Veronica Silva

Achievement Gap: The internet tells you that Latinx students remain underrepresented in doctoral programs and doctoral degree confirmations, with only 8.2% of doctorates conferred to Latinx students. You are unable to find the more specific answer to your question: What percentage of Latina women hold doctorate degrees? Google will only tell you either the percentage of women or the percentage of Latinx people, but your particular situation does not yet exist in the research.

Beauty School: The last time you visited Cuba, your cousins showed you how to suction tulips onto your fingertips. The three of you poised your hands as if maneuvering long bright acrylics. When you approached the street your mother used to live on, you ditched the flowers so your parents wouldn’t see your attempt to look grown up.

In Cuba, your aunt was a nail artist. You remember when you went to the American beauty supply store with your mother and she bought the manicure machine she would later ship overseas to your aunt. Your mother lamented the cost, but it was an investment to help your aunt make money. Your mother often called investments sacrificios. Sacrificio, it seemed, was your mother’s job as the eldest and the first to leave.

When she arrived in the US, your aunt got a factory job packaging lingerie instead. She started sneaking home bras and underwear around the time you and your cousins simultaneously sprouted breasts. You split the goods based on size, then color preference. When your aunt’s boss started requiring the women—and they were all women—to use transparent backpacks at work to prevent stealing, the steady stream of leggings, lacy tank tops, and Spanx wrapped in plastic disappeared.

College: Someone, at some point, convinced you that leaving your hometown for college would make you smart and independent. And as long as you stayed in Florida, the state would pay for everything. All that was left to do was convince your parents. In retrospect, the schools weren’t that different. Both were public state universities with strong English programs, and FIU boasted a respected law school. Not to mention the scholarship money you would have pocketed if you stayed in Miami and lived at home during college. As much as your parents wanted you closer to home, they were also told that sending their child to the bigger, better, further away school was an investment—not just in your future, but your family’s future. And if you’re honest with yourself, you had your heart set on attending college in a new city, and because your parents wanted to support your enthusiasm toward education, they supported this decision. Is it enough to say you wanted it? If they couldn’t do that—if they couldn’t give their child the education they wanted simply because they wanted it—then what had they worked so hard for? Immigrant families are familiar with this logic: the choice that requires the most sacrifice is what pays off in the end, so it is always the right choice to make.

Degree: The online master’s degree program was meant to guarantee your mother, an elementary school Spanish teacher, a pay increase. It was your senior year of high school, which meant you were applying to colleges and studying for the SATs, but you made time every evening to help your mother with her reading. Sometimes, she drafted her responses and you revised them prior to submission; other times, you wrote the entire thing. The master’s program was only offered in English.

Secretly, you grew resentful of time spent on your mother’s writing; you had your own studying to do. You needed to get a scholarship so you could justify leaving Miami. One night your mother knocked on your bedroom door, carrying her papers. You knew she already felt guilty asking, so you doubled down on your indignation. Pretended like you didn’t know what she was about to ask. When she did, you said something sarcastic like “I thought you didn’t want me to be a writer.” Looking back, you’re ashamed of more than just the immaturity of the comment—you see the way you weaponized your English, a tool given to you by your mother, and mocked her with it. Your mother eventually abandoned the program, overwhelmed by her full-time job and a household of kids, elderly parents, and recently immigrated nieces. Add the threat of you leaving and her need to give you everything she couldn’t finish. 

English: From the time you started looking at colleges, your choice to major in English was a point of contention between you and your parents— one that only escalated over the next four years. Your mother’s fear was understandable; you yourself still couldn’t conceptualize what career options were available to an English grad, but you heard they were slim. You didn’t yet know what a career as a writer looked like—that it even existed.  When you left Miami, the plan was that you would graduate in three years and return to FIU for your law studies. You decided to enter undergrad as an English major, insisting that effective writing would be necessary for a career in law. “Law schools won’t care what I majored in,” you told your parents. “Just that I had a good GPA.” In retrospect, it’s clear that law school was never in the cards for you. You never took a political science course, never ran for student government, and never showed the slightest interest in the usual courses or activities a pre-law student might care about. But you did write poetry.

