No one is going to miss you. After four years of teaching in the English Department at De Chantal, a Catholic university on the Northside of Chicago, you’re leaving the Midwest for a major research institution in South Florida. For the past three months you’ve kept this news to yourself, keeping your lips sealed as you waited for the contract to be negotiated, the paperwork to be processed, your fall courses to be scheduled, and the whole thing to become official. You wait until the last day of finals at the end of the spring quarter. With teaching done and nothing but grades to turn in, your almost-former fellow faculty gather to shake off the school year. You attend the end of the year party to deliver the news and say your goodbyes in person.
The party’s in full swing when you arrive. The conference room isn’t big enough for all of the department’s tenure-track faculty, admins, and adjuncts, so everyone attends in shifts, rotating in and out. As your colleagues crowd around the cold cuts, crudités, and cubes of cheese, you make the rounds to say farewell.
Even though you’ve been on sabbatical all year and you haven’t seen anyone in ages, no one asks how you’ve been or says long time no see.
To your news, they say, “Nadia, it’s all so sudden!” Which is true. You weren’t even on the job market when you were recruited and made an offer you couldn’t refuse.
(Don’t reveal the offer. Nobody likes a sore winner.)
None of your colleagues offer congratulations or wish you well. No one lifts their glass of wine and toasts. No one asks a thing about your new tenure clock or teaching load. Curiosity trumps academic social etiquette. How you will dispose of your property is what they are dying to know. “What will you do with your condo?” they ask. “Are you to going to sell it? Or are you renting it out?”
“Neither,” you tell them. You’re keeping it. You don’t have time to put your place on the market, get it sold, go apartment hunting in a new city, design new courses and syllabi, and pack up your life and move everything you own in a mere six weeks. Even if time were not an issue, you wouldn’t sell or rent your condo. True, it’s nothing fancy, but it’s nice, you like it, and it’s all yours. There’s no doorman, elevator, game room, gym, or indoor pool in the building, but from your place you can walk to a movie theatre, a playhouse, a comic book store, a public library, and the lake. There are supermarkets in both directions, restaurants everywhere you turn, and a lovely wine shop three blocks away. If you don’t want to walk, several buses run down your street and the CTA Red Line is just up ahead. Aside from some books, clothes, and shoes, you’ll be leaving your condo just like it is. You’ll return to it during semester breaks and university holidays when you’re off from teaching. No need to sell it or have to deal with property managers and finicky tenants.
Your colleagues look at you like you’re speaking another language. They cock their heads to the side, squint, and ask you to repeat yourself. They’re not sure they’ve heard you right. “So you’re just going to leave your condo?” they ask, unable to mask their accusatory confusion. It’s as if you’ve left a dog tied to a post outside of a supermarket or placed a baby in a basket out on someone’s doorstep and gone your merry way.
Baffled, they shake their heads and take bracing drinks from their glasses of wine. “I don’t know how you can do it,” they say. “I know I could never afford that.” They expect you to behave the way they would, but you are not them and they are not you.
“And what about Miami?” they ask.
You say, “I’ll probably just sublet or get a short-term lease and rent some furniture.”
That’s not what they mean. They clarify, asking, “Do you think you’ll like it there?”
You shrug and say, “Sure, why not?” You’ve seen Miami Vice, The Golden Girls, and
Eve. What’s not to like? You say, “I’m actually looking forward to taking my talents to South Beach.”
Only two of your colleagues catch the LeBron James quote. One jokes about the town not being big enough for both you and King James. The other predicts you’ll score cheap season tickets since Lebron’s leaving the Heat and heading back to the Cavs at the season’s end.
Everyone else wants to warn you. “Prepare yourself,” your colleagues caution. “It’s nothing like here.”
You assume they’re referring to the beach culture, predicting that it will be hard for you to focus on research when everyone else is off sunning on the sand. Reassure them. “Don’t worry,” you say. “I won’t become a beach bum.”
But that’s not what they mean. “Miami takes some getting used to,” they say. “Really, it’s a whole new world.”
An image of Disney’s Jasmine and Aladdin seated on a magic carpet and flying high above the city of Agrabah comes to mind. Assure them you can handle it. Academia keeps you on the move. For years you’ve followed dissertation fellowships, postdoctoral fellowships, and tenure-track positions wherever they’ve lead. Each time it’s been a whole new world, a whole new place to which you’ve had to become accustomed, a whole new city whose ways you’ve had to learn.
Speaking in hushed tones, lowering their voices to whispers, clutching the stems of their wineglasses, and holding their small plates close to their chests, they let you in on a secret.
“Almost no one speaks English,” they reveal. “It’s a total culture shock.” They say, “It’s like being in a completely different country.”
