Mexico

... and when she talks about Mexico, you can just see the love pouring out of her mouth and her ears and her heart.

Yes, that's about right.

Olympics.1.

Today I watched women from the US dominate the track and field and the beach volleyball court. As much as I take issue the US on various accounts, today was one of those days where I was proud to be an American citizen and proud to be able to associate with these incredible women, even if just through the thinnest of connections in this imagined community.

GO USA!

(Mexico is also doing pretty well in these rounds... let's see how our futbol team does this weekend!! ANDALE!)

What Will It Take To Get Your Attention

America.

I'm sitting here in a room enjoying the breeze on an American summer afternoon. It's delicious. Sheltered. Forgiving of my mistakes, my outbursts, my opinions. My gender, my history, my studies, my aspirations, hopes dreams wishes thoughts.

And still. We have something to disagree about. (well, maybe a few things)

I'm reading piles of histories, testimonies and accounts of Colombia from the 1980s, 90s and 2000s. The hardest part is reading about things that happened within my lifetime. And now. When I know I'll go back to school and the same rules about drug laws will be preached, but the same users will keep using. And frequently. With complete disregard to the market, where it came from, the blood on their hands between lines of cocaine.

When people preach about college they say, try new things. Explore. #YOLO right?

When did we stop thinking about the consequences of our actions? When did pop stars, politicians, journalists, TV personalities tell us to try everything once, and forget about the rest sometimes. When did the price tag attached to those actions, what it costs other people and other places much more than we can imagine... just fade away? When did drugs become so sexy that we can ignore the bloodied hands they came from? The communities they destroy along the way?

Thank you for your purchase.

You have now funded: ammunition for a guerilla army occupying southern Colombia. A hit man to take out a politician speaking out against drug violence or a journalist providing accurate coverage of the violence. You've given a paramilitary group money to fund dirty politicians who will keep corrupting the government's efforts for peace. Pick one. Do you want any of these on your hands?

I watched a grown man cry on a journalist's footage of the violence and occupation of rural towns plagued by extortionist practices of these armed groups. He will live in fear each day for the rest of his life, while he waits to see who is next.

And while the coca grows in South America... THE PROCESSING CHEMICALS COME FROM THE UNITED STATES. And Europe. The two markets bankrolling this process and ensuring that visitors to cities like Medellin need to go through 3 or more military check points and interrogations wherever they go near the city.

The irony is that the students who use will be in their quiet apartments or at a party. Safe, controlled spaces where the most they have to worry about are the police busting their event.

Imagine the alternative and what production ACTUALLY looks like. Imagine fearing for the future of your children to the point that you would willingly send them away to live with strangers. You probably cant, if you are someone I just described.

I have a personal soft spot for conservative cocaine users. Rich upperclass students with access to disposable income who believe in everything the Republican party pushes, including the war on drugs, all while keeping a steady supply of cocaine in their possession. If this isnt corruption, I'm not sure what else is. Yes, end the supply. Get rid of the sellers in South America... they say. Yet...

The day we started ignoring the reality of where are drugs come from and the consequences of our actions is the day that truly lost sight of our supposed desire for "peace" in the western hemisphere.

To those students I mentioned earlier: It's not about you. Your hour long experience of drug induced haze is not worth this. And if you had to stand before these people affected by your decision and watch what the reality of this trade looks like, you wouldnt make the decisions you are at present.

To the US: Stop hiding the truth behind your political speeches claiming everything in Colombia is cleaned up, and saying that Latin America is the source of all these problems. Without a market, there wouldnt be the same degree of production, economic growth and promise that comes with this trade.

To my readers: Keep yourselves informed, but with a grain of salt. The media in the US takes one angle, and other countries will present themselves in the best light that they can as well. Only by reading and talking to as many people as possible (carefully) will you understand the extent of the consequences we face from our decisions right now.

An Immigrant Narrative.

Someone just asked me, "why do you refer to it as your country?" when I was talking about Mexico.

The implication being, I am from the US now and therefore I am American. American in whatever that internationalized idealized or ridiculed or exaggerated view ends up being. Based on my time here in India, it means being white. And a hyperly sexualized female figure. Which is something that I have HATED from the first day here on out. It means being privileged and sheltered, which yes compared to the rest of the world, Americans are undoubtedly so. I include myself in this stereotype, because I have been very lucky and I acknowledge and am grateful for that.

People look at me and see white. They see brunette in the US. They see güerra in the Mexico. They see blond in India. They see my skin tone as the ideal to the point that all major actresses are as pale as I am, every grocery store/street stand selling skin care products promising to bleach your skin/your arm pits/your pubic hair. Americans pour on the fake tan and nearly glow in the dark. Here I glow in the dark for different reasons.

I cant change what I look like. This is what I am and this is how I will always be. And I am happy with that.

But so much about citizenship is clearly tied to this nagging idea of identity politics. For people whose families have lived in the same city/country for several generations, the answer is simple. You can be a citizen of that country and never wonder.

I am an immigrant.