First-Generation: The first time you brought a poem into a college workshop—a poem with Spanish lines—was also the first time you learned you could go to graduate school for writing. Up until then, you thought only medical doctors and lawyers had a need for graduate school. You sat quietly as the class debated the politics of your mother’s italicized voice. They said things like code-switching and linguistic diversity. It was your first semester; all you knew was that your poem was wrong and your grade could be marked down. After class, you felt proud when the instructor said “Have you thought about MFA programs? These topics are hot right now.”

Graduation: Your mother has always been a teacher. In Cuba, she had years of experience in the classroom. In the US, her country’s degree in Education is useless. She attended college again—a second time—while taking gigs as a substitute teacher, learning English, and carrying you in her abdomen. Once, she told you she knew she had begun to understand English when she heard the person behind her during graduation react in disbelief that your mother had received honors distinction.

Hispanic Women Writers: Your sophomore year, you took a literature class called Hispanic Women Writers with the only Hispanic professor you’ll meet in college—the only woman of color you’ll see teach a college or postgraduate class in your six years of schooling. The professor was also Cuban, so your camaraderie was both instant and novel, and she often defaulted to you for back-up regarding the Latin American experience. This didn’t bother you; in fact, you really started to lean into it. You dug out the hoop earrings and lip liner. You tried at the pressure cooker, but you weren’t sure what the pin at the top was supposed to do. Every time the whistle blew, you felt like it was snitching on you. This was about the time you split your name in half—not just at home, but at work and in class. In Hispanic Women Writers, you read Ada Limón’s Bright Dead Things. You hadn’t realized there were books filled with nothing but poetry.

Individual Counseling: Junior year was supposed to be your last year of college, according to your agreement with your parents, which means graduation was fast approaching even though you were still a sophomore. The general malaise of an uncertain future multiplied under pressure from your parents, a confusing entanglement with an older man, and the hormonal birth control that unknowingly exacerbated your depression. You called out sick from work every day and slept until 2 PM. Overdue assignments piled up until you avoided opening your courses entirely. An email reminding you that your scholarship renewal was contingent upon maintaining a 3.0 GPA is what shocked you out of your depressive state enough to cobble together a few make-up assignments and grovel for forgiveness from your professors. You nearly missed the enrollment deadline for the following semester, meaning the only classes you could get credit for taking had already filled up, which is how you ended up shepherded from one academic advisor’s office to the next—until you were sitting in front of the Director of Student Advising, sure that she was about to say: There’s nothing we can do. You’ll just have to drop out and move back home. 

Instead, she asked: “Who told you that you have to graduate in three years?” The question stunned you. 

“Well, my parents. But won’t the university force me to graduate once I’ve taken all my credits? Won’t my scholarship run out?” 

“No one’s going to force you to do anything. You can stay as long as you need.” She sketched schedule blocks on a notepad. “If you take classes part-time instead of full-time for the next two years, you can graduate in four years while keeping your scholarship.” Looking at the notepad, the solution seemed so obvious. You even learned that you could take internships for credit, which would help you with the problem of what to do after graduation. This extended stay, padded with a few non-credit courses, also solved the issue of enrollment.

You met with her nearly every week for the rest of that semester. She made phone calls on your behalf, signed waivers, wrote you a referral to the campus counseling center, showed you how to research internships and graduate programs, and helped you pick your classes. She tactfully dissuaded you from impulsively changing your major to Psychology and helped you source a free LSAT textbook from the graduate school. Crossing paths with this advisor altered the course of your college and postgraduate career entirely because you would not receive the same kind of unconditional, objective support from your parents—never mind the practical know-how required to navigate a four-year American university.

