I am an (undeclared) Comparative Literature major, because I thrive on diversity of ideas, people, cultures, genres, languages, movements and media, and I love to bring these diverse interests into meaningful intersection with one another. I like to write–mostly poetry–and I gather books and hide them in my room. I study philosophy, art and cultural criticism as a way of life, and came to Hunter in order to do that in such a way that society at large would consider it “productive.”
I am from a multicultural family, and was raised not to give preference to one or another “ethnicity,” but rather to learn about and embrace them all. What happened was that I generally came to appreciate hybridity, difference, complication, and grey areas in all facets of life, not just race, and I seek to explore these grey areas.
By ethnicity, I am black, Mexican, and Irish, with trace elements of German, Cherokee and Apache. My Mexican grandfathers (I have two) came to America in the 1960s and struggled for the right to live and work here legally. My Irish great-grandfather came in the 1920s and struggled simply to survive, and was for decades quite successful in this endeavor. My father is “black” in the indeterminate way many Americans are, due in no small part to the nature and legacy of slavery. In trying to understand these intersecting cultures, I am drawn to the study of how cultures come to be defined with and against each other in America, a nation of immigrants who have had to come together in order to grow roots where they otherwise had none.
