will, took me shopping. Upon entering Abercrombie (the old Abercrombie), I noticed that the floors were plush red carpeting, and the store mimicked an old home with small fake chandeliers as the lighting, and round oak tables displaying tight warm sweaters with the words printed like fashionable calligraphy across the chest:

A-B-E-R-C-R-O-M-B-I-E & F-I-T-C-H.

I gushed over the lettering, felt the material between my fingers like it was gold, and took up to looking extensively for the one shirt I was allowed to buy. My mother complained about the prices, telling me we could go to a department store and get more clothes, but I was too spellbound to care.

A few sales associates that stood behind the registers ignored us and kept talking among themselves, noses turned up.

My mother stood in front of the counter, waiting to be helped but no one bothered to look at her for a long time. Finally, asking loudly for a dressing room, they looked at her and shrugged, clearly irritated. Taking the key off the hinge and without saying a word, the sales associate went to the back corridor and opened a dressing room.

For people that had been so wrapped up in a conversation about keg stands, they suddenly began to get very curious about our exotic Mexican dressing habits.

I had two shirts to try on, two, and since they were expensive at the time, I was on a mission to make the right decision. I wasn’t sure how normal people tried on clothes, but I tried them on with the intention of feeling the sleeve length, the material, whether it fit right, which one looked best on me. Suddenly, there was a quick, rough, rap at the dressing room door. The sales associates were suddenly very interested in our purchases:

“Are you still in there? Can I help you?”

“No, we are fine.” My mother said calmly at first.

One minute later:

“Everything okay in there?”

“Yes.”

30 seconds later:

“Is there anything you need?”

“No, thank you.”

10 seconds later:

“Are you sure everything is okay in there?” “Do you need me to come in? I can.”

“We are fine!”

My mother was angry, I was suddenly aware of their concern; they had thought that we were up to something. Since, speaking with an accent and being in a dressing room for five minutes was obviously something to be suspicious about. The “Can I help you’s” weren’t in a polite voice, they were in a voice that said, if you are stealing, I’ll try to get you deported tone.

We walked out, and the sales associate was standing next to our dressing room like a private detective staking out a couple of murder suspects, her eyeballs produced an expression usually reserved for lemur monkeys. My mother did not want to buy the shirt; she was clearly upset. But I persisted, being naïve I hoped what I had witnessed hadn’t been real.

My poor mother, trying to please me, walked up to the counter with scorn in her eyes and wrote a check, putting her hard earned money toward a company who had disgraced her in front of a young, ignorant daughter. I had felt horrible for her, I had wanted to spit on their shiny oak counter in my mother’s defense, but I stayed silent, something I may never forgive myself for.

I wore the shirt on out of uniform day but each time I did, I felt pangs of torment and sentiments of angst bubbling beneath the FITCH, in a space under the flesh of my chest, which held a confused heart of twelve years old. I wondered if what had happened had been something I had learned about in school, a word spoken about in white communities at a vague and careful distance called discrimination. Eventually the shirt would be coated in it and I would wear it with only with shame and animosity it was purchased in.

As I grew up, I realized how extremely unfashionable Abercrombie & Fitch is, and I would never be caught dead in a fashion reserved for small town sorority girls. Irony set in, and people where I’m from still don’t understand many reasons behind my detestation for Abercrombie. It is more than the fact that it lacks a sense of style and originality, and no serious fashion major in the world would identify Abercrombie as cool by today’s standards, it is common and boring. It is more than the way the company is marketed to upper-middle class wealthy white kids, or the secrecy behind their hiring process, or those whored by its textiles.

Another part of my “Ethnic-ness” was always having it shown off for the benefits of others. I had always wondered why I was picked to be a model for grade school calendars or newsletters. I remember being called in from class one day, this time in High School by a guidance counselor. I immediately got the gut instinct that I was in trouble, as I walked towards the hallway, I was flooded with all the things I’d gotten away with. Judgment day had arrived. However, fortunately it hadn’t. The counselor had never been nicer to me. We headed outside to the little oasis the school had built for picnics with important school board officials, where she told me I was going to have my picture taken for a newsletter that would be sent out to Catholic grade schools around the greater Cincinnati area. I was honored to have been picked! But when I saw who was sitting on the bench in front of the photographer, I was confused. There sat, two black girls, of about nine in the whole school, one Asian girl, a freshman, and the only other minority, a middle eastern girl, a senior. This was a Catholic, all-girls high school that held about 1200 girls…and we were their proud minority. I was told to put on my school sweater and smile. My smile must have looked dumbfounded however, because to me, I had been brought to serve a purpose, to reflect the school’s “diversity” which amounted to the people sitting on that bench. I later asked the counselor why we were chosen, and she had uttered something along the lines of how ‘special’ we were.

