Navigating a Sea of Identities
My earliest memories take me back to a quaint suburban house my family rented in the Mexican city of Tijuana, a mile away from the border with the United States. I remember my dad, who worked long shifts in the construction industry in the San Diego metropolitan area, sometimes brought me American treasures like Mickey Mouse coloring books and gas station cookies. I also remember that our TV received American channels like PBS and NBC, and that I often watched shows like Arthur and Pokémon in English without understanding anything at all, Spanish-speaker as I was.
When I was nine, my parents decided to move from the big city to their mid-sized town in the Central-Western state of Jalisco. Although at first I found it strange that I could not find any giant supermarkets or movie theaters in this new town, I eventually ended up enjoying the laid back lifestyle its inhabitants enjoyed — people still rode horses in the streets, climbed nearby mountains for weekend picnics, and hanged out at the town square every Sunday. The September holidays in honor of Independence Day and of local saints and virgins were especially colorful and loud; young people walked around the square, buying liquor and throwing confettis, riding rollercoasters and eating hotdogs.
When I was fifteen, my family finally got approved for US residency — the conclusion of a lengthy legal process that my father had started a decade or so ago. We moved to South Carolina, where my aunt and her family lived. By that time, I had learned enough English in middle school to survive my first year of high school. I learned enough about the American education system to make my way into college; the beautiful city of Charleston is where I completed my undergraduate studies.
I don’t have much to say about this period of my life, other than perhaps it was exceedingly quiet. I had always been introverted, but I suspect other factors influenced my inability to be more of a teenage rebel. It was during these years that I had to learn and learn to love the fact that I am gay; that my sexual orientation is not what my parents or society at large had planned and that, whether I wanted it or not, I was going to be affected by my sexual orientation. I also started to deal with a myriad of mental health issues that took very long to even identify: beyond being sad more frequently than normal and struggling to establish friendships, I started to either exercise religiously or carelessly overeat. I still fight those urges today.
After a rather uncomfortable one-year hiatus from school at my parents’ house, I have come back and I am happy with the direction my life project is taking — even if certainly many aspects remain uncertain. Still, however, I look back at all my life experiences and at the collage that form my cultural identities (a Mexican in the process of Americanizing himself), my sexual orientation, my mind, my personality traits, and my interests, and I am not sure if there is a single place where I belong. I can choose multiple communities but not one of them can quite relate to my life trajectory so far.
I sometimes wonder what it’s like not to have to turn to multiple groups for understanding: speaking a single language and simply existing in a world where your culture, physical appearance, personality, and social class is seen as an integral element of normalcy. I sometimes wonder if perhaps my sensation of navigating so many spaces is perhaps more widespread that I would like to believe, and that I, in fact, have not much to offer in terms of novelty to ever become a prolific writer of fiction (one of my dreams, by the way).
I sometimes, on the other hand, consider myself lucky to have experienced so much. I’ve been in a number of situations and spaces that few people have explored. Perhaps I ought to exploit this for good instead of thinking of how it contributes to an unresolved sense of isolation that has persisted in me since my parents explained to me that we were immigrants in Tijuana, that we were outsiders and would always be.