They say, “The one time I went I thought the pilot had taken us too far out.”
They say, “It’s not like it used to be twenty years ago.”
They say, “I almost forgot I was still in America.”
They don’t have to spell it out—you hear them loud and clear. What they mean but will never come out and say is that Miami isn’t white enough for them. A majority Latino city with seventy percent of its population classified as Hispanic, there are too many black, brown, and indio Latinos running around the city, and running the city, to suit them. It makes them uncomfortable to be in a place that’s not predominantly white. They don’t know how to be a minority. They like their Hispanics fumbling through phrases of broken English, not speaking three or more languages with ease. They like their Latinos picking fruit, bagging groceries, and driving taxis, not treating patients, managing condos and hotels, and approving or denying reverse mortgage loans.
They don’t imagine they are offending you. If anything, they believe that they’re preparing you for the culture shock that you are sure to feel; they assume that their misgivings are yours. How quickly they forget that Latinos come in all colors—even black— and that you can still be Latino without looking like Jennifer Lopez or the guy from Saved by the Bell. They know that you’re African American, but they’ve forgotten that you’re also Puerto Rican. Here, in the Midwest, you pass without intending to all because of what others fail to see. At home in your native New York, it only takes one glance for people to know what you are. In Brooklyn, there are so many ways to be Puerto Rican that no one ever bats an eye at your special blend, but in Chicago, no one recognizes you’re Boricua unless you show up for salsa nights at Sangria’s or The Cubby Bear. Hopefully, when you get to Miami, you won’t have to carry pictures of your abuelo and tíos everywhere you go just to show that you belong.
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Two months later, in August, when you leave for Miami and fly over a city whose condos and casitas nestle alongside one another, the culture shock commences. It begins in the airport. As soon as you land, get your bags, hop into a taxi, and the driver asks for your destination and nothing else, you know it’s true—you really have come to a whole new world. In Chicago, all the taxi drivers are nosier than a bochinchera hanging outside her window all day, bothering you with intrusive small talk about where you’re from and why you’re here when all you want is to get to your destination. In Miami, the drivers mind their business and allow you to ride in peace.
There are seven staff working in the condo building where you are renting an apartment, a Colombiana property manager from Medellín, two Cuban housekeepers who are old enough to be your abuela, and two maintenance men: one Cuban, the other Colombian. At the front desk, two older men, one Cuban and one African American, take turns signing in guests and recording package deliveries. It takes three months before you even notice that only the property manager and front desk men speak English.
It turns out that your former colleagues were right, after all. Miami does take some getting used to. In the Publix supermarket, there is more than one kind of sofrito, so now you have to choose. Goya or Badia? Either way, you can leave your pilón in the cupboard—you don’t have to pound garlic, onion, green pepper, and culantro to make your own. You no longer have to buy masa to make your own empanadas. In Miami, empanadas are everywhere—in the bakery section of the Publix, in the airport’s food court at Versailles or La Carreta— they’re even sold on the university’s campus in a food truck near the building where you teach.
It’s not all dulce de leche, though. Some of the ubiquitous empanadas don’t measure up. The chicken ones are drier than what you’re used to; they’re missing that good Boricua sauce that spills out on the first bite. When you go to dinner at Lario’s, singer Gloria Estefan’s South Beach restaurant, your arroz con pollo is served to you in a skillet, the rice wet and soupy, with not an aceituna in sight. What’s worse is that when you order arroz con pollo elsewhere, it comes slathered with a horrible thick white cream across its top. Even though Cuba and Puerto Rico are two wings of the same bird, you’ll just have to fly alone in this case and stick to what you know. These problems take some getting used to, but these problems are your biggest ones, problems which you can easily tolerate in a city that offers maduros as an accompaniment for almost anything you order, problems you can put up with from a city that awakens the flavors on your tongue that have been napping for so long.
Hardly the whole new world your former colleagues predicted, Miami’s more like a place you’ve almost been to before whose ways you remember. Force of habit makes you acknowledge the viejas you see standing outside the Metrorail station all morning hawking The Watchtower and you’ve always known better than to leave an occupied room without first saying buen día before you go. Maybe your Spanish isn’t perfect. Maybe it’s rustier than an iron nail and as broken as a shard of pottery. Maybe it’s as unfinished as the poem it’s always writing in your heart, but it’s enough to make yourself understood, get your point across, and move through the city without difficulty. It’s true that you hardly ever hear English once you leave campus at the end of the day, but you don’t feel like you’re in another country. No, you don’t feel like you’re in a foreign land at all. You’re in the country beneath this country, the land beneath this land. You know exactly where you are.