I’ve always hated being asked “What are you?” I was Diana, like the princess, from Kindergarten through high school. Then I re-introduced myself in college as Diana, with a dipthong and two syllables, like my parents named me and how my family called me.
I respond to both, but I’m aware that the way I choose to pronounce my name affects how I’m seen. With the first pronunciation, I can be anyone. The second, the one I’ve used throughout my adulthood, marks me as Latina. So when people ask me what I am, I wonder if it’s because they think I must be “other,” and I stutter. I tell them I was born in New Jersey to Costa Rican immigrant parents, raised in Connecticut, lived in Costa Rica for a bit, returned to New Jersey as a teen, went to college in New York City, and settled in Washington, DC – with a few foreign stops along the way. So many words when a simple “I’m American” should suffice.
My kids, Americans born of Americans, don’t mind being asked what they are because it makes them feel unique. My sisters sometimes take umbrage at my umbrage and tell me, as sisters will, to get over myself and just give people the explanation they’re after.
Maybe the question offends because I’ve always felt as American as apple pie and tacos.
Am I Diana or Diana? Can’t I be both? Can a person truly expand beyond the confines of cultural expectations, or will we, in the end, just revert to type?
Reinvention is at the core of Litany of Saints , my forthcoming triptych that tells the stories of immigrants from the same Costa Rican suburb who face challenges to their self perception, forcing them to grapple with what they’re supposed to be and who they want to be.
In “The Lives of Saints,” Felipe and Ruth are chasing the American Dream, but are hamstrung by Ruth’s inability to free herself from the traditional and religious customs of her family. “Las Tres Marías” follows three first-generation American sisters who return to live in their parents’ home country, but come disastrously face to face with an insidious machismo they are unprepared to handle. And in “La Familia,” John or Juan Manuel, a Costa Rican immigrant to the United States gets pulled back to the country of his birth amid the messy Cold War politics of the early 1980s, forcing him to question his loyalties and his ideas of what it means to be Costa Rican.
In examining the contextual nature of identity and assimilation, Litany of Saints reveals that what you are depends on time and place.
We all have a backstory. Some want everyone to know it; others would rather it blend in with the wallpaper. A lot of us, I believe, are toy-making elves who just want to be dentists.
So what am I, really?
I’m Diana.
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