You pulled my hair back from my face, rampant with tangles and crimped waves slickly curling at the bottom of my elbows with sweat. It was Lunt Basement, it was dancing, it was finally kissing you outside on a picturesque bench glistening with snow and moonlight, it was proceeding my place to hook-up, and it was now, lying next to you in this very perfect moment when
“So… That was nice. I’ve always found you to be, like, a smokeshow, attractive. You’ve got something exotic about you. That’s it, yeah, something ethnic or whatever. Where are you from again? Like, your parents, where are they from? You’re definitely not from around here.”
I opened my eyes wider than they could possibly ever open, feeling the blood rising into those ocular veins, kickboxing and kneeing their way to punch both my dark chocolate almonds out of their sockets, and onto the dusty wooden floor in my Tritton dorm room. I could see my own psyche, my own conscious rolling her eyes at me: “Haven’t you learned better by now? You’re not just a fresh-meat froshie anymore, you’re second-semester, medium tender. You should have known better.”
I kept my robotic gaze on the asylum white ceiling, feeling it blur into grittiness as I stared harder, harder, harder. I mumbled something under my breath, something about being a Miamian but also being Cuban but also being sort of Puerto Rican but also being Spanish, and when I heard you reply back with something along the lines of me being spicy, I made it unequivocally clear the night was done.
That was me, the secret Tabasco extra-hot and mildly-spicy sauce your cafeteria lady used to mix into the government-issued Grade Q beef they fed you in school to make it somewhat passable as legal and edible. Or the secret Tabasco extra-hot and mildly-spicy sauce they lather on Taco Bell burritos to make sure that stoners can’t distinguish the difference between ground up cat vomit and ground up beef. Not like they’d care.
Sometimes it was sexy, fiery, searing, sizzling, burning, peppery, pyretic, but in the end it all meant the same damn thing. I had flavor, I had oomph, I had pizzazz- or so it was deemed- and apparently, I was supposed to be happy about it. Be grateful. Soak in and hyperbolize the whole stereotype like a Sofia Vergara on the purest cocaine my Daddy surely was selling in order to give me a cushiony and lush private college education.
I was the secret formuler in the Krusty Krab patties, and I caught myself in the midst of so many greedy Planktons, trying every itsonlyajoke and using every itsobviouslyacompliment on me to figure out the recipe, the mystery, the code to gain consent and unleash the wild side they were taught lied within my genetic and ethnic blend.
Being a light-skinned Latina that is White-passing meant that I was a surprise within the surprise, a bonus point for the final score- especially if you answered the Double Jeopardy of my existence correctly and somehow fathomed that, yes, I could be a legitimate and authentic Latina and not be dark-skinned!
And, hey, it wasn’t all that bad. It hasn’t been all that bad. Nights like the one spent with that crush were the minority. I made myself believe that if I kept my emotions mum and my reactions minimal, I could slide by, and get a hang of the college dating game and hook-up culture.
I told myself I could deal with it. I told myself I wanted to be as agreeable as possible, as liked as possible. Coming across as “unappreciative” of my curves that came from a rice-and-bean diet, or the thick hair that grows back five hours after I’ve trimmed or shaved it, or the naturally olive complexion, would be coming across as a bitch with a pole shoved up her big fat Cuban ass.
Nevertheless, fetishism of my Latinidad continued to pervade my experience, in more ways than sending a guy home after getting slightly ticked off at a stereotype. That’s what racial micro-aggressions were to me, at the time, microscopic moments of slightly ticked-off that crept out of my skin like the rest of my body heat that Pennsylvania winter.
They- the frustration, the shame, the confusion- condensed easily for a while there. For if I could giggle at a Consuelo appearance on Family Guy, then couldn’t I just as easily laugh when someone on my freshman hall said they thought I’d make a perfect “Cuban housewife,” or when a group of guys I used to be tight with would teasingly coerce me into saying things like “¡Ay Papí!” to get them to crack up? I wasn’t easily offended, not really. And I’m still not.
But, then I heard about The Rainbow that second semester of freshman year and completely lost all my shit.
The Rainbow is apparently a list made up of all sorts of identities that men should become acquainted with physically. “You’ve got your redheads, your Asians, your twins, your French chicks, your Latinas” this person said, a person who knew me well.
“You’re probably someone’s token Latina right now! You helped them complete The Rainbow!”
If you ever want to understand what fetishism of a race or ethnic group is, I think that last remark contextualizes it fairly accurately.
