La Vida At Our College: Reflections Of A Harvard

Hello. My name is Alejandro Gac-Artigas. It’s a funny name, one that had terrorized many a substitute teacher calling roll throughout elementary school.

Olijondro? Alahandro? Ali…Aluh…A.. I rescue them with an interrupting “Present,” knowing the matter would be resolved no sooner than a blind man playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey.

The uncomfortable dance around my name’s 21 letters began the very day I arrived at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta, as a customs officer scrutinized my family’s passports. Carrying only the boxes we could carry and armed with one-way tickets, I suppose we were worth a second look. I had come to a place where a name I had shared with countless faces in Puerto Rico had become an eyesore, a hassle, a menace.

The flimsy front door of our rundown apartment separated this new world from the fading memory of home we preserved inside; the sounds of r’s rolling, the smells of arroz con gandules cooking, the warmth of a family from an island where family means everything. I knew that when I left this world for school every morning, “Alejandro” would not sound the same for a very long time. And I learned to deal with that.

Better and better each time, learning to intercept each substitute teacher as soon as he or she paused at the sight of my name. Always waiting a hopeful but ephemeral moment, I learned to recognize the discomfort in their eyes and quickly saved them the trouble. Present.

And then the strangest thing happened.

Alejandro?

Ah-le-han-drro?

The substitute teacher looked me directly in the eye, and pronounced my name correctly. While his accent betrayed his Anglophone identity, the fact of the matter was that every syllable he uttered challenged any pronunciation of those 9 letters suggested by the conventions of English.

As quickly as he had read the previous name, he read mine. The word “present” remained caught in my throat. Like a cat ready to pounce only to find that its prey had vanished, my words sunk clumsily in this unfamiliar situation. The teacher looked at me, knowing well by the color of my skin that I was the only kid in the room who could claim ownership to that name. I raised my hand to signal the words that could not escape my perplexed lips, and without hesitation the substitute teacher moved on to the next name. Brian Matthews.

This moment that had once disoriented my tongue beyond its capacity for speech was repeated. At first only occasionally, with only the youngest and most precocious of substitutes. But over the years with more and more frequency, I watched as teachers learned to negotiate my name, their eyes adjusting almost seamlessly from the American syllables that had preceded mine.

By 10th grade I had developed an expectation that my name be recognized, feeling a sense of surprise and a hint of pity when someone fumbled over the syllables. Of course no one quite pronounced my name as I would, but people lost their fear to try, their discomfort in the face of it, and began to exercise the same sort of confidence in saying an Anglicized variation of “Alejandro” as they would accord any other name. Something in the country, something I did not yet understand, had been changing.

Feeling as if some measure of justice had been achieved for my name and, abstractly, for my heritage, I no longer insisted so adamantly that everyone address me by my proper name. Friends began to refer to me as “Oli,” a nickname spelled phonetically to avoid conflation with the woman’s name of “Ali” and the rugged drink of “Ale.”

As if through some sort of rite of passage, I would meet people as an Alejandro, and only through a period of their usage of that name would they enter into the ranks of those who I didn’t mind, and sometimes didn’t even notice, abbreviating my name. As I was introduced to others as Oli, I would confidently extend my hand, looking them in the eye and expecting their understanding: Hi… Alejandro.

Graduating from high school and coming to Harvard, I was a combination of many things all at once, more than I could explain or even understand myself. I was Alejandro and I was Oli. I spoke only Spanish with my parents and only English with my sister. I was Hispanic, but I lived in an overwhelmingly white community.

When September came, my beaming father and tearful mother moved me into my freshman dorm and I sewed myself into the ethnic quilt that was my housing assignment: a South Asian, an Irishman, a half-Chinese kid, and myself, all token representatives of our races, all Weld 51.