Finding Identity at Barnard

The thing is, I never know how to answer when people ask me where I’m from.

If you come to the Visitor’s Center at Barnard and look at my BSAR name tag, it says Brownsville, TX—and that’s true. But it’s also not. It’s just the short answer.

Brownsville is where I was born, where I went to school, where my friends were, but right across the river—not even thirty minutes away—was my home.

Mexico is where my parents were born, where my family lives, where there are stories of childhood shenanigans and family history, where I scraped my knees and wrestled with my brother in the yard.

But just because it was close by doesn’t mean it made it easy.

I struggled a lot with my identity when I was younger. I felt like I was stuck, getting carried away in the current of the river that had determined most of my life. Logically, I knew I was both—Mexican and American, with the passports to prove it—that these two sides of me formed one whole person. But it never felt like it.

Kids, as it turns out, could be mean. For the people in Mexico, I was always American. I hadn’t been born there. My doctor’s appointments were in America. My schooling was American. I often felt like I had to choose one or the other.

I could stick with my roots, could stand up to mocking, could say I’m Mexican and be proud of it. But in Mexico, I had to acknowledge I’m American—and it always felt odd, coating my tongue like a lie.

When I started looking at colleges, I always knew I was going— it wasn’t a question of if, just where. I was looking for a place where I could build community, where I didn’t have to leave behind the warmth of home just to grow. I wanted somewhere that would let me be both grounded and flexible—somewhere I could explore, stretch, and still feel like myself. 

Barnard felt like that place. And somehow, I just knew I was going to get in. I wasn’t nervous; it just felt right, like future me was sending back a quiet reassurance that I’d be okay.

Even so, when I finally arrived, that sense of limbo hadn’t disappeared. 

Like any first-year student, I missed home. But I also felt foreign in a way I wasn’t expecting. I missed speaking Spanish. I missed the music, the food, the street vendors, the very smell of the soil back home.

I wasn’t too worried at first—it’s New York City, after all. But coming from a place where almost everyone had some connection to Mexican culture, suddenly not having that around me felt... steadying. I signed up for a translation class my first semester. I figured it was something I did regularly at home—why not take a class for it? 

Professor Peter Connor spoke so beautifully about language that it changed my life. 

For the first time, I saw my words as beautiful. I saw the constant tug-of-war between English and Spanish not as something messy or fractured, but as a gift. A strength. A way of seeing and reshaping the world.

I met the girl who would become my roommate for the next two years in that class. And she told me all about the Mexican American club on campus, and brought me leftovers from events.

While I was initially thrown off by the fact that many didn’t even speak Spanish, I was soothed by the way they engaged—with the culture, with each other, with pride. They stood by their heritage, not because it was perfect or easy, but because it was theirs.

I felt like I was seeing the world through new eyes.

Little by little, that feeling of being “in-between” started to shift.

What surprised me most at Barnard was how naturally my background started showing up in class—not as something separate, but as part of how I think.In one seminar on Latin American cyberpunk, I wrote about how narratives of disability and bodily modification reflect real-world biopolitics and cultural memory—ideas that resonated with me deeply because of where I’m from, and how I’ve learned to read power and language.In my policy courses, we talked about borders and surveillance, and I brought in stories that weren’t theoretical to me—they were lived. And people listened. Professors encouraged it.

I never thought of being bicultural as something broken or something I needed to fix. But for a long time, something inside me didn’t sit right—like I was living slightly out of sync with myself. Like I was constantly switching gears but never really settling into one.

At Barnard, I didn’t have to fix anything. I just had to stop bracing for the switch.

I started speaking with more ease. I started writing papers that felt like mine. And slowly, I realized that I didn’t need to resolve the tension—I just needed to learn how to live in it, and even draw strength from it.

If you're a prospective student and any of this feels familiar—if you grew up moving between languages or cultures or places—I want you to know this: Barnard doesn’t ask you to be half of anything.

You don’t have to water anything down to succeed here.

There’s room for all the parts of you—the fluent and the in-between, the pieces that feel grounded and the ones that still feel unsure. Barnard is full of people learning to hold complexity, not erase it.

I used to feel like I was caught between two worlds. Now I know I was always both. And that’s not something to explain or resolve—it’s something I carry proudly.

When visitors come in, I give them the whole spiel: I’m from Brownsville, Texas, right at the tip of Texas, but I’m also from Mexico, just across the border. And it’s really cool, because if you stand just right in some places, you can even see the buildings on the other side. 

And maybe that doesn’t fit on a nametag—but it fits me just fine.