Hubcaps

By Diana Rojas

(Originally published in Pergola | February 14th, 2026)

Bobbi Sue Somebody was not her name. But let’s call her that. Hers was a double-barreled

Southern name like that. I lament to say that I was not terribly welcoming when she arrived. To be fair, it was a little bit her fault. But she had arrived on my turf, and good manners dictate that it was my job to be nice.

Bobbi Sue had married a Northerner and was exiled to New Jersey as a condition of her marriage. She was very clear about that. She made sure all of us in the newsroom knew that she knew that she didn’t belong. How could someone like her – a nice girl from Richmond, as she used to refer to herself – fit in in New Jersey, she’d ask. She had turned up at the start of summer, just when the air in the Garden State starts steaming, aiming for its muggy crescendo later in the season. She wore wool skirt suits, jacket and all, over pantyhose. On her face, full makeup. Her hair, heat curled just right. Every morning, she came in put together just so, keeping to herself, quietly typing away in her cubicle until she had to go out on a story or unless she was conferring with an editor.

It would be unfair to portray her as shy or mousy. She was neither. She just thought she was better than the rest of us. She kept her distance.

By mid-June, just looking at her made me wilt from the heat. I decided I needed to help her fit in.

“Bobbi Sue,” I said to her one day when we chanced to be in the ladies’ room at the same time. She was holding wet paper towels to her nape to cool down. She had taken her jacket off and the cream-colored shell underneath was sleeveless and sweaty, stuck to her back. “In New Jersey, in the summer, especially if you’re a reporter running in and out of the office all day, it’s perfectly acceptable not to wear hose, or a jacket.”

This was the early ‘90s. I was wearing a fitted striped cotton shift, not tight, but cut lower than a t-shirt and pinched in at the waist. It rested slightly above the knee. It flattered me, but that’s not why I wore it at least once a week: on my reporter’s salary, I didn’t have that many clothes. I definitely did not own a skirt suit.

I don’t think Bobbi Sue approved of my style. She smiled, looked me up and down, focusing on my tanned bare legs and said in her impeccable Southern drawl: “DeeAnna, nice girls from Richmond always wear hose.”

Chusma. It’s a great Spanish word that means rabble, common. Chusma can be a look, or an attitude. It can be bad manners, or inappropriate clothing. My family, lacking in all manner of finances, flung the word around accusatorily and with abandon. We were not chusma. Perhaps we were snobs. I definitely did not take nicely to that sort of face-scrunchy critical assessment of my outfit that Bobbi Sue had done, which called into question my classiness with a wrinkled nose. I said nothing out loud, just smiled and nodded, confrontation not being my thing. I have class. In my mind I lobbed some silent expletives at her and decided that I would just let her melt.

As the summer wore on, Bobbi Sue got plumb assignments. She could write. Sometimes we’d talk shop and I’d ignore her smiling digs at my articles. Sometimes her critiques were not wrong. That she was a nice girl from Richmond who could write better than I could didn’t ingratiate her with me. I kept as much distance as our shared cubicle wall would allow. But by September, I decided I was being childish, provincial, petty. The air had cooled so looking at her stopped bringing me discomfort. It behooved me, I decided to try to understand her culture better so that I could appreciate her. I was overdue to show hospitality. One slow news day, I rolled my chair over to her desk, inviting a couple of my colleagues over with a wave of the arm.

“Bobbi Sue,” I said impulsively, my chums leaning on our desks, listening in, hoping for some entertainment. Slow news days were like that. “I’ve never been south of Washington, DC. Tell me about the South. Tell me about Richmond.”

Her eyes lit up. She indulged me. We talked about the look of the city, the steamy summers, Southern culture, debutante balls, Lost Cause veneration. I was interested, sometimes fascinated. It was a whole different country. She spoke of her world so lovingly.

I wanted to know more. I moved over to my favorite travel subject: food. I asked about different dishes, about fried green tomatoes, fried turkeys at Thanksgiving, biscuits. And then I brought up squirrel.

Pause. I love food. Mine is an adventurous palate. There’s not much out there that I won’t try -- pig’s ears floating in black beans, tripe, blood sausage, tongue and rabbit. It’s all fair game (pun intended).

So, squirrel. My then boyfriend/now husband had once regaled me with the story of a college dormmate who, homesick for his Pennsyltucky town (to those of us born and raised in the Northeast, that would constitute The South already) would camo up some nights and arm himself with a BB gun to go out hunting for squirrel. It was his heritage, I supposed. I didn’t blanch. Squirrel is to Southerners what rabbit is to Portuguese, which then boyfriend/now husband had introduced me to. Noted.

