My Time Among the Whites

October 14, 2019
In this conversational and often comic memoir-in-essays, Cuban American novelist Crucet (Make Your Home Among Strangers) examines entitlement and dislocation in a white world. In 1999, Crucet and her family drove from Miami to Cornell University (she was the first in her family to attend college), ignorant of the “extra long twin sheets, mesh laundry bags” she would need for her dorm but eager for an education that “would plug me into a kind of access and privilege I didn’t yet have a name for.” In “Say I Do,” she writes of her immersion into a white world that had her “marrying a gringo” she met in college at 23; she describes their Cuban wedding at “a parrot-infested jungle island theme park in Miami Beach” as “edutainment for the white guests.” Crucet writes in “Going Cowboy” of leaving Florida in 2015 to teach at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and of staying at a working cowboy ranch “to see the real Nebraska.” Shaken by the owner’s rant “about Mexicans getting passes into the United States,” she acknowledges that her “light skin and the privileges it affords” let her pass as white, admitting, “I was helping him perpetuate his ignorance by choosing instead to ensure my own safety.” An excellent prose stylist, Crucet easily immerses readers in her narrative.