Junior Year: Although your decision to leave home for college was made somewhat naively, you found invaluable mentors who nudged you to pursue your writing. In your junior year—a real junior year that would be followed by a senior year—your poetry professor asked you to visit her during office hours to discuss your poem. That was the second time you heard the term MFA. When you chose to delay your graduation, it was because you were terrified of leaving school without any idea of what was supposed to come next. Your professor’s recommendation to pursue more school, in this case, seemed like the perfect solution. To your parents, you were already behind—although four years is an average amount of time spent pursuing a bachelor’s degree. That semester, you told your mother you were thinking of applying to poetry programs, leaning heavily on the credibility lent by having your professor’s support. Your mother had no idea what studying poetry could possibly mean, and you were still learning yourself. “What kind of company would you get a job with?” she asked. You told her you would likely be a teacher. You remember making sure to specify “university,” because you had learned that this also carries a kind of credibility. She used the term decepcionada, which sounds worse than disappointed because it also sounds like deceived. More was said during this phone call, but you refuse to open that scene. For months, you and your mother didn’t speak.

King’s Cup: College was also a crash course in drinking games: beer pong, rage cage, king’s cup. At a party, across a sticky folding table littered with playing cards and red solo cups, a white friend who is also a writer joked that first-generation students never find anything else to write about. You have to admit it’s true and it was a good poke at an opposing player—except everyone who laughed was white and came from families that had lived in the US for more generations than they could keep track of. You doubt that this friend had ever read your writing, which made the truth of their statement even more startling. 

Law School: One summer spent in Miami, you toured the FIU law school and arranged a meeting with an admissions representative. You did this only to appease your father. You were still in the midst of a severe, persistent depression, and he thought bringing you home and pushing you toward ambition would fix it. Nothing about the tour or meeting enticed you, and your father was upset when he saw the prospective students’ brochure abandoned on the kitchen counter later. Your parents expected you to be a lawyer by twenty-three, at which point they could stop worrying about your future and focus their attention on your brother instead. Doctor or lawyer? Other children of immigrants won’t need you to explain why those were the only two career options your parents saw as respectable.

You demonstrated an irredeemable hopelessness at math early on, which meant your options were pared down to law. Law school, somehow, was the thing your parents believed would save you from working. An oxymoronic sentence, sure, but also perfectly logical to other children of immigrants. You went along with the idea of law school long enough that it became difficult to remember who wanted you to go to law school in the first place. “But you always said you wanted to be a lawyer,” your mother insists to this day.

Your parents did not account for meddling professors putting ideas in your head about poetry, a semester spent nearly flunking out of college, or a year-long depressive episode that would come to symbolize the break between a life lived for your family and a life lived for yourself.

MFA: There is no particular moment to point to, but eventually your parents stopped pushing the idea of law school as the epitome of success. They stopped boasting that their daughter was law school-bound; instead, when friends asked what you were studying, they would shrug and look at you for the explanation they still couldn’t grasp. But once you were in the thick of the MFA, publishing poems and teaching classes, it was easier for your parents to visualize your alternate future. Suddenly a degree in Creative Writing had tangible outcomes. When you published your first poem, your mother put it through Google Translate and sent it to your entire family. You don’t ever see the translation yourself, but you feel exposed and embarrassed by the words the machine split open so earnestly.

Sometimes you are secretly grateful for the language barrier, combined with the deeply coded metaphors of poetry, because it feels safer. It is not lost on you that this sense of safety is nestled in the same lack of access that you held over your mother all those years ago when you refused to help her with her graduate homework. Despite your embarrassment, you know that her attempt to translate your poem is only proof of how badly she wanted to understand you, how proud she was of you.

Sometimes, when you talk about graduate school, your mother still laments not finishing her master’s degree and your chest floods with shame and regret. All she ever did was expect the best from you—the best of you. And you couldn’t help her with her commas?