I have parents from different places, histories. blood ties back to different countries. Feelings that tug me and cause me to feel loyal for different reasons. I love Boston. I love living there and the streets have become etched into my mind and memory and I feel safe and comfortable and at home there. I love Mexico and all of the places I have been able to explore there, and see and feel and revisit and taste and be part of. I am proud of the US when we compete well in the olympics or surprise people by doing better at soccer in the World Cup a few years ago than everyone expected. But I turn off the rest of my life and watch Mexico's games in the world cup when I'm with other Mexicans -- something I dont do for American sports (apart from watching Michael Phelps in the last summer Olympics).

My top 25 on Itunes are a mix of Mexican pop music, weird alternative American music, and some other stuff thrown in there.

I speak Spanish and English at home. I eat spicy food without flinching or even noticing, and I wear more color than 95% of the people in my neighborhood.

I study and work in Mexico and the United States.

If my citizenship and my nationality is based on "where my blood is from" I am a stateless, floating human being. I dont have this as an option and I accepted this long ago. My Mexican friends tease me because I am not fully one of them anymore. My American friends tease me too. All with affection, yes, but there is truth in this. I am not one thing. I have written and spoken about it countless times. All that I can give you is a narrative as an immigrant. I cant give you a stamped sheet of paper with my extended family tree and provide you with anything conclusive.

So this leaves me with one option, when people as me "where are you from?" or "what are you" all I can say with certainty is, "Hi. I'm Diana."

Cleaning Out My Closet

I cleaned out my closet today. For people who know me well, this is a big deal. I am a pack rat. Or, actually that isn’t terribly accurate because I pack extremely lightly when I travel. My overnight bag to New York last week was my handbag with a change of clothes and my toothbrush in it, outside of the usual.

It is more accurate for me to say that I am a bit of a hoarder. I like to keep things with the reasoning I might need this later. How often does that ACTUALLY happen? Almost never.

It’s not so much the objects that I am hoarding. I don’t like the clutter, but I get used to it. I think it’s the memories that we attach to things. You remember the person you wore that horrible pink sweater with that you wore when you thought it was a good idea at age 12. The half empty tube of pink lipstick from my first skating competition (finally threw it away after deciding it smelled too much like wax and was a color I would never wear in public again). The shoes that you love and wore all the time but part of the sole has worn through and the other shoe is slightly too small and gives your blisters every time you wear them. The book you read over and over again while your mother told you to turn on the light because you were reading in the dark and going to hurt your eyes one day (she was right…).

It was nice to be so close to some of these memories again, but it was also refreshing to look back and see how far I’ve come. You realize that life really is constantly changing, and when things aren’t as expected, you haven’t actually disappointed anyone.

I saw some of my oldest friends last night. We’ve all been apart for many years now, but we decided to meet up in Boston and have drinks outside. Boston is in the perfect stage of summer right now – the evening was warm but breezy. And yes, we’ve all gone in different directions and couldn’t believe that we made it to this point (We met when we were 11 years old and were learning to tie-dye. Now we were sitting in an outdoor bar in Boston…) but some things were exactly the same.

This revisiting of old memories has helped me figure out more of my research work for Colombia. I’ve been working through sources like crazy, and each day the details of its history get more and more confusing. Some parts are so clear and familiar, and then there are others that never make sense to me. Some of my frustrations with Mexico jump out at me from the pages of David Bushnell’s The Makings of Modern Colombia. People, individuals from my past trips there stand out in my mind. Their kindness, their hope, their spirit that moves me to tears. And in the background is this extreme violence and the threatening undertones of a storm brewing beneath every word, interaction, and trip to the zocalo. How do we reconcile ourselves with the past? On paper it is easy to reject and throw things away, because pragmatically we know that forgiving, forgetting, and essentially tossing out the bad feelings will improve society. But as a person, how do you let go of this past? This fiber that ties us all together and creates a history that goes beyond what I find inside of my closet or the conversation that I had with a friend I made while I was figuring out who I was?

I’m giving it time, but I think this thesis work is going to be more than just a paper. There is a lot that I want to understand about my obsessions and illicit markets, but for many reasons Colombia made sense for me to study at this point in my life.

My heart is in Mexico. But I know that I cant be back there right now and do the things that I want to do. Colombia is the close cousin, with one arm open to take me in while I wait. She offers a rich history of a people captured in a single frame in the media and the secrets that all of the Latin Americans I know live with every day of our lives. There is a love of life that I cannot describe, the same kindness and the hauntingly beautiful and diverse landscape of a country that suffers the same multiple personality disorder of my own. This could be me letting go a little bit.

I cannot wait. 

Questioning the Plan (Originally posted on the Levo League)

This is where I started at the beginning of the year:

Questioning the Plan: Re-evaluating the world our generation is coming of age within, and how to grow around the uncertainty.

Diana Enriquez tells us the story of how she grew to reject the banking and consulting track, and learned to embrace the uncertainty that allows us to open up and see opportunities everywhere.

