A Spik at Harvard

I didn't know I was a Spik until I got to Harvard and an Anglo freshman demanded to see my ID while I was chatting in Spanish with some Puerto Rican friends in a common room in the freshman quad at the college.

We had a meeting there of the Puerto Rican student organization, La Organización or LaO, for short, and we were waiting for others. It was a first-year dorm, so the student in the common room was a freshman, who had been sitting quietly and reading in a large and comfy armchair when we arrived.

We weren't being loud or obnoxious, as we well could be, so I was shocked when he got up, took several decided steps toward me, and demanded to see my ID. I turned toward him, vaguely amused that he had approached me, the only woman in the room (my two other friends were big Puerto Rican men) and the only one who was less than five feet tall.

"Why do you want to see my ID?" I asked in English.

"Because you obviously don't belong here," he retorted, annoyed. "Show me your ID or I'll call the police."

At first, I couldn't believe what was happening. Unlike most Puerto Ricans, I don't show much of my African ancestry (except for my black, curly and willful hair) so that my skin is fair ("strawberries and cream" someone said once to my dismay) and freckled (the requinto of a great-great grandmother who came to Puerto Rico from Ireland).

Thus, it wasn't because I "looked" Puerto Rican that this uptight Anglo kid was harassing me: it was because by speaking Spanish and by sounding Puerto Rican, I wasn't American enough, in his mind, to be at Harvard legitimately.

I eyed him with all the disdain I could muster and hissed: "Call the police, you stupid freshman. I'll show them my ID and then you'll feel as ridiculous as you are."

He hesitated for a moment and then stormed out of the room but not before yelling at me: "You fucking Spik!"

That was my first encounter with the word Spik (a racist remark used by Anglos against Latinos who can't "speak" English) and my initiation into the culture of racism and discrimination upon which this "America," this country that appropriated the name of two entire continents, is founded.

Back then I felt like he had slapped me, like he had confirmed what I knew all along: that I didn't belong at Harvard. Truth be told, I always felt like an outsider there. I actually perfected the art of living as an outsider there.

After my years in college, and after living so many years in the States, I've gotten used to being an outsider. It's part of who I am, of who I became by virtue of leaving Puerto Rico to live here.

That day, more than twenty years ago, I found out I was a Spik at Harvard. Now, more than twenty years after, I am still a Spik wherever I go. But now it's not something I would ever be ashamed of. Today, it's a badge of pride and survivance.