Julia Alvarez: What We Believe About Identity

JULIA ALVAREZ is the author, most recently, of “Afterlife,” a novel, and “Already a Butterfly,” a picture book for young readers. She was awarded a National Medal of Arts in 2014 (CREDIT: Bill Eichner)

One of the baffling things that happened when my family arrived in the United States in 1960 was having to find a term for ourselves. No one seemed to know where the Dominican Republic was. Back then there weren’t that many Dominicans in the United States — the dictatorship made it difficult to emigrate. So when my family was asked where we were from, we couldn’t just say, “We’re Dominican, you know, like Sammy Sosa or Alex Rodriguez.” Our classmates often mistook our country for the other Caribbean nation of Dominica. “Oh, you lucky dog! We went there for spring break!” At least Dominica was in the same neighborhood of islands.

The hyphenated nationality (Dominican-American, Chinese-American, even African-American) hadn’t yet been invented. If we had to check a box, the sorry options we were given (“Negro,” “Eskimo,” etc.) didn’t include us. We were vaguely of “Spanish origin,” which was better than the more deprecating slurs of the playground: “spic,” “wetback,” “greaser.”

I was born in Nueva York, but my parents returned to their homeland when I was a month old. They immigrated again when I was 10. I was American, but not American. I was an immigrant but not really. From the get-go, my identity wasn’t easy to untangle. I didn’t know how to talk about who I was, but I knew what made me uncomfortable. The two models of Spanish origin in popular culture were Miss Chiquita Banana and Ricky Ricardo — one, an over-the-top Latina “bombshell” touting her wares, both her bananas and her curvaceous self, and the other the butt of jokes, who brought on an outpouring of canned laughter whenever he opened his mouth. (Needless to say, I did not love “I Love Lucy.”) The whole idea that I could be in charge of the nuances and complexities of my identity never occurred to me. All I knew were the either/ors.

There was no vocabulary to light up the margins where my outlier selves were camped, waiting for the borders to open and let more of my selves in. “To thine own self be true,” we read in my Shakespeare class, a mantra of my hippie friends. But which self? I wondered. I was large; I contained multitudes, like Señor Whitman. How to say so? English was still a tongue I was trying to negotiate, and I had yet to find a term for myself that felt exactly right.

A term like “female,” which described one aspect of myself, didn’t allow for the differences, contingencies and modifications that came from being the Latina variety of female. “Intersectionality” wasn’t a word anyone used, though the place it maps was where I was living. Only when I started writing did I find the space to explore, qualify and give nuance to the many selves of my self, the stories of my story.

In the 1980s, like Columbus “discovering” America, editors suddenly discovered ethnic writers, though many of us had already been writing for several decades, our work published by regional magazines and small presses. But with our literary green cards came new identity challenges and assumptions for us to contend with. Did my characters always have to be Latinx? Did my plots always have to circulate around Latinx issues? Why were most of the books sent to me to blurb by Latinx or other ethnic authors? (“You’ll love it,” editors promised.) It’s not that I didn’t want to claim my ethnicity; it’s that I didn’t want to take on others’ limiting assumptions and scripts.

On top of this was the ongoing quandary of what to call ourselves. “Spanish origin” had morphed into “Hispanic,” which became stigmatized as a census-driven colonized term, one that ignored our Indigenous and African selves. Many of us, uneasy with those erasures, shifted to “Latino/a” (although that term recalled no bigger colonizer than the Roman Empire); then came “Latin@,” a more inclusive, gender-neutral description; and more recently “Latinx,” each term an effort to define ourselves and assert control over our journeys. And so by trial and many errors, putting my foot in my boca any number of times, I struggled to articulate what it meant to be a lived identity, not a performed or assigned or co-opted one.

Recently, a fellow ethnic writer and I reflected on coming of age in a world before multiculturalism. “And yet we’re still writing!” she crowed. The undefeated. It was such a relief to let my hair down with someone who felt the same bemusement and weariness at having come through the fire to yet more fire.

I was left wondering what it meant to have survived all these changes in the zeitgeist and in myself? What core principle of being had come through the fires of rejection, neglect and erasure? The triumph I most want to claim as I move into old age is surviving with that core intact.

One of the gratifications of growing older is hearing fromyounger Latinas that reading my work and that of my fellow contemporaryLatina writers helped them understand their lives in alltheir complexity and variety. We all needed vocabularies, storiesand testimonials, and over the 50-year stretch of my writing andpublishing life, I’ve increasingly seen those needs satisfied. Theborders have opened, at least on paper, for many of us.

But now as I enter my 71st year, I find myself in a shifting relationship with the identities I’ve spent a lifetime fighting for,shaping and claiming. Call it old age — or the result of years of practicing meditation, where the focus has been on letting go of the ego and embracing emptiness — but these days I’m more interested in shedding selves. In returning to a core self, the mother root.

More and more I’m drawn to the aesthetic of Japanese haiku,in which the extraneous and unnecessary is stripped away,leaving behind something charged and vital. I’m in awe of short,poetic novels that reside in the borderlands and liminal spaces of genre. I ache for fictional companions, older characters, especially older Latinas, accurately portrayed, not airbrushed into clichés (the wise abuelita, the once-beautiful señora of the autumnal patriarch, the red-hat-purple-shawl viuda alegre, the cantankerous gruñona — all the lite inhabitants of crone lit).How to report accurately on this stage of the journey, on the selves left behind, on what identity looks and feels like at this later stage of life?

The struggles are still necessary to fight. The layers still have to be lived through. You can’t shed an identity you never had the chance to claim and live out. As the gentle and brilliant Ocean Vuong writes, “Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.” We have togo back and help those who cannot get out, as my veteran compañera Sandra Cisneros reminds us at the end of “The House on Mango Street.” Nobody gets to be excused from the transforming work of love.

In one of his later poems, “The Layers,” Stanley Kunitz writes of the many lives and layers he has lived and left behind.And yet, “some principle of being / abides, from which I struggle/ not to stray.”

Being a member of an ethnic “minority” has meant living in and through the many definitions and layers that a new language and culture provided. How do we understand a core self that survives intact from these assaults to its full diversity? (Finallyin older age, I understand Toni Morrison’s defiant statement that she was not writing for the white gaze, which starts with not living in the blinding light of that othering gaze.)

Near the end of “The Layers,” a voice directs the old poet,overwhelmed by the wreckage a life inevitably leaves behind,to “live in the layers, / not on the litter.” Why dwell on the grievances,on the litter of bitterness, the distortions of others, the restrictive boundaries of smaller selves? I want, instead, to live with an awareness and appreciation of all the layers. Doing so involves accepting my own diversity, forgiving myself, seeing myself with perspective, humor, generosity and tolerance, and extending all of the above to others and to their struggles, which have also been and continue to be my own.

That might be the core principle that guides me, what I believe: not content or credo, but a way of being in the world — a life lived in kindness and kindredness, in abiding love.

Meanwhile, there is work still to do. As Kunitz writes in the final line of his poem: “I am not done with my changes.” The territory of identity in later life needs to be explored and articulated. Just as our earlier stories helped younger Latinas and other readers understand themselves, our elder stories today may help them in later life. What does it mean to be an elder not only in the ongoing struggles of our communities of color but also in the hugest civil rights struggle facing us all, that of saving the planet? As I grow old, I might only be able to show up on the front lines in the lines I write.

That would be a satisfying close: to disappear, like Walt Whitman, under boot soles — to be the ground others can stand on.