I didn’t come to Latin America expecting Texas to show up.
But something about being here –fumbling through Spanish, misreading social cues, being visibly foreign again –pulled that version of me out of storage.
Texas was the first place where I learned what it felt like to be other.
To be mislabelled. To be sorted before I could explain myself.
Back then, I tried to disappear into whatever box seemed safest.
Here, decades later, I’m doing the opposite. In Costa Rica and Nicaragua, I’m still the outsider but I’m not trying to erase myself anymore. I laugh at my broken Spanish. I say yes before I feel ready. I walk into rooms knowing I won’t fully belong and stay anyway.
Texas taught me how to survive difference.
Latin America is teaching me how to inhabit it. That’s why this memory surfaced now. Not as nostalgia –but as contrast.
Same feeling. Different response.