Essentially, when one is fetishized, one is degraded and stripped away from ones personhood. We are relegated as mere objects, mere trophies or tokens that men “win” when they kiss, date, flirt, or fuck us. We are demeaned to Two Ounce Bottles of Tabasco Sauce: spicy girls that pack a punch in the sack or on the street. We carry this brand on our breasts, on our dangly earrings, on our curls, on our cork wedges, on our purses. It is with us everywhere we go, and while some may see this fetishism as “advantageous” for scoring guys, it only gives men more ammo for their sexism.
How so? All of a sudden, those things you loved about your Latinidad- whether they were your temperament, your hospitality, your attention to appearances, your luscious curls, your thick legs, and your plump lips- now become potential areas of chastisement from men. Your body needs to be covered up in certain ways, your make-up is too dramatic, you don’t need to eat all of those tostones con mojo you should probably start trying to cut your waist-size by half but keep your tits and ass to make sure you meet the criteria for whitewashed/brainwashed beauty standards.
Reading this, you may still be unconvinced that being called spicy should be offensive to someone that is a Latina, but these appellations take on vaster and more complex forms of their own that cheapen and dehumanize. Spicy becomes synonymous with hotheaded, ill-tempered, crazy, psycho, bitchy, rude, dramatic, ridiculous, wild, slutty, impulsive, reckless, coincidentally around the same time that the person in question that called you spicy begins looking for reasons why you rejected them, or why you weren’t perfect for them, or why the relationship could never function with such a SPICY HOTHEADED ILL-TEMPERED CRAZY PSYCHO BITCHY RUDE DRAMATIC RIDICULOUS WILD SLUTTY IMPULSIVE RECKLESS puta as a partner.
Yes, my “spiciness” was once-upon-a-nightmare claimed as one of the main reasons as to why I was an unqualified candidate for a superior and transcendent love that surpassed all other loves a male could offer to a piece of meat like me.
It’s exhausting enough to have to deal with the execrable lambastes spat out by the likes of Donald Trump about how repugnant my Latino and Hispanic brothers and sisters are. Dealing with the negative perceptions of Latino identity that demean our ability and capacity to comprehend, to engage, to provide, to progress, to act nobly and dignifiedly, is also exhausting. Please don’t make me expend whatever shard of emotional energy I have left on worrying about being perceived as spicy from my crush. Please, God, anything but that.
Luckily, studying at Haverford College as a Latina has had a monumental perk: People here tend to be, for the most part, overly kind and overly conscientious. Specifically, the men here tend to be, for the most part, overly kind and overly conscientious. The Honor Code, the Quaker spirit of Haverford, and the general open-mindedness and tolerance of our generation, has made for a college experience with a bounty of beautiful run-ins, encounters, acquaintanceships, friendships, and flings.
That doesn’t mean that we’re perfect, though.
I know we can do better. I know we can treat our women better, and our women who are People Of Color better at this institution. Be wary of the way that you describe women, particularly those who identify as People of Color. We are not chocolates, we are not spices, we are not peppers. We do not complete your pantry, or your prismatic Rainbow of If I hooked up with her then I’m obviously not a racist!. We have more to offer than what’s on the outside, and what we have to offer on the outside does not give keen insight to what lies within.
I am not a Two Ounce Bottle of Tabasco Sauce.
But, I am most definitely hotheaded. Jaja.
Author’s Note: I would like to reiterate the following: This is not an account of every person of color at Haverford College. This is not an account of every woman who identifies as a person of color at Haverford College. This is not an account of every woman who identifies as a Latina, or as a Hispanic. This is simply one fragment of my own narrative, a sliver of my own existence as a White-passing Latina at a predominantly White college that I am willing to share. It does not encompass all of my sentiments, or all of my experiences, because quite frankly, I need time beyond my years here to begin piecing the jigsaw of abstracts and concretes into one cohesive entity, and yet, I know for certain that finished product would only capture a bleak percentage of what others who identify as I do have gone through. I also am not here to spout hate, or to rouse anger, or to spearhead an activist movement that I fear would lose steam just as quickly as it would begin to boil through this very page onto a slew of oftentimes well-intentioned (but poorly directed and executed) fervent statuses posted on social media platforms. I will be sharing other tales during Hispanic Heritage Month that are fused with concilitatory humor and somber critique, just like any other opinion piece floating in cyberspace, that will expose the blissful and painful parts of being a Latina woman in the context of our college, generally in the United States, and in comparison to other parts of the world. Thnx fam.