I used to be smart. I was the first female in the McAllen I.S.D. to take Calculus as a 16 yr old. Whatever things I accomplished in high school, I did so easily-- never working hard at learning and never really caring. Because of my high SAT scores, I got letters from all the Ivy League schools, Stanford, and even MIT. I fulfilled several quotas: I was smart, I was female, and I was a minority. I thought I could only afford to apply to two universities: UT Austin (which gave me a scholarship and sent me a filled out application for me to sign) and St. Mary’s University.
Life was so different when I was 17 yrs old. I had no identity and I was so inexperienced. My brother told my parents students at St. Mary’s were required to go to Roman Catholic mass every morning. My father is a Pentecostal minister and he believed my brother. Add to that the fact that the scholarship St. Mary’s offered only covered half the costs (and that’s because I was accepted into their honors program.) My parents could offer no help and no advice, so I went to UT Austin.
I was a chubby, Mexican girl who wore glasses, and I didn’t like to party! I still wasn’t taking my academics seriously, and I came back home after one year.
When I was 19, a boy paid serious attention to me for the first time in my life, and even though I didn’t really like him, after a few months I agreed to go out with him. I married him at the age of 22 because my mother had gotten married when she was 22, and my sister had gotten married when she was 22. He took the little self-esteem I had, and I lived wishing for my death for the next four years. I was aimless for years, having lost faith in myself.
I became interested in music, and I learned to play a little piano, bass guitar, and acoustic guitar. I started songwriting, and decided to return to college to take some music classes. I made the Dean’s list my first semester, and got a taste for academia. I switched majors and finished within 3 yrs with Magna Cum Laude honors. I got to travel, and I also got the Dean’s Outstanding Student Award Spring 2009.
I push myself very hard. I’ve worked fulltime throughout my schooling (sometimes carrying 21 semester hours.) Most of the decisions that I made as an undergraduate (including applying to the MFA Creative Writing Program) I made because I love being a student. I suspected I could transfer that love to teaching and I was right. It’s the perfect existence for me—a continuous cycle of learning and teaching.
Something snapped into place for me this school year. It was a combination of writing about my strict religious upbringing and reading Gloria Anzaldua. Something that had been missing all of my life is now a fuzzy light inside me I can identify. I am so far from where I want to be—and I don’t me success-wise—but knowledge-wise (no pun intended!) I want to become an expert in Chicano/Chicana literature. I want to be a Chicana writer. I feel like I found a part of myself, and I don’t want to let go now. This doesn’t mean I can’t be a Shakespeare expert or do a million other things (I still do music and many other dorky things as well.) What it means is that I am free to be myself—who I was born to be—who I shape myself to be.
I used to be smart. Now I’m on my way to being wise.
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