Orchid Care: ¿Cómo estás, mi vida? Mira, la pones debajo de la llave y le dejas caer mucha agua. Después la dejas en el fregadero para que escurra toda el agua. La pones en la ventana a coger sol para que no se pudra. Y por quince días, casi dos semanas, no tienes que echarle más agua. Si está en una vasija de barro tienes que tratar que alguna raíz esté afuera. Y si tu ves que alguna raíz está seca, tu la rajas con la uña y la pelas, y el hilito que es la raíz principal por dentro va estar verdecita. Por ahí va a poder seguir creciendo. Y cuando a ella se le caigan las flores es porque se le tienen que caer. No la botes. Tú la dejas que ella vuelva a parir. Dale mi amor, un besito.

PhD: When you are accepted into a PhD program in Creative Writing, your parents don’t even care what the degree is in anymore. All they hear is that their daughter could be a doctor. Even if you won’t be the kind of doctor in a white lab coat, they understand—if only vaguely—the kind of privilege and access you are being offered. Nevermind the fact that the financial aid package is so dismal that starting a PhD program would actually be a step back financially. Five more years of cobbling together a miserly teaching stipend with other part time work in exchange for the promise of entering a declining job market. You’d graduate at nearly thirty with no savings toward home ownership or a retirement plan—the two things your parents always said signified true financial security.

No wonder opportunity gaps only widen in regards to postgraduate and doctoral degrees. If lack of education traps Latinos, immigrants, and women in low-wage jobs, how are we expected to shoulder the financial strain of the very educational attainment that promises career opportunity and financial freedom? This time, it’s you who wants to be done with school already. You are no longer sitting in front of your academic advisor looking for clever ways to extend your stay. You already did the leaving home thing and a PhD would double the distance. In five more years, your brother will have finished college. Dad’s blood pressure higher, Mom lonelier. But your mother is still enamored with the idea of your potential doctorate degree. “Hija, please,” she says on the phone. “I left behind everything when I was twenty-five.” And that has shadowed your whole life.

Quad: A quad, commonly the heart of a college campus, is typically a rectangular courtyard surrounded by buildings; in other words, it’s an open space within a closed area. The architecture of a campus quad is perhaps a heavy-handed metaphor for the traditional American college experience—the appearance of independence even when you’re enclosed in the safety net between adolescence and adulthood. But this might also serve as a useful metaphor for your family. You’ve often found it difficult to explain why your departure from your childhood home was such a big deal— leaving home for college is an expected and celebrated milestone for many American families.

However, like many immigrant Latino families, yours is highly group-oriented. In the past, you’ve become comfortable with labeling this intense enmeshment as a toxic pattern—and it can be—but it is also a defining cultural value rooted in loyalty, protection, love, and a history of displacement.

Your family’s migration to the US was slow but deliberate. Your father’s family arrived first and your mother followed. Over the next fifteen years, your mother’s family would also make their way to the US. Inside your home, your father knocked down and erected new walls to create a layout that could also accommodate your mother’s family. Your mother’s family lived with you on and off throughout your childhood—your aunts and cousins were no longer extended family but a core part of the home. Your maternal grandparents still live in your mother’s home, and it is expected that they always will.

Your first home in Miami was just two stop lights away from your paternal grandparent’s house. A bit further down that street lived your father’s sister. Your father’s uncle also lived in the same neighborhood. In that neighborhood, your houses circumscribed a quad of your own. When your parents moved you and your brother to a new home in South Miami—about 40 minutes away via the highway—your father’s family grew cold in their disapproval. When the behavior of each individual is based on pleasing and strengthening the family unit for so long, decisions made without centering the entire family are a kind of betrayal. Now imagine moving over 200 miles away. Although your parents sensed that your move toward college was a move toward the entire family’s success, your departure also signified a kind of disavowal of your family’s deliberate regrouping in Miami. 

