My Underdevelopment

Ever since I left Puerto Rico to begin my life in New York as a student at Sarah Lawrence College, I have thought of myself in comparison to Sergio, the hero of Cuban director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s great movie Memories of Underdevelopment. “One of the things that unsettles me most about people is their inability to sustain a feeling,” Sergio says. “This is one of the main symptoms of under-development: the inability to relate things, to accumulate experience and grow.”

These words have followed me. Life in college, away from family and friends, has been an enriching experience, but, at the same time, I have had a hard time deciphering which relationships and experiences will make me grow and which I need to discard.

For me and for many other Puerto Ricans, underdevelopment has a meaning that goes beyond material necessities. As a young, sheltered person, underdevelopment was a reflection of my interior state. It pervaded my struggle to grow up and move beyond the familiar world of family and friends. When I was a high school student I was so distracted thinking about myself that I forgot about others.

My community service requirement in eleventh grade was to go two times a month to a public school to help children with their classroom assignments. But it was a burden. Sometimes I’d skip it and go to the beach. So much, I now think, for my sense of “giving back” because I was being educated in a good private school. I was too easy on myself. It didn’t bother me that in my school I was among the first to speak out when it came to criticizing the government of Puerto Rico and the inefficiency of public services.

At this time in my life, writing, especially in English, was, I thought, my ticket to a successful future. My mother, a translator, helped me learn English. I remember her writing corrections in blue ink next to the teacher’s corrections, which were in an intimidating bright red. I saw these blue and red corrections as a battle for justice, but now I realize that I was privileged and took it for granted.

After I enrolled in college, I made nonfiction writing my first course choice. But juggling two languages became an issue as soon as I started writing essays. When we did peer review in my writing seminar, I received mostly grammar and spelling corrections. While other students in my class were developing their style, I was busy trying to make my writing clear. I started using writing manuals and drastically simplifying my ideas. Expressing myself in English and receiving feedback on my writing clarified a realization I’d had in Puerto Rico: in English, I was an average writer.

When I speak or write in Spanish I rarely falter, even when I’m nervous. But in English, self-consciousness kicked in. In seminars, I had trouble making substantive comments. My nervousness only made things worse. I refrained from making comments unless I planned out what I was going ...