Crying in the Corner Store

Adjusting to a PWI and The Zauner approach to Nostalgia

by Zaira Girala Munoz - First-year MA/PhD student, English RCL program with a Disability Studies Concentration.

As a new grad student and Columbus resident from the East Coast, I arrived with my expectations and anxieties about Ohio itself as well as The Ohio State University. I arrived from The University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), a Minority Serving Institution (MSI) with non-white students making up over half of its student body. I was also a McNair scholar, so I came from a predominantly Latine and Black program. The move to OSU—a university with twice the students and acreage of UMBC and almost half the diversity—has been jarring. At UMBC, there was always the subtle comfort of walking between classes or around campus and constantly seeing students of color and almost every ethnicity walking across the quad or in hallways chatting between classes, and hearing multiple languages spoken. Moving to OSU, I became aware that I had taken that quiet unspoken comfort of being at an MSI for granted. Though I wield a tremendous amount of privilege being white and Hispanic, I still felt uneasy as I walked across campus. Though my department has a higher percentage of Latine students overall, I still feel anxiety beyond my department in a mostly white environment in which I am still the cultural other. However, this discomfort has motivated me to seek out community within Columbus as a whole and fold in elements of heritage, culture, and nostalgia that remind me of things from home to empower me throughout my week.

Homemade treats from Diamond's Ice Cream in Dublin. Images by Zaira Munoz

Much like Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast and Crying in HMart fame, my family and I have often lived in mostly white neighborhoods and would drive out to in my case Latino bakeries or stores. Since moving to Columbus, I have found there are pockets of community and nostalgia if you know where to look. Though Jeni’s and Graeter’s are amazing, my favorite is Diamond’s Ice Cream in Dublin, where I sit next to the giant Frida Kahlo as we both nurse mangonadas heaping with mango and chili, avoiding a reading or rewarding myself for finishing assignments. Little kids dart between the tables and chairs next to mine, screaming and laughing in Spanish, their parents trying to get them to pick their flavors and negotiating their terms of reward for good behavior. As much as my commitment to Meijer and Aldi is solidified with new grocery routines, as are the trips I make out to La Michoacana stores to fortify my pantry with sweets or ingredients I have had my whole life.

In some ways, the little pilgrimages I make to these places are a return as much as a destabilizing force. I contend with my academic identities and my cultural and ethnic ones regularly. I contend with the impossibility of Latine or Hispanic as ‘other-imposed’ labels too finite to describe the massive swaths of nationality, culture, and ethnicity they claim to represent. I also go eat a lot of ice cream and chili-covered fruit because I am supposed to be writing but I simply Cannot Right Now.

There is something about the ways Latine grocery stores are stocked that feels curated. It creates and destroys nostalgia all at once. It reminds you that 'Latine' and 'Hispanic' were terms made to categorize an 'other'. It exists as a construct and a consequence. It's education halfway to chaos. What’s foreign to you is home to the person squeezing by you in the cramped narrow aisle. I am completely at peace and disoriented all at once. There are moments, however, when I glimpse a familiar package or see the labeled edge of a canister over the edge of a top shelf and make a small scene asking a friend to get it down for me or exclaiming as I shove it into the teetering basket digging red lines into my arm. Lugging around the giant canister of Dulce de Batata or entire bulk boxes of Bon a Bon and Duvalin or Mango Nectar in little juice Boxes with cartoon characters.

Between the cramped shelves, I mentally check off the snacks I've been dying for. All at once, despite the foreignness of Columbus, the complete overtime of OSU's massive campus, and the stacks of reading I'll go home to, I hear laughter and realize it's mine. In my party dress, pattern tights, and platform Docs- far from home, missing my mother and silently crying in the middle of La Michoacana- I skip between shelves, pulling every packet of nostalgia off the shelf like it'll disappear, smiling like a little kid, staying forever.■