My Time with Jennine Capó Crucet
by Melissa Martínez-Raga
Jennine Capó Crucet (right)
Photo by Melissa Martínez-Raga
I was curious about the author whose book was burned by a group of students at Georgia Southern University just last month. The news had horrified me; initially, because it was a fellow Latina from the Caribbean I hadn’t heard about and her novel Make Your Home Among Strangers sounded fascinating and immediately relatable, but quickly after, because, as she later put it when the topic inevitably came up in the Q&A, “It’s not a great leap from burning books to burning bodies.”
The reality shock of this news nevertheless made me discover and follow Jennine Capó Crucet. After three published books, including one by the UI Press, she was finally invited for the first time to come to Iowa City through Witching Hour to talk about her essay collection My Time Among The Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education. I wish I had looked at the Festival schedule earlier, so I would’ve had time to read more than just the Google Books preview. I am certainly making time now for the signed copy I picked up at Prairie Lights.
Capó Crucet, an associate professor at the University of Nebraska, is from Miami and has family in Cuba. As a Latina, an American, she lives at cultural crossroads where she is constantly asked if she’s ever been to Cuba, a shorthand, she says, to figure out her politics or her “Cuban authenticity.” Her response, her writing, attempts to articulate the contradiction that is America, a different part of history from the politics that split her family. Her complex identity offers an insight into how privilege and power govern spaces and affect interactions. I appreciated when she made a point of clearing up that, after a whole book searching for an answer on how to navigate cultural dynamics, there is still no clear one for solving problematic exchanges or entirely understanding other individuals. What we can do is listen to each other, accept it, and just move on.
She first read from “¡Nothing Is Impossible In America!” asserting the upturned exclamation point, normal in Spanish but foreign to English, was her way of transmitting the upturned nature of this essay from the start. Capó Crucet divulged the origin of her first name, and how it phonetically helps her pass as white but morphologically reveals her migrant parents, themselves marked as ethnic minorities by their Spanish names. Her parents looked to the 1980 Miss USA pageant for a suitable girl name that would commemorate their American nationality and help their daughter fit in—specifically to runner-up Jineane Ford (since winner Shawn Weatherly had “a boy’s name, despite evidence to the contrary standing right in front of them wearing a crown”)—but still altered the name to appeal to Spanish grammar, undoing the work that would fully make her pass.
She revealed she had once workshopped a fictional rendition of this story and her white classmates’ feedback consisted of doubting the credibility and lack of “loudness” in this couple’s conversation about their future baby’s name. She was especially bothered by the assumption that people of color obviously discuss their oppression outright as they watch TV, yet she still found herself preoccupied with a peer’s comment about how unlikely it was that Cuban immigrants might not honor their past with their children’s names. After all, she said, her parents’ name choice for her was intended as “the American Dream where everything else must be eradicated.” What do we do about individuals who must honor a hopeful future in lack of a mystically happy and accessible past? How do we grapple with the gender, racial, class nuances that complicate migration and nostalgia?
The excerpt from “Going Cowboy” that followed was a compelling account of Capó Crucet’s “touristy voyeurism” of what she thought were authentic cowboys. Sharing the quintessential American experience of cowboying with a group of impertinent French filmmakers, her edutainment—so that, as a new teacher in Nebraska, she could connect more with her students—actually led her to catalog stereotypes.
After tense conversation regarding her improper roper boots and Easter-egg-teal Toyota Prius, she did not hesitate to attempt putting herself in the guide’s boots to make sense of his commercialized existence; ultimately, to understand that it is never the job of the person providing the experience to teach an audience, but it is the viewer’s job to be there and to listen. There was much to think through with this piece, especially when she mentioned she was forced to leave early at the insistence of the rancher because her safety was threatened. Plus, the rancher owned a lot of guns.
I loved how open she was about her privilege, about how things are uncomfortable, how debates about identity are grey and don’t always offer a pretty conclusion. She says every interaction, every awkward and hostile moment, is burdened by a long history; it is not the failure of either person but of a system that brings them to that moment. After listening to her read excerpts of My Time Among The Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education, full of complex interactions between diverse individuals in America, she asserted her motivation was to keep fighting against the idea of the one story, the single story of Latinos/as/x, of Cubans, of Miami, of America. It will always be difficult work to keep the conversation going because it is an education that will never be finished.
“It’s messed up how great [whiteness] is,” says Capó Crucet. She got angry emails asking her how she’d feel about a book titled my time among the browns. Her response was: “It’s already there. It’s called Dances with Wolves. It’s called Heart of Darkness.” She explores the uncomfortable territory of predominantly white spaces as normalizing a race of domination, of privilege in cultural areas. Whiteness has long been allowed to observe the “other” and report back, to be praised in dominant histories and narratives. What happens when someone can observe whiteness in that way and report back to everyone about what that looks like?