Required Writing Courses: In spite of everything, you really want the PhD. You want time to write, which is another way of saying you fear you’re not a writer at all without the structure of a program. You realize you don’t really know who you are outside of school—so much of your worth has been measured by your grades and achievements. Worse, maybe: Writing and school have always been unextractable from each other in your life. Maybe that’s reason enough not to commit to the PhD—or maybe it’s exactly why you should.

Spring Break: In college, you visited a friend’s home during spring break and learned that most moms love having guest bedrooms—entire rooms dedicated to being empty and adorned. A throw pillow embroidered with HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS in farmhouse script sat karate-chopped and centered on the bed. When you saw it, you had the inexplicable urge to eat it. You thought of your bedroom back home, which was housing two cousins at that time, and your mother’s promise to have it ready when you inevitably return.

Teacher: Before the MFA, your aunt once took your hand off a book and flipped your palm around to inspect its delicateness. Tracing your fingernails, she said “It’s clear the girl doesn’t work.” At the time, you were going to school full time and working as a tutor. You did not correct your aunt; you understood that your unmarred hands were not indicative of the kind of work she was referring to. When she asked you what you were studying in school, you made the mistake of saying, plainly, “English.” Your aunt looked at your pink hair, your strange shoes. “Don’t you already speak English?” You didn’t realize she meant her question earnestly; later, you felt cruel for laughing. That’s when you learned it was easier to answer that question by saying you were going to be a teacher.

Perhaps your mother did not see teaching as a worthy career for you because she had internalized the idea that her own career as a teacher was not worthy. Despite your mother’s immense dedication to her students, the low pay and demanding workload had made your mother feel as though her career had not allowed her to reach her full potential. And if you became a teacher, you would not reach your full potential either—your family would not progress socially or economically if you ended up exactly like your mother. But with the promise of the doctorate degree came the poise and acumen of the title “Professor.” Something about walking across the quad with your blazer and multiple graduate degrees seemed like a dignified step up from “teacher” to your mother. Being a professor could be good enough for her American-born daughter. Her American-born daughter could be nestled in the safety of the quad forever. The irony is not lost on you: your choice to study poetry at the graduate level once fractured your relationship. Now, because of this PhD, this lofty Doctor of Philosophy, it was what she most wanted for you.

Unschooling: Your parents, like many immigrants, are big believers in meritocracy—they have to be. All your life, you had been told that if you work hard enough—sacrifice enough—you could achieve anything. Always that word—sacrifice. You internalized this mentality for a long time. Maybe, for that reason, you also sensed some romantic sentiment toward the PhD. You wanted to test your own resiliency. You had earned an opportunity—that word again, opportunity—that not many people get. That same exclusivity that makes degrees only scarcely attainable. That same privilege your parents sensed in a lawyer/doctor/professor daughter. And perhaps, even, that same false sense of importance that drew you toward a new city in pursuit of a college degree six years ago. But it was there, in college, that you became so intertwined with these institutions that you could no longer fit into your own family.

Vocational School: One year at the annual pig roast, you refused to pose with the lechón, even when your paternal grandfather put an apple in its jaw. College also saw you become vegetarian—just another choice that seemed to broaden the rift between your family’s Cubanness and your own sense of self. Your grandfather built a rotating rotisserie long enough to skewer the baby pig. You watched him fidget with the motor he repurposed from some other machine—a lawn mower, maybe.

For as long as you can remember, your grandfather has been missing halves of a few fingers, the tip of one of his pointer fingers ending too suddenly—you don’t know the story, but after years of watching him split coconuts with a machete on the porch, you can guess. 

The people in your family work with their hands. Your dad was a trucker, among other manual jobs, and now works as an AC technician. You’ve lived your entire life in awe of your father’s ability to fix anything he gets his hands on. You don’t mean to indicate a hierarchy with this contrast between manual work and formal education, although your parents have sometimes regarded their own lack of education or English as pitfalls. But you can see why people engaged in highly specialized manual labor might struggle to understand why something like poetry—so often described by its abstractness, its slipperiness—would require an advanced degree. Your parents are practical people, and poetry was a luxury—an indulgence like tulips on the fingertips.