It was always something growing up, constantly trying to blend in and always being made to stand out. I wasn’t that comfortable in the spotlight. I didn’t realize how great it was, and how I should have reveled in my uniqueness until I went to college and realized how closed my eyes had been. I found myself hanging out with people of all types of backgrounds. Chinese, Venezuelan, Vietnamese, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Dominican, Egyptian, mostly people of mixed backgrounds who had found themselves in similar situations. Suddenly, it wasn’t just okay to be different, it was accepted. I still however, found myself at a distance from the native Spanish speakers.

My understanding of the Spanish language could best be described as a mood ring, I can tell the color of the feelings, but I’m fuzzy on the details.

If that part of my life wasn’t confusing enough, I had the other end of the spectrum. Being a gringa in Mexico, a whole different ball game. As this narrative flies south of the border, allow me to paint a different picture.

My sister and I had been looking forward to Playa Del Carmen all day, the thought of rows and rows of silver jewelry at cheap prices made us giddy.

I made my way through the market place, white tents filled with shiny toys to adorn my ears, neck, and fingers with. I sifted through the rings and came across a beautiful Turkish star ring and tried it on. The price I saw was a little higher than I expected but still reasonable. The owner of the tent, a young well-built beach-bum looking type approached me with a flashy white smile reserved for cheesy car salesmen.

“Te gustas?” He began with a grin.

I looked the part, he didn’t realize that I was actually a closeted gringa. I was suddenly very aware of my language handicap.

“Yes, I mean, si, me gusta mucho,” I said letting my Americanism spew all over his gorgeous silver jewelry. His unbelievable smile became a shade less shiny.

“Thirty Dollars,” he said still smiling.

“No Señor. It says 200 pesos.”

“No, no, not twenty, thirty dollars”.

“Aquí es el precio”.

“No, no, the price tag, it is wrong”.

“What? That isn’t true.”

Upon seeing my Spanglish and lack of Mexican bargaining techniques, my mother flew over and in a vortex of swirling Spanish, shouted at him and not only got the price reduced to the original tag but a hefty discount as well.

When it comes to my family that is when it is the most frustrating. After knowing my personality, you would find that I’m usually a very verbal person, I need to communicate, I thrive on bouncing back ideas, bouncing back jokes, juggling words and comments and stories. It is something I crave about human interaction. Not being able to do that is torture for me, it is enough to make me go into a temporary state of comatose.

When puttering around another country, you view your surroundings with wider eyes. You soak everything in as beautiful yet are bitterly aware of your differences.

The very last time I visited my family in Mexico it had been a very long time since I had spoken any Spanish (unlike my younger sister who had been taking it for her fourth year in high school, who also planned it to be her minor in college) and then there was me. While my sister was dancing in the corner with a dozen of my cousins I hadn’t seen in close to a decade, I was in the corner with a few people, speaking the short phases I did know, while my Father helped to translate. Everyone assumed that bronchitis was the reason for my tongue tied sadness, and the reason I did not want to go dancing that night. Alas, it was more than that. I could see the shame in my mother’s eyes from across the room; she had raised a gringa daughter, a daughter who had rejected her language, people, and country. Later that night she had let me feel the contempt from her astringent Spanglish anger. All I could do was weep in the bathroom, trying to explain myself in English to no avail.

If only I could shout from the rooftops: “I was three! I cannot speak because I will always have this memory hanging over my head like a cloud, a storm of self-fulfilling prophecies, cumulus clusters predicting rain whenever I open my mouth in this country. I am upset at myself; for pretending it was my fault all these years, as if I had the control, as if I could dictate my life when I was a toddler. I’ve been carrying this burden far too long. As if I enjoy being an ignorant tourist only armed with a camera in the country where half my own blood comes from. I always say I will learn Spanish fluently, on my own. How’s that going? I’ve dabbled in a number of languages but the Mexican border of fear is strong within me.

It has been quick to suggest that the reason I don’t speak is because I’m ashamed of acknowledging my heritage, however the truth is that I’m dazzled by Mexico and by my mother. I’m dazzled by the vast, mysterious living earth decorated by the smoking volcanoes, ornamented by laughing cacti, the palm trees that sway to the mariachi, jungles cascading along teal waters, the red Indian soil, the majestic Spanish boulevards and classic architecture. It is a mystic, foggy spiritual country of love, flavorful in all its wonders.

