It must first be clarified that I, Diego Hernandez Diaz, of sound mind and body (kind of – I’m slightly overweight), do hereby decree the following a more or less factual account of my past four years. There is embellishment and considerable artistic license that must be acknowledged but only as it involves the events relating to myself. That is to say, the whole book, and particularly this chapter is the kind of truth you would swear to your parents, not the kind of truth you would swear to in a court of law.
I haven’t been Mexican for a long time. That is to say I am proud to be a Mexican born and raised. I grew up in a city called Guadalajara. To those outside of the United States of Mexico that’s often a meaningless piece of information. Perhaps that’s why I’m prone to making up stories about my background when talking to my disposable in my trips up and down the continent. That’s why I tell them that I’m a Philly native travelling from Guadalajara only on business – it keeps things simple if I have them believe the verbal diarrhea that spills from my mouth rather than fill them in on my life. Tell them how my parents don’t speak English- how despite the fact that they both have Ph.D.’s in Pharmacology they speak a little French and considerable Spanish. They were the first in their family to attend college.
People would wonder why my English is so good. People do wonder. And every time I come up with a kitschy and smart-alecky response to it.
“I watched a lot of American sit-coms that wouldn’t run on American TV you know? Like Reba!”
And then they’d wonder why I don’t have a southern accent. So I’d explain that my parents, with incredible foresight, bought a great deal of English books so I would have material to dig into once I learned to read ingles. Of course that would only mean that I’d have to explain to them two things. One – I went to an American School that threw in an extra year between kinder garden and first grade appropriately termed pre-first. This was a year meant for to teach us how to read English. And two – I showed them that I could read English about two weeks into the year. My mother was summoned to the principals office and offered the following:
Principal: “Your son can read”.
Mother: “Spanish. Yes, his father and I taught him. Or is that his father and me?”
Principal: “English.”
Mother: ”English?”
Principal: “English”.
Mother: “That’s not possible. His father and me can’t speak English”.
Principal: “We’re moving him up a grade”
And so off I went to the first grade and you can easily how this story gets complicated.
So I stick to other truths. But not this time, an it’s not because I’m finally “of age” in this putative country but more so because I’m in the right state of mind to write it. Even if it takes me all night or simply a couple of hours a night till the end of the school year.
The story that followed was not one filled with years of bullying as the youngest kid. I was a big kid. Not big in the mid-west type of big but simply massive. I was taller than any other kid in my grade – boxy, chubby almost but not quite. It was the kind of size that affords you the luxury of never having to be violent because sheer magnitude of potential repercussion avoids you a scuffle. Instead I developed two things – a hard work ethic (though I’m sure any psychologist worth her two cents could prove was deeply ingrained in me by my parents) and a larger than live personality.
Blitz through the next 10 years. I was a shark in a pond full of guppies and felt damn good about it. My friends and I fancied ourselves the kings of our high school. The same school, down to the plot of land, we’d attended for over 12 years now. From different walks of life we had a jock, the future lawyer (the pre-law stereotype in American cynicism), an artsy type who’d belong in Brown (and did go to Brown) and a computer maniac who chose to got to MIT because he could. Somewhere in there I fell into my niche. I fell in the middle of all of them. With a little bit of each and my own passion for people. At the time I didn’t realize that my friends at Wharton would help me identify my gregariousness as a positive attitude called “good at networking”.
On one infamous occasion we convinced the headmaster to let us out early on a Friday afternoon to go study physics on air hockey tables. We went to Peter Piper Pizza and behaved like we were in middle school. We did the same for the rest of the year.
On another occasion we shot a film for our film festival and convinced the headmaster we needed to go to the mall to get the soundtrack that was going to win us the prize. We left, got the soundtrack and soft serve and returned to win the prize.
I know it sounds like suburban victories and they were. Even though Guadalajara was nothing like Suburbia and my friends were not your average valley-boy types. We were nerds with ideas of grandeur at a school that didn’t have seniors hazing freshmen or people that skipped school.
We had bodyguards who kept our walls safe and a security force that could overtake Paris.
The American School Foundation of Guadalajara was a place where an American Football team would have had a hard time finding traction except for the few consulate kids who were both athletic and inclined to believe in a half Mexican team’s ability to memorize plays called quarter and dime.
This was my school, a place where choppers would land in the middle of the soccer field and where bomb threats would have FBI agents from the consulate show up at our school and scan our rooftops. It was also a place where a Math teacher, a former proctologist in the U.S. seeking asylum in Mexico after a few sketchy sounding cases in his home country, could propose building a solar oven using the old satellite antenna atop the school library. The soup we warmed using that was fantastic and we learned nothing except that it takes a lot of sweat and tear to build a solar oven.
