Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Repose,” John White Alexander. 1895.
Beleaguered by a pandemic for over a year ought to remind us of one thing: it’s a lie to say life is too short; if anything, it’s too long. Especially this past year, there have been too many crises, heartbreaks, breakdowns, blunders, restarts, deaths, and births. Occasionally, however, there are moments of ecstasy. For me recently, those moments have been those in which I feel Seen, and in a year of seclusion, that bliss hits a little different.
Late in March, preeminent reggaetonera Karol G released KG0516, her third studio album, sprinkled with several #tbt moments, the most surprising being “LEYENDAS.” This tribute to la vieja escuela merges Ivy Queen, Nicky Jam, Zion, Alberto Stylee, and Wisin & Yandel, all mainstays of reggaetón’s ascension to world domination, singing some of each other’s greatest hits. A six-minute closer that glides from one classic to another like a DJ’s setlist at a quinceañera, “LEYENDAS” is not only dedicated to the legends it features but also to an entire Latine generation that can’t imagine popular music without syrupy melodies over dembow rhythms.
In this track, Karol is tapping into a trend that has been brewing in the last few years, in which reggaetón of yesteryear is continuously interpolated and reworked by young artists. If you can quickly recall Wisin’s iconic bars in “Mayor Que Yo,” or if you can perfectly sing the hook of Angel & Khriz’s “Ven Bailalo” without having heard the song in a decade, or if you watched a bootleg copy of Talento de Barrio with your dad, or if you heard your Guayaquilean aunt ponder the definition of mahón after having heard it when “Pegao” was released, then this revival moment is for you. Like so many poor Latines who grew up during an era in which reggaetón was still marginal in the pop sphere to acts like RBD and Juanes, songs like “LEYENDAS” take you way back.
It takes me back to hearing my father singing “Lo Que Pasó, Pasó” upon its release; to hearing an older cousin reveal that she had learned that Don Omar owned at least three phones; to pondering with my sister what Wisin, Yandel, and Yankee looked like without their opaque sunglasses; to blowing on N64 cartridges at a cousin’s apartment while “Caile” blared from the courtyard below; to eavesdropping my mother’s aunts recounting the latest episodes of Cobras & Lagartos and El Cuerpo del Deseo. Like Twitter was saying a few months ago: you just had to be there.
Not only was I there, but much from within that eclectic milieu became embedded in my identity. Inhabiting an institution like Connecticut College, however, has often made me feel like that entire memory bank is worth little. Sometimes one finds themself feeling like Toto in Manuel Puig’s La Traición de Rita Hayworth: inhabiting a space that both nourishes and degrades. Conn, after all, fashions itself as a rigorous institution, so one is bound to feel less than in the path to edification, but that experience is thornier for minority students.
Besides walking next to a tall, blond man while touring campus, the first moment of profound inferiority arrived at my first class: USA Plays/American Drama. Whatever poise my trying-to-be-cute outfit conferred me was stripped when we were told to introduce ourselves by naming the most recent play we saw and one that had moved us. As my turn approached, every student—nearly all white and pretty—announced works by obscure playwrights. For my family and I, never having attended a play or even read one, the closest thing we knew about theater was High School Musical. When my turn arrived to introduce myself, I had to confess that I was the only one in the room without any knowledge of the subject. Drenched in embarrassment, I dropped the course immediately afterwards.
Perhaps this scene struck me particularly because I had gotten so adept at assimilating. This past weekend over dinner, a friend asked me why, given that I spent nearly half my life abroad, my accent is perfectly New England. Growing up, I explained to her, at predominantly white schools, one quickly learns that possessing an accent thick enough to knock on, that dressing like one is from that part of town, and that not getting the right jokes wasn’t how one amassed cultural capital, escaped ESL classes, or could be the administration’s token immigrant.
This affinity for assimilation must’ve stuck with me through my time at Conn because, for example, the only time I entered Unity House or the LGBTQIA Center were during transfer orientation and I never attended a meeting for Las Voces Unidas or QTPOC. The reasons for why I never attached myself with Conn’s BIPOC population —and, particularly, its queer community—remain hazy to me. One succinct rationalization that I’ve drawn is: half the boys in the Naugatuck Valley, it seemed, wore eight-inch Chippewas and watched tractor pullings live. That, as much as any Don Omar classic, is what I’m familiar with, whereas that oh-so elusive Posse Privilege, attending private schools, growing up in a large city, or feeling queer enough feels foreign. Of course, no one ought to expect all BIPOC students to be like oneself. But can anything compare to fellow students just getting you? To be Seen like that—in my case, as a déclassé queer ecuatounidense—is rare.
It was that alienation from Conn’s whiteness and its students of color that compelled me to delve deeper into what was never going to be found in Blaustein’s classrooms or Tempel Green and do what many BIPOC nerds here do: create my own syllabus. The gag, then, is that it is because of Conn’s estrangement that I sought Jorge Enrique Adoum’s Entre Marx y Una Mujer Desnuda, Chelo Alonso, Mariana Rondón’s Pelo Malo, Joaquín Torres García’s inverted map, or the Guerra del Agua. Just as key in galvanizing my reexamination of my identity are the understated yet powerful moves of Conn’s Latines: the MMUF presentation by Viridiana Villalva Salas ‘20; Seven Twenty-Five, written by Ana Reyes-Rosado ‘20; cumbia, merengue, and salsa bursting from the Harris kitchen; the PICA presentation by Kairis Rivera ‘21. More than any class reading, fellow BIPOC students are the encouragement behind embracing my outsider identity while simultaneously acknowledging my complicitness in the marginalization of this school’s poor BIPOC student population.
Such reflection is long overdue, but as my time at Conn comes to a close, I remain hopeful that many of the invested BIPOC students here can make great strides in disruptions: indeed, we can’t continue to be complacent with all-white, all-non-poor Winthrop Scholar cohorts, or rare BIPOC contributions to The College Voice, or so many of our trans and non-binary students feeling unwelcomed and unvalued, or the unspoken segregation between white and non-white students at Harris and even at seniors’s receptions at President Bergeron’s home. More and more Conn students of color are forging their own avenues for identification and validation, which recently has resulted in new initiatives like Akwaaba and POCA.
Ultimately, as many reasons as there are to be disillusioned here, Conn’s students of color provide just as many reasons to be in awe, inspired, and perhaps even Seen—the way Karol G did for me.
