I have been a fan of Junot Diaz since I was an undergraduate at Cornell University. As an alumn of the Cornell MFA program, Junot had once walked the grassy knolls and snow covered sidewalks of Ithaca that I did. He, like other conscious people of color, had while a graduate student been involved with campus and student issues like financial aid, campus housing, lack of Latino recruitment and retention, et al. I was most impressed and truly became a fan after reading his first book Drown, a collection of short stories, mostly focused on his take of the Latino immigrant experience in the urban New Jersey.
As an aspiring writer I was even more fascinated and impressed that he had survived the Cornell MFA program and written what he had wanted to write rather than compromising or appealing to the “literary canon” aka dead, white men whose words were taken as law or better yet as scripture.
However after reading a Q&A where he discussed his new book, The Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, (a Pulitzer Prize winning work which I loved and highly recommend) I was left wondering how aware he was of the many sides to the Latino college experienced actually existed or if he even cared?
Diaz, like a percent of my contemporaries, immigrated to the U.S. as a child and experienced the poverty, the bullshit and the realities of urban life as a poor person of color in this country. When asked about his experiences at his undergrad alma mater, Rutgers, he responded: “You’ve got to understand, just so that we’re clear…I worked through college…for me college wasn’t just somewhere I showed up and daddy just sent a check.”
Excuse me? Just so that I’M clear I take issue with his statement. The problem you ask? There are a number of us whose parent(s), from every strata of the middle class spectrum, “sent a check.” And guess what? It still wasn’t enough to cover the cost and expense of sending a child to an institution of higher learning. In my situation specifically, I had every form of financial aid known to man: grants, loans, work-study, a required student contribution. Oh yeah, AND my folks pooled together a sizeable chunk of their monthly income to cover my tuition/expenses. Not something you expect from a kid who grew up in the ‘burbs and in a house her parents owned now is it?
My own education was nearly a dream deferred because of its cost. My parents, aware that I was aiming high (private and Ivy League schools dominated my college choices), gently cajoled me to attend my town’s local community college rather than the schools on my list. Why? So that they could actually afford to send their daughter to college rather than just talk about it. Thanks to my own tenacity, I wasn’t willing to set aside a four year experience that I knew would change my life. I insisted that I would take on whatever financial debt necessary to accomplish my goal of getting a college degree from the school of my choice.
So the presumption that those of us whose parents did make a economic contribution to their education were somehow not working or busting ass to pay for a degree that we would continue paying for long after the diploma was hung on our walls or that we took it completely for granted and didn’t appreciate the sacrifice behind our presence on those campuses, is not just factually incorrect, it’s deluded and insulting.
I had a number of friends who despite being “middle class” still struggled to stay in school for financial reasons. The reason? Typically, after students have finished their first year and reapply for aid for subsequent years, their total package is lowered. The hefty financial aid awards they were initially offered are instead diverted and used as a carrot to entice prospective freshman to attend. I remember one friend who after three years discovered her aid had been slashed in half. She took a job as a resident assistant to get free housing and a meal plan. This was just a year shy of graduating. Other people I knew saw their financial awards plummet by a substantial percent year after year, forcing them to get creative with how they did or didn’t spend the money they did or didn’t have: borrowing books instead of buying them, recycling notebooks, applying for food stamps, taking campus jobs during the summer to defer their expected student contribution for the year, etc. Or of course (the devil itself) putting expenses on their credit cards. [SIDENOTE: Whose idea was it to give a 17 or 18 year old a line of credit when they are just learning how to use a bank account? Horrible.] And yes, these were all kids whose parents “sent a check.”
Here’s a concept that Mr. Diaz may be unfamiliar with, not for his own fault but simply being unaware, lots of middle class kids struggle the same as those from poorer backgrounds. It may not be the same kind of struggle, but it doesn’t devalue their experience or mitigate its reality. So the next time you think someone is just “getting by” or “chillin’” or has it “easy” because their parents help them, stop to think about what their parents help means to their entire family and what’s being sacrificed elsewhere so that they can sit where they’re sitting.
