The Privilege of Exposure

AC/DC, pierced nipples, campfires, and cans of Keystone Light—this was my upbringing. I was raised in rural Eastern Oregon, where conservative populism was not debated but assumed. Though my parents seemed to contradict the stereotype—I was born of a teen pregnancy—my worldview was narrow long before I had language for it.

Today, I am the family outcast. I travel. I chose a nontraditional career as a massage therapist and write in ways that deny me privacy. I have been married twice, both times to men much older than me, and I am the first in my immediate family to earn a college degree. What sets me apart most, though, is empathy—an intentional practice rather than an inheritance. In my family, I am well cultured, and still a work in progress.

My sophomore year of high school—twenty years ago—the shift began. I was taking Spanish classes, and unlike most of my classmates, I loved them. That interest didn’t come from nowhere. It came from two people who quietly expanded my world.

The first was Señora Ettinger. She was small, high-energy, and absolutely not someone you crossed. Confident and unflinching, she wasn’t afraid to call you out when you were unprepared. Her thick Puerto Rican accent carried through everything she said, occasionally slowing our understanding but never her authority. Her expectations for us as Spanish students were exacting. She won me over completely when she turned our Friday classes into salsa lessons. There we were, dancing in the high school commons to Daddy Yankee’s Gasolina, while she held nothing back.

The second was Armando, a family friend who became my unofficial Spanish tutor. I can only imagine his frustration listening to me practice my colors, stuck on amarillo, unable to roll my r’s—a skill I still lack. What he offered, though, was patience, encouragement, and exposure to a language and culture that felt larger than the world I knew.

The small community I grew up in was rural Eastern Oregon—gun racks in pickup trucks, American flags on front porches, and a shared certainty about who belonged and who did not. Words like “illegal” were used freely, without much thought behind them. Politics weren’t argued so much as inherited. The town was proud, insular, and wary of difference. It was also unusual in one important way: it was home to a university.

The university mattered. It functioned as a cultural outlet in an otherwise insular place, a rare opening in the landscape. Beyond helping me with Spanish homework, Armando used the university as a classroom of his own. Through him, I attended a Native American powwow, watched Island Magic, a performance by Pacific Islander dancers, and wandered through art galleries I would never have entered on my own. By my junior year, I traveled to Costa Rica with my Spanish class. These experiences were small and fleeting to a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old, but they mattered. Each one quietly unsettled the certainty I had grown up with.

My senior year, America elected its first Black president. Shortly after, I married Armando.

He was born in Mexico. His father brought him to the United States in search of a safer life, a better life—one built through labor that was exhausting, underpaid, and essential. His family worked in fields, picking crops most people never stopped to think about once they reached a grocery store.

Being married to an immigrant reshaped my understanding of work, belonging, and empathy. Armando went to college. He paid taxes. He listened carefully—even to people who did not deserve his time or patience. He carried himself with a quiet dignity that filled in the gaps left by everything I had never been taught to consider.

Through him, I began to see the hardships I had been insulated from. My upbringing had been narrow, not because it lacked love or effort, but because it lacked proximity. My marriage erased that distance. Abstract opinions gave way to lived reality, and certainty gave way to questions I could no longer ignore. 

When I was pregnant with our daughter, my grandpa pulled me aside and said, “You know, your little girl isn’t going to have your blue eyes. She isn’t going to look like you.”

I love my grandpa, but it was a startling thing to hear. He loved my husband too, genuinely. Still, there were moments—comments, assumptions—that sounded like an alarm going off without warning.

In 2016, as the country entered another election cycle, my grandpa insisted that Armando get his citizenship. If money were the problem, he said, he would pay for it. Money wasn’t the issue. We had already begun the process. What unsettled me was not his concern, but the logic behind it.

How could he support policies that cast immigrants as threats, while wanting to protect the one immigrant he knew and loved? Why did proximity soften his fear, but not expand it? I began to wonder what might change if the people he spoke about so casually were no longer abstract—if they had names, histories, and families, as Armando did.

When Bad Bunny stepped onto the Super Bowl halftime stage and sang almost entirely in Spanish, the reaction followed a familiar rhythm. Some people danced. Others bristled. It wasn’t even in English, they said, as if language were a gate instead of a bridge.

I recognized that discomfort immediately. I had grown up around it. It sounded like the unease I once felt when words didn’t come easily, when I couldn’t roll my r’s, when the world stopped arranging itself for my comfort. It sounded like my grandpa’s worry disguised as protection, like a town that loved what it knew and feared what it didn’t.

But music doesn’t ask permission, and language doesn’t exist to reassure us. Both invite us to listen—to lean in, even when we don’t fully understand. What I learned, slowly and imperfectly, is that empathy works the same way. It asks us to sit with unfamiliar sounds, unfamiliar stories, unfamiliar people, and resist the urge to turn away.

America has never spoken with one voice. It hums, clashes, harmonizes, and sometimes sings in languages we don’t yet know how to hear. My life has taught me that belonging isn’t about recognition—it’s about attention. About choosing to listen long enough for the noise to become music.