Earning My Way to Belonging
My mom and my family thought it was stupid and dangerous for me to join the U.S. Army. The Iraq War had just started and Americans still cared about Soldiers losing their legs to IEDs in the middle east. You see, in Colombia, being a Soldier is something one is forced to do. There’s a lottery draft that you get out of if you have enough money. If you get picked, you got treated like dirt at boot camp and sent to the jungle for a year to get ambushed by the guerrillas or to serve as a military policeman in a city if you’re lucky. Maybe you commit some atrocities hunting for guerrillas or paramilitaries and you make it out alive. You don’t get a discount at the movies. No one thanks you for your service. So I get why my relatives found it baffling that I would volunteer for such a thing.
I joined the U.S. Army for many reasons—none of them altruistic or patriotic. I wanted to speed up getting my U.S. citizenship after almost a decade as a legal resident. I wanted to travel and to see what the world beyond Miami and New York City looked like. I wanted money to pay off college loans, because one day I realized working two jobs while going to Florida International University to earn a Bachelor’s degree in English which would render me unemployable was a fool’s errand. Most of all, I needed a respectable job that didn’t pay by the hour and had benefits. I wanted access to the American dream.
At Basic Combat Training I met white recruits from Appalachia and the Midwest who had never met a black or brown person before. I also met Puerto Rican and Samoan recruits who spoke very little English. I was a foreigner to the rural whites and an American to those coming from the territories. And in the thick of awfulness of learning to be a Soldier in the snow, I asked myself why I was putting myself through all of that for a country that didn’t care about me—where I didn’t belong.
Months later, on my flight from Saint Louis, MO to San Angelo, TX, wearing my dress greens, I was upgraded to First Class and thanked for my service, and even though I hadn’t done anything for this country other than a lot of exercise, marching and shooting, I felt seen—I felt special in a way that immigrant kids from Miami don’t get seen—revered and not feared in a white space. It was a beautiful feeling.
“I felt seen—I felt special in a way that immigrant kids from Miami don’t get seen—revered and not feared in a white space. It was a beautiful feeling.”
It was then that the notion that I could somehow earn my way into belonging—into whiteness—through military service really took hold. If I served the U.S., if I paid my dues like a true patriot, I too would be just as American as those kids from the Midwest. Wanting to be a respectable adult—and unable to stand listening to the endless litany of country and gospel stations in rural America, I began to listen to AM talk radio thinking I was listening to news—I began to agree with Michael Savage that liberals suffered from mental disease and that it was awful that Democrats wanted to turn this country into a communist, pacifist country where men would no longer be men. I felt so American, hating the ‘enemies’ of our great nation. I felt like I belonged.
“They were generally kind and welcoming—never openly hostile or discriminatory. Yet, they were masters at microagressions.”
By the time talk radio turned on Hispanics in 2006, the veneer of my faux Americanness had eroded. My civilian coworkers at the Fort Polk Fire Department in western Louisiana were mostly white. They would proudly call themselves rednecks and fly the confederate battle flag from their pickup trucks. They were generally kind and welcoming—never openly hostile or discriminatory. Yet, they were masters at microagressions. They mixed my name up with the name of the other Hispanic Soldier in our detachment so often that one week we switched nametags and no one noticed. Thinking they were being helpful, they advised me about which towns were KKK hotbeds so that I wouldn’t stop in them while driving through. They loved joking with me about cocaine and drug trafficking and asking me what it was like to swim across the river despite the fact I told them that I’d arrived in the U.S. on a plane. They would talk amongst each other about opposing the mixing of races as a matter of principle, and they would denigrate and name-call the godless people of New Orleans—who are predominantly Black—as if somehow they had deserved the tragedy that Hurricane Katrina brought upon them. For years, I said nothing. I thought I had to tolerate them to exist in their American space—as if they were doing me a favor—as if I didn’t belong in it all on my own. Despite the repeated subtle messages that I didn’t belong, I thought that I could show them that I did—never mind that I couldn’t wait to leave western Louisiana.
It was the conservative backlash to George W. Bush’s immigration plan that opened my eyes to the self-loathing, striving-for-whiteness narrative I had built for myself. I had been okay with the talk radio hate and shared in the collective outrage until it was directed at my kind. Until they referred to people sharing my skin color and my family’s story as criminals, as invaders, as vermin.
Every time I landed in Miami during my annual leave, I felt alive—with an insatiable appetite to go salsa dancing with friends, to listen to reggaeton and merengue on the radio, to make my rounds through a list of mandatory Colombian, Cuban and Latin American restaurants. It was there, during my December 2006 vacation, that I realized—as stupid as it may sound—that Miami was not only American, but American enough. That my immigrant story of fleeing 90s violence in Colombia was as American as growing up in a farm in Iowa. That croquetas at El Palacio de los Jugos were just as American as a hot dog on the 4th of July—and that regardless of how white people felt about it, I was as American as they were, with the same rights and freedoms. I registered to vote as a Democrat.
It was after that trip I became truly patriotic—when I decided that I didn’t need white people’s approval to serve this country and that my service counted as much as theirs—no matter what they had to say about it. I began to talk back to my coworkers, which didn’t make me popular with most coworkers and fellow Soldiers. I decided that if these people didn’t like me being their peers, they would hate being my subordinates, so I decided to become a commissioned officer.
I traveled to Colombia for the first time in almost a decade in 2009. It felt familiar, but it didn’t feel like home. For starts, I renounced my Colombian citizenship in order to earn my commission as a Lieutenant, so I had to enter the country as an American—and be questioned about my lack of a Colombian passport—with the same amount of bureaucratic distrust I saw in INS agents at Miami International Airport almost two decades earlier. I would forget words in conversation. My cousin’s friends said I dressed and sounded like an American—even though I still had a slight Colombian accent when speaking English. I realized I had a lot of work to do to come to terms with how Colombian or non-Colombian I had become.
Nowadays, as the first person in my mother’s side of the family to have a graduate education, raising two children with a white American wife in a new suburban Texas house, I feel secure in my Americanness, even as our American civil society and system of government are challenged in ways I thought unthinkable—in ways that remind me of Colombia in the 90s. I don’t however, feel secure about my Colombianness, about how much of my childhood culture and language I’ll be able to pass on to them. I was in the mental process of reckoning with the Colombian half of my dual identity and planning a needed family trip for the children to meet their Colombian family for the first time when the coronavirus pandemic hit—so for now, joined by millions of first, 1.5 and second generation Latinx Americans asserting our claim to both sides of our identities, I’ll continue to exist in this in-between world where tacos are life, Selena Quintanilla and J-Lo reign supreme and where todo es posible.