Withdraw: Your brother completes one semester of college and considers dropping out. Your dad calls you. “I don’t know what to do about your brother,” he says. You’re twenty-three now. In the version of your life your parents would have preferred, you would be living in their house and attending law school. Maybe you’d be prepping for your bar exam right now. Nonetheless, you are their college-educated daughter, and you are meant to be an example to your brother. That’s your job as the eldest and the first to leave.“I don’t want to be hard on him the way I was with you,” your dad says. Although it’s the most tender admission you’ve ever received from your father, this comment mostly upsets you. It’s not that you’re waiting around for an apology all these years later, but this sentence upsets you because it’s so close to an apology without really being one.

You hide your woundedness—a woundedness you hadn’t realized was still so raw inside you—because turning this into an argument would risk your father shutting down on you, and you think you have a chance to help things go differently for your brother. “Don’t push him away just because you don’t agree with his decision,” you tell him. “Help him.” That’s all you wanted in the first place.

When you tell your partner about this conversation over dinner that night, you think he’ll react with the same indignation you felt initially. Can you believe? The nerve of him! Instead, your partner says, “That sounds like progress. He realizes that he was unfair to you. And he wants to be better.” Perhaps this thinking rings as self-absorbed, but you can’t help but feel resentful that your own relationship with your parents was damaged simply because you were their first attempt at parenting. And now you were expected to give them parenting advice so they could avoid those same blunders with their second child. Something about listening to your father’s half apology, his voice tinged with a rare shame, had positioned you as the authority. Yet you tried not to sound too much like a parent—like you thought you could raise a child better than he had—in your responses. You remember the tulips again—the way you shook them off before your parents saw your attempt to look grown up. Your dad calls you a few more times about your brother.

“Maybe he doesn’t want to go to college,” you tell your dad. “Maybe he wants to learn a trade like you did.” You’ve always suspected this about your brother, because he doesn’t like books or studying the way you do, but he was always smarter in more practical ways. Better at figuring out how to get places without directions, how to make things work—computers, cars, things with parts. In a lot of ways, technical trades are similar to poetry.

Your dad tells you that he didn’t have a choice. He tells you he was seven when he first picked up a hammer because he had to help his dad at work. “But you guys have a choice. I made sure of that.” 

The choice, you know, is not really a choice. Education is a gift your parents gave you, yes, but it is one that both compels and restricts in its expectations. Your father can’t imagine his child not wanting the best education available to them when he has frequently expressed his own regret regarding his lack of a college degree.

Your dad’s conflict with your brother’s desire to withdraw from school reminds you of your previous disagreement with your mother. Where she wanted you to be better than an elementary school teacher, your father wanted your brother to be better than an AC technician.

XYZ: Let’s say that XYZ stays in Miami. XYZ speaks Spanish with XYZ’s family every day and eats a steady diet of rice and black beans. It’s a good thing XYZ lives in Miami because XYZ can help XYZ’s grandmother with peeling the garlic and potatoes. XYZ is a good granddaughter. XYZ helps XYZ’s brother with his essays because XYZ is also a good sister. When XYZ’s car breaks down, XYZ’s father is around to fix it. XYZ does not need to worry about who is keeping XYZ’s mother company because XYZ always spends time with XYZ’s mother. Let’s say XYZ does not wake up confused about whose apartment XYZ is sleeping in, because XYZ sleeps in the same bedroom she has slept in since she was thirteen. Let’s say XYZ goes to college in Miami with XYZ’s best friend from high school. XYZ writes poetry. XYZ decides not to go to law school because XYZ likes writing poetry. There is no world where XYZ doesn’t disappoint XYZ’s parents with that choice, even temporarily, because there is no world in which XYZ’s parents aren’t XYZ’s parents.