By Rudy Martinez. Republished from Sybil. Read the original polemic against whiteness publication here.
Six months ago, I graduated with a philosophy degree from Texas State University in San Marcos, TX. What was promised to be a day of jubilation for my family, as I am a first-generation Colombian and the first in my family to ever attend an American institute of higher education, was instead welcomed with a reluctant sigh of relief. My parents both escaped a decades-long civil war in Colombia and met in Miami in the early-90s. They would marry in September 1991 and I would be born March 21st, 1992. We grew up in a predominately Latinx working-class neighborhood in Miami called Hialeah. The only thing my mother ever asked of my younger sister and I is that we go to college. Hialeah wasn’t exactly a place that nurtured my intellectual potential, but I managed to attend community college right after high school. Within two years, I had dropped out and decided to hitchhike around the country. After returning from the road, I made new friends and we all moved to Texas: This is how I found Texas State. After waiting a year to qualify for in-state tuition, I became a “Bobcat” in the fall of 2015. As a philosophy student at a “Hispanic Serving” institution, I was excited to synthesize my cultural past with an intellectual future.
