I was born in New York, to parents who are both US citizens. My mom and dad both come from middle to upper-middle class backgrounds, and my family still lives within this socioeconomic bracket. This means that my siblings and I grew up in a household that has never been under financial strain, and we have been able to attend private schools for most of our education. My dad is a corporate transactional lawyer, and makes enough money that my mom does not need to work.
I am white, and of Western European descent. This places me within dominant racial and ethnic subcultures. I have also lived most of my life outside the US–seven years in Dubai, and five in Spain. When I lived in Dubai I was very young, and not particularly conscious of my positionality as a white North American expat. In Spain, I am much more conscious of my positionality, and how I am called upon to define it. One thing that stood out to me from a reading I did for my Italian class was the idea that, of those who leave their country and move to another to establish a new life or seek a new livelihood, only white people are considered “expats” – all others are “immigrants.” Though I have been accustomed to calling my family “expats,” I have begun to wonder if this is the most appropriate term.
Though I consider Spain “home,” because it is where my family is, when I am there I feel a sense of dislocation, of not-quite-belonging. My parents are not as proficient in Castellano as me and my siblings are, and I have felt the discomfort of a parental figure who has trouble talking to and understanding teachers, shopkeepers, and medical professionals. I often have to translate for my parents. My grandmother broke a bone in her arm when she came to stay with us in Barcelona, and I was the one who took her to her doctor’s appointments and acted as interpreter. I remember feeling resentful, as I helped undress her before her operation, that I had been delegated this responsibility.
This summer there were mass protests against tourism in Barcelona, and I became acutely aware that I present as a tourist. In fact, there may be some ways in which my family’s positionality in Spain (again, upper-middle class people living in a wealthy neighborhood and sending their kids to private school) causes its own social ills. But whenever I go out, I often think about how to look more like I belong, and struggle to affect a casual ease in conversation, while waiting for the bus, riding on the tram, or ordering something at a bar. I know the streets, I know the smells, the shops, the sleepy mornings; I know the cadences of the language, the greetings, the signs, the way the sky looks at night. The place is familiar to me, but I’m not sure I will ever feel fully held by it.