I wouldn’t be opposed to eating squirrel if I could ever get over them being rodents. I researched them for this essay and read that their meat tastes like a sweet and nutty cross between rabbit and chicken and that the most recent stats (from way back in 2014-16) show that their flavor is not unpopular: more than 16 million squirrels were harvested between the U.S. and Canada during that time. Of that huge number, Virginians harvested some 800,000 squirrels. New Jerseyans, not even 50,000. Seeing as squirrel is a veritable rarity on Northern plates, my ignorance, one could argue, was not willful. The defense rests.

“So, Bobbi Sue,” I said, fist under chin, almost breathless with anticipation, “tell me: have you ever eaten squirrel?”

There was a collective sharp intake of air amongst those listening, like I had hit a wrong note. Bobbi Sue’s face froze for a split second. Then she recovered her smile and in her sweetest drawl she responded: “Why no, DeeAnna. Have you ever stolen a hubcap?”

The conversation ended right there. Abruptly. Bobbi Sue in her wool skirt and jacket and pantyhose got up and took off to the ladies’ room. I imagined her patting her nape with wet paper towels, smug and satisfied. I rolled back to my cubicle in a huff to call my then boyfriend/now husband.

“The bitch!” I whisper-screamed into the phone. “Fucking Southern prejudiced bitch! I was trying to be friendly. Can you believe she said that?”

“I can,” he said, way less sympathetic than I would have expected. An anthropology major, he explained culinary squirrel habits demographically to me, then added: “You just called her chusma.”

Oops. My bad. There’s now a common phrase for what I did to her: micro-aggression. It was not a concept I knew about in the ‘90s. Was it my fault that I didn’t know eating squirrel was considered chusma? I had never even met a Southerner before. Bobbi Sue might have gently corrected me, I argued. Instead, boy was she quick with that comeback! And bravissima – it was a doozy! Bobbi Sue had something I completely lacked: a natural self-defense instinct. She was locked and loaded before we even sat to chat. She was ready to stand up for herself.

I want to imagine that Bobbi Sue hadn’t known she hit me where it hurt the most: my Latinidad. I am sensitive. At the end of high school, when I announced to the lunch table that I had been offered a fat scholarship to a fine private university, my so-called best friend retorted: “It’s only because you’re Hispanic.” No mention of my excellent grades or test scores, or extracurriculars, or shoe size. No one at the table contradicted her. Not even me. It could very well be that, at the time, I accepted that being Hispanic might not make me equal to her, also a child of immigrants (albeit white Europeans). That throwaway comment, borne of teenage jealousy, crushed my moxie with one fell swoop and left me forever uncertain: am I good enough? Even as I smiled and changed the subject at the lunch table, I met my mental nemesis that day. I’ll call him Chip, a little bugger with the outline of self-doubt and a solid, intractable core. He mocks me. “You think you’re hot shit, don’t you?” Chip giggles, maliciously, every now and then when I dare to feel pride. “Wrong! Read the room: everyone still sees you as just Hispanic. Token. Chusma.” Chip expects some of us will never live up to the expectation of who we’re supposed to be.

In middle school I lived in Costa Rica. There I was called a gringa. I didn’t mind that. That name fit me well: it’s what I saw in the mirror. The year before Chip came to live on my shoulder, I pretended to be Italian when I won a small social club pageant and was crowned Miss Roma

1986. One of the judges congratulated me on being a pure bred, immediately segueing into a look of disgust when describing the previous year’s winner: she had been Italian/Colombian. Hispanic. He pantomimed spitting when he said that. I found it grossly humorous, congratulated myself for taking a swipe at stereotype just by having mastered a foreign language. (We had been conversing in Italian). I didn’t give myself away. The shame of that omission came on belatedly, at the lunch table, where I smiled and was unable to speak in my defense.

Bobbi Sue’s comeback, like the lunchroom DEI comment, reminded me that others weren’t looking in my mirror. They saw me differently. Different. In the stunned silence that reverberated after her hubcap comment, I could hear Chip laughing noisily: “She told you,” he kept repeating. Bobbi Sue and I never became friends.

A lifetime later, living with one foot in the South in Washington, DC, where I had moved in 1996, I was a middle-aged woman obsessively restoring wooden kitchen cabinets and tarnished cast iron fireplace screens in my new vintage Victorian house, which we were rehabbing to move into. The truth was that the work I was doing was a labor of misplaced frustration over the contractors’ slow and inadequate progress on the many jobs that needed to get done. I’d daily update the project manager – let’s call her Debby– on my progress to underscore my complaint that I was working faster than her hired guys were, that most days I was the only one working on site. I suggested that maybe they weren’t understanding her, that maybe I should speak to them directly, in Spanish – the language they spoke amongst each other -- so they would know what I expected. Debby, who didn’t speak Spanish, demurred.

Debby was from my old tony neighborhood, from the same group of school parents I mixed with for years. She was popular. She was good at her job.

