I grew up in the suburbs and I attended a private university in the Northwest. I haven’t exactly spent a lot of my life as a minority. But I’ve never felt more like a grain of sand on the beach than I did at this event. I was surrounded by clones. Every person there was young, moderately wealthy, well-educated, well-travelled in Latin America, bilingual, recent graduates of liberal arts colleges with degrees in Spanish and International Studies. There was almost no point in introducing myself.
I started to feel claustrophobic. When we went out at night I was so desperate for a cigarette that I asked every person who walked through the door of the bar. I don’t usually smoke and I wasn’t craving nicotine, but I had an immediate need to exert SOME kind of individuality--even if that meant casting myself into the “dirty smoker” circle of Dante’s social inferno. At least it would allow me to escape from the confident and extroverted intellectual broken record conversations about the kinds of cocktails people had tasted in their travels to Bolivia and Argentina.
(Disclaimer: The law of Narcissus tells me that I will almost inevitably grow to love these people, as we have so much in common...and I may want to delete this post from the internet eventually).
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