PRIMERA PARTE: AN AMERICAN IN GRANADA, NICARAGUA
After two hours of trekking on a rocky, uneven path, we finally reached our destination. Two days prior, 10 friends from Harvard had traveled home with me to receive a 10-day-long crash course on Nicaraguan culture, history, and society (read: nightlife). It was the morning after a vigorous night of “cultural immersion” (read: clubbing), and somehow, we had convinced ourselves that climbing to the top of Volcan Mombacho was a good idea, which left us 1,345 meters above sea level and several miles from the nearest bottle of Tylenol.
Luckily, the extraordinary view before us had made our hangovers better, at least for a few minutes. The 360 degrees of terrain appeared in its most pristine form—mountains, rivers and lakes untouched by any form of civilization.
With the help of a Native American tour guide, who bore only a dulled two-foot long machete to protect our group from snakes and cougars, we traveled around the volcano’s entire crater spanning five lengthy miles of tropical humidity and containing flocks of bite-sized mosquitoes. As the only native Spanish speaker in the entire crew, I translated everything our tour guide said into English.
At the end of our volcanic expedition, the tour guide took me to the side of the road. I was confident in my skills as a bilingual. I thought he’d congratulate me on my extraordinary translation. This, however, was far from the truth.
“You speak English perfectly!” he said. “But your Spanish,” he paused and wobbled his hand from side to side, “your Spanish needs some work.”
My stomach fell 1,345 feet. I was an American amongst my own countrymen. I would always refer to Nicaraguans as my people, but would they refer to me as one of theirs?
I wasn’t so sure.
During my 16-year-long academic career at the American Nicaraguan School in Managua, Nicaragua, I was always known as the bespectacled metal mouth who thought himself more American than Nicaraguan. I’d always respond in English to my friends, even when spoken to in Spanish, and was among the few who actually read English books for pleasure. Speaking English without any hint of a Latin American accent was something I took pride in. But when I arrived at Harvard in 2006, I discovered how off-target I was about the subtlety of my accent.
The first time I heard someone imitate the way I speak is my most haunting linguistic experience at Harvard. Lugging my books back from Lamont on a Friday night, I became brutally aware of the reality.
A few friends, who had clearly been busy pre-gaming before sundown, stumbled towards me in front of Winthrop House. They reminded me of an incident that had occurred during freshman year, as I was walking into my room in Hollis.
“Dude, I will never forget when you walked into the room when me and Chris [my freshman year roommate] were there and you began saying: ‘KRRRIISS! Eat smellz laik something ju chudn’t av bin dooin!’”
Maniacal laughter ensued. Apparently, he found my accent funny.
But I had not. His impersonation of me must be inaccurate, I thought to myself. I hoped to God it was inaccurate. “I don’t talk like that,” I curtly responded with a stoic face.
What happened that night in Hollis, and what I had actually smelled, is irrelevant to my story. The real issue was that he had succeeded in making my accent sound thicker than that of a Latin American lolcatz.
These incidents at the apex of Volcan Mombacho in Nicaragua, and outside of Winthrop House in Cambridge, Mass. sparked mini identity crises in my life. I was seen as a foreigner both in the United States, (where I was born), and in Nicaragua, (where I had lived 18 years of my life).
I had to ask myself: Where do I belong?
Mulling over not belonging anywhere always brought me back to one particular quotation by Latino writer Gustavo Perez Firmat:
“The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you. My subject: how to explain to you that I don’t belong to English though I belong nowhere else.”
Although I found temporary consolation in this short quotation, I became really uncomfortable with his notion of “belonging nowhere.” I had become so obsessed with labeling myself as either strictly Nicaraguan or American, that I ignored the reality of my situation.
I am a fluid and ever-changing amalgamation of both, and not necessarily 50/50. The stringent categorization that I was imposing on myself, just like any form of social labeling, was damaging and ultimately very inaccurate.
And I can haz both, right?
—Andres A. Arguello ’10 is a History and Literature concentrator in Eliot House. And the name’s ahn-DRAYSS, not AHN-drayss.