Debby had been project manager for many glamorous house renovations in the old ‘hood. Her work was exalted over cocktails at housewarming parties to celebrate recent remodelings, because that’s how it’s done: you show off the work, the upgrade. I hired her for two main reasons: I wanted to support another woman, and I wanted the right look. Not gonna lie -- I, too, was planning a housewarming. She was supposed to be the shit, the One to Hire. She cost, but the results were supposed to be worth it.

Debby disappointed me.

One day during that ordeal, she and I were standing outside staring at dirty siding that needed cleaning. I was annoyed. Impatient. I wasn’t hiding it. Her workers had yet to install the new backyard spigot I requested, and so were unable to power wash the siding, which I ordered. Her workers, as usual, had not shown up to my job site that day – they were off at an Eastern Shore renovation of hers that I would later learn was written up glowingly in some trade magazine. That day, Debby had come at my insistence, and she brought with her, she said, a great idea.

“I don’t think we necessarily need to power wash all the siding. It’s just that spot that needs attention,” she said, pointing to a chunk of siding two stories up. “We can do it by hand.”

That was the great idea. I assumed she was speaking the Queen’s we.

“If your guys want to climb up a ladder 30 feet high to scrub a piece of siding, instead of installing a spigot that I’m going to need anyway at some point, they can be my guest,” I huffed, adding, imperiously. “I just want it done. Yesterday.”

When I looked down from the spot on the house, I saw that she had blushed deeply, from her collar to her forehead. She stammered.

“Oh,” she said, “I thought that you might want to do it. Since, you know, you like to clean so much.”

She was guileless as she suggested this to me. Latinas like to clean. Presumption? Supposition? Postulation? Or just plain insult? When she saw me, was I only ever the stereotype? Had I unwittingly reinforced it by cleaning cabinets and cast iron so well? Effortlessly, she flattened me with one statement -- just like Bobbi Sue had done when she asked me in my 20s if I had ever stolen hubcaps, and just like my teenage best friend did when she suggested I was a token admission. Or the bigoted Italian pageant judge. And so many other indignant paper cuts endured but not worth mentioning, the sort things that Chip would chuckle at, nudging me, wink wink: “D’ya hear that?” The sort of things I’d always try to ignore, telling myself not to over-react.

After Debby suggested I clean the siding, Chip howled with laughter. “Hoo boy!” was all it could say in between cackles. “Hoo boy!” Through the noise, I remembered insulting Bobbi Sue about her squirrel eating habits. My defense was ignorance. Her parry was stereotype. Maybe I was too sensitive. Maybe I needed to be better armed with comebacks like Bobbi Sue. Maybe I needed lessons in Confrontation to learn to tell people off. Maybe God was punishing me for my liberal use of the word chusma to judge the worth of my fellow beings. Maybe it wasn’t that I was Latina; maybe I was just a little déclassé, no matter if I had the kind of money to hire a Debby or not. Maybe I wasn’t actually as smart as I thought I was. Maybe the college did select my application because I ticked a box or two. Maybe I never fooled anyone about who I was. Maybe only foreigners could recognize me as a gringa, but gringos would never see me as their social equal because to them I would always be Latina, Other. Lesser. I had no comeback. I never did when snubs were hurled at me. I only ever learned how to shrink back and seek cover for my shame at feeling the need to explain who I thought I was. For once again having made the mistake in thinking that I belonged.

By the time I started college, I had changed my name from Diana, like the princess, to Diana, with a diphthong and two syllables like my family called me. Both suited me. Both were me. A rose by any other name is still a rose, after all.

Or maybe it isn’t.

Here is all I managed to say to Debby: “I can’t go up there. I’m afraid of heights.”

I did not explain to her how and why she had insulted me gravely. I didn’t tell her that I was born in the USA, just like her. I didn’t insist that she was a bigot. That I was her equal. I didn’t give her a chance to plead ignorance, to explain that she didn’t mean to offend. I just mentioned my acrophobia as if that would be the only reason I would not clean the siding. Then I shut up, smiled and took my leave. I went to the powder room and stood at the sink with cool, wet paper towels pressed upon my nape to keep from bursting into tears, my brain scolding the guffawing Chip to just please, please, shut up.

The next day, I fired Debby. I did my own project management. I hired my own workers. I spoke to them only in Spanish. They called me Doña. They thought I had higher social standing than them. I didn’t tell them I, too, was just like them: Hispanic. Other.

It has been six years. The dirty spot on the siding has never been cleaned. Sometimes, as an exercise, I still try to find a good comeback for the Debby’s and Bobbi Sue’s of the world. But realistically, I don’t think I ever will. After all this time, I remain defenseless. I still don’t know who I am expected to be.