As a child, I loved making plans. I enjoyed making lists and keeping journals, both of which I kept on my bookshelf. My prep school, where rule-abiding high-achievers were rewarded, encouraged my habits and promoted careful planning. Life was laid out for us in a 10-year plan, and I was not sure that I could follow it.

My desire to have a plan wasn’t unique: the study of overachievers in our generation, as well as our early obsession with college and the next step, has been multifarious. Alexandra Robbins, author of the highly-lauded non-fiction work, The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids as well as  Andrew Ferguson, writer of Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid into College, explore the challenges of the college admissions process. They look at the point of view of a student and a parent, respectively, with special focus on the desire to enroll in as many projects, classes, and activities as possible in order to impress admissions officers. The real-life characters in Robbins’s book (all students Maryland’s highly competitive Walt Whitman High School) have been on the college prep track since day one of freshman year. Pursuing a plan other than the Whitman-approved ones raises eyebrows in that academic environment. Unfortunately, the same can be said of high schools all over the country: that the reaction to uncertainty has been to bear down on a known path that may or may not be optimal for everyone.

Realizing my major and intended career path didn’t suit me

Like most of my peers, I worked hard in high school. And I loved the experience. But the real excitement of making it through the first step came when I assimilated to campus life. When I first set foot on the Yale University campus, I had many expectations about my major and expected to love my classes. I figured I’d go on to graduate or law school and land a job in the government, as I was always interested in politics and law. I had my plan, but I was quickly met with surprise. I entered my first economics seminar and realized that my classmates and the professor were communicating over AM frequencies, while my brain was in permanent FM mode. It’s hard to get on the same wavelength in that situation.

Besides having a different thought-process than those around me, I struggled to make sense of a subject I assumed I’d love. For the first time in my academic career, I found myself doubting the plan.

My uncharacteristic reaction— to throw out the 10-year plan— worried me. What was I going to do now? High school prepared me for higher education and college was (apparently) supposed to lead to graduate school… but maybe this wasn’t the best thing for me. I was facing questions that I had never really encountered before and desperately trying to whip up a new plan, one that would make me happy and give me the space that I needed to grow. Maybe it meant reshaping my own definitions of success.

What ultimately made me drop the plan

One day, while I was typing an essay, an old friend emailed me about a summer job in Mexico doing sustainable development work in rural communities. My “worry about The Plan” virus was eating away at me, but nevertheless I looked through the description, called a few of the coordinators and realized that this program that had fallen into my lap was exactly what my freshman self had been looking for. I was excited about the fieldwork, the adventure, and the uncertainty about what was ahead. As I booked my flights to Mexico a few weeks later, I knew that this was the beginning of a big change.

My outlook shifted. I began to see opportunities everywhere and took them, especially when it was in a department or field with which I was unfamiliar. I worked with political groups of different leanings. I researched India and signed myself up for a research trip there while my classmates attended informational sessions for Morgan Stanley. This summer, I will be doing research in Colombia on the Drug Wars and Political Campaigns for my senior thesis. None of this would have happened had I not asked myself what would make me happy. Today I walk straighter than I did than when I was all about the Plan.   

Embracing the unknown

As I chat with interviewers, their eyes often light up, and I have a feeling they react this way because they recognize I am not afraid of taking risks. I chase opportunities when they present themselves, ask people I don’t even know if I can talk to them about their work, and live the life I want for myself as best I can. I see my friends and classmates struggle with the question, what should I be doing? What does my 10 year plan look like? Is this the next step? And I smile to myself. I find strength in being uncertain and willing to go out there with my eyes open, and it’s my hope that they come to the same realization as well if plan making just isn’t working out for them.

And part of this adventure brought me to one of the ultimate sources of happiness in my year: founding and organizing TEDxYale. I made one of the best friends I will ever have through long hours of working through details, arguing about the merits of different speakers, and learning from him as an equal with a completely different view of the world. In this space, creativity was rewarded. We created a space for people who wanted to talk about their journeys through the uncharted paths in life. I went from nightly phone calls to daily planning meetings with the team to launch a full day conference with 10 alumni speakers, 7 students we trained in the art of public speaking, and a few brilliant professors. I was reminded that life is a twist of fate, and I’ll never know exactly what the next obstacle or opportunity would be. I could only move forward with my eyes open.    

I found my center in embracing a future that will be what I make of it. And I learned to love myself, in all of my crazy, quirky interests, because I could shape the person that I wanted to be. I do think I will go on to either law or graduate school, but for now I am going to explore the options I have until I am sold on my decision. I have met my expectations, and now it is time for me to carve out my own space, in this ever-changing job market.

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Diana Enriquez is a junior at Yale University majoring in Political Science and Ethnicity Race and Migration. She is an activist, artist and researcher with a particular interest in migration, the drug wars, and the Latino vote in the 2012 elections. At Yale she is the president of a social-justice oriented student group called MEChA and the founder and co-curator of TEDxYale. 

 Originally from: http://levolove.com/post/16766472879/questioning-the-plan-re-evaluating-the-world-our#/