In actuality I lust to learn Spanish, it is as if a little taste bud on my tounge grows sour when I begin to speak. A little notch in my cranium twists and swivels trying to recount childhood remembrance of the language lost upon my palate, stuck somewhere in a cavity of my soul that longs to be excavated by Mexico itself.

When we arrived in Puebla, it was a wonder to me how my mother could ever leave her beautiful birthplace. Lovely boulevards and purple bugambilias lines the walls of every house. As we walked through the city, I noticed how the cathedral’s tower scraped the velvet clouds and when the bell chimed it echoed with an eternal song throughout el parín. The Spanish bells haunted me as I imagined how my mother could leave this dreamy place to form another dream in America.

Mexico City is a vibrant place, but if there is something more vibrant it lies just outside the city, at a place known as Teotihuacán.

The pyramids of Teotihuacán loomed in the distance like archaic skyscrapers as my uncle drove on through the cool morning. My lungs ached as I coughed out the open window. While being on vacation in Mexico with my family, bronchitis wasn’t exactly a welcomed travel partner. I felt uneasy, I shifted my body over the vinyl seat covers and laid my head on the door.

Climbing the Pyramid of the Sun had been my one goal for the trip. I already had a pretty horrible cardiovascular system, but with bronchitis at my side, I could only hope to make it half way up. Each time I coughed that raspy, shivering cough, my organs wept with indescribable agony.

We began walking through a corridor of ancient  pyramids on each side, the walkway of the dead, carvings depicting large cats and old magical tales.I looked up the Pyramid of the Sun seemed to touch the cloudy abyss above. It was rocks upon rocks and staircases upon staircases lifting it higher and higher into the misty sky.

“They say, if you reach the top and throw your arms up to the sun gods, they will grant you energy,” My uncle said as he began to climb ahead of us.

I prayed that was true, because my energy had long been gone.

Each of us began climbing; even my small mother put oomph in her step. I stopped frequently to attempt a breath without coughing. I sat perched, gazing over the people who looked like ants, scattered across the ground. I tried to imagine ancient humans gathering in the center of the village, sacrificing one of their own to the sun god. It didn’t seem possible that this very sun that melted the current clouds beat down on people here long ago. It was amazing; I was sitting on something older than anything I had ever touched.

I climbed a little further and joined my sister on a stoop; we dangled our feet over the edge. I snapped pictures of our toes above the rows of stones that cascaded down below us.

My lungs began to get worse each time I climbed the ladder of altitude, my breath began to shorten, my tears began to well up with the wind dashing back and forth against my skin. The stairs began to get steeper, and I could no longer stand up. I passed my bag off to my father and crawled up the steepest part of the stairs, painfully inching upward as I gripped the cool rocks, one by one.

“You okay Mona?” My Father said sympathetically.

“Not really,” I said resting my head on his shoulder.

My Dad had been sympathetic during the trip, I guess he must have understood being on the outside when he first came to Mexico and met my mother. A gringo, a white guy, a foreigner who didn’t know that the hot sauce he was about to inhale wasn’t soup. The look in his eyes seemed to say, yo comprendo.

As I neared the top, the stairs began to get steeper and I could feel my ribs begging for an end to the unforgivable journey I had taken them on. With one more cough or laugh or breath, I imagined my lower ribs popping out of place. I began to think about Los Teotithuacanos, about  the grandparents I never knew,  about my grandmother of indigenous blood and my grandfather of Spanish blood. I rested a moment wondering what they would think about me today.

I slid my hand over the last step, grinding my nails into the surface and suddenly saw no more steps. I felt bright, crispy air, and saw the sun as close to me as it had ever been, melting away the horizon. Trees appeared like verdant freckles on the ground’s face. I imagined people upon people; nations upon nations, the most exquisite and beautiful sights to be seen by the Teotithuacanos, a universal appreciation for life and the great human experience. A chilling, spooky, miraculous aura surrounded me. I threw my arms up in the air, reaching for the energy of the sun gods and smiling and shouting and jumping high. Suddenly I felt a burst of energy, quickly followed by a series of coughs and hacks.

It was my bitter reality, as soon as I thought I was about to understand my culture; I was either hacking up the language or hacking up bronchial fluids. How perfect an ending to my exploration of self. Perhaps there are more pyramids to climb in my life, more wandering to see where I fit in between this country and that. There are surely more answers to be sought, but at least I’m attempting the climb.

Monica Bologna-Huerta , a native of Cincinnati Ohio, is finishing up her BA in Fiction Writing at Columbia College Chicago. After graduation she plans to travel the world teaching English and perfect her (now intermediate level) Spanish.

View all articles by Monica Bologna-Huerta.

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Tags: personal essay