When I was going into the 10th grade I considered switching schools. The Mexican schooling system works in a 6-3-3 schedule unlike the American 4-4-4. 10th grade was my last chance to get out – and I almost did. I applied to a different High school, rocked their admittance test and was set up to go.
Diego gets pulled into a meeting with the principal and the headmaster. Diego is interrogated about his future and he starts referring to himself in the third person.
I explain that the other school is offering me a larger scholarship, that the other school is cheaper and financially speaking, for my parents at least, it is better. They mention that getting into an AMERICAN (all caps) university will be infinitely more complicated that way and I need to be smart. The thought of attending university somewhere in the United States not of Mexico first pops into my mind. They ask me to stay. They tell me I need to stay. I tell them I can’t do.
I launch into an allegorical story of the kid who attempted to buy candy with his weekly allowance. In the story he attempted to buy the Mexican version of caramel chews but they were a dollar and his allowance was 50 cents. In the story education was the caramel chew- something that you desperately crave but immediately regret as it sticks to your teeth and palate in noxious ways that keep you tongue clicking like a horse for an hour afterwards. In the story I portrayed myself as Romeo. I was merely a captain of the ship I’d been given to command from the outset. I had no control over it.
It was my first con worth telling about. They bought it and got to ride their train for the next three years on the exclusive deal that they’d benefit from my accomplishment and I’d benefit from their lower? Education.
And so I stayed and played the game. Took the PSATs and saw a counselor who told me all my schools were reach schools.
Let me clarify a notion quickly. We, that is to say, Mexican children (and families) do not have a concept of what a counselor is. In Mexico you guesstimate what your college choice is and you apply to one. And by apply I mean you take a test that 2nd graders can take and pass and as long as your check does not bounce (and even then) you are enrolled in the pursuit of higher education. A counselor is about as useful as an alternate religion in a catholic country. We already have priests, you better promise something better.
I explained to Ms. Spiesel that I was only going for gold and that if I was to stick to silver or bronze I’d stay with Mexico’s gold and go from there. Financially speaking it made sense. Get paid to school here or pay a fortune to go abroad.
And I got in. I got into my dream school – Stanford. And other smaller schools like Penn, USC, Notre Dame, and Yale.
It came down to Penn, Yale and Stanford. At Yale I was irked by the tour guides constant references to Harry Potter – he seemed to fail to understand that bringing my imagination to the earthly constructs of his university made Yale fall short. At Stanford I saw rats on Palm Drive and found issue with being referred to as either a fuzzy (liberal arts) and techie (engineering) – they didn’t seem to get that I was a fuchie. That neither label truly applied.
In the end – as you will see – hopefully and only if I still have you, I chose Penn. Not because I knew anything about the dual degree Engineering/Wharton thing I was signing up for but because they had a transparent a simple attitude.
“Yes, we work hard. But we play our hardest”.
It wasn’t some slightly surfer bro approach to life who just happened to stumble into life by accident and be successful. It also wasn’t a thing where parents could pay for my weed addiction and English major simultaneously.
It was pragmatic. It was exciting. It was the home of the Phillies.
We used to get grades by quarters in high school. My second semester senior year, the time where the inflammation of the senior is formally known as senioritis hits – I missed 6 weeks of class in a 10-week grading period.
My chemistry teacher was a middle-aged crisis filled neurotic who would hit on me. My principal I had already seen drunk once. He was sitting outside the school, smoking a cigarette – he looked up to me and asked: “what’s the point?”. Two of my classes were independent study and my Spanish teacher was terrified of me. I was the only kid who actually read the books and calls him out for taking the spark notes quizzes, translating them and administering them. I had nothing to fear.
I came back and had my highest average ever.
So I chose Penn.
On my graduation night, when I introduced my girlfriend to my parents formally for the first time, I was smashed.
Prom looks like this. Everyone comes, family and friends. We all have dinner at a castle we rent. No limos required, just suits and lots and lots of intoxicating material – preferably liquid. We have a toast post dinner to say buen provecho. The families leave. And then the open bar hits for the next 4-5 hours. We then go to another open bar after party.
My parents hired a driver for me that night. I packed 17 people into my Honda CR-V that night.
A summer followed that I compared, in my graduation speech, to terminal patients on their last few weeks of doctor prescribed life.
I tried taking advantage of my last moments with my family, friends and loved ones. Or so I thought. Forgetting that I would be back at every chance, and that it wouldn’t be until senior year that I would realize that I needed to stop coming back.
When I said I wasn’t Mexican for while I didn’t mean it. It just means I drink scotch more than tequila now.
And then I boarded a plane to Philadelphia, PA.
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