When I transferred to Florida State in January of this year, I did not know what to expect. Here I was, a Latin girl from a big diverse city, entering what felt like another planet. Not only was I nervous about moving to a new city on my own, but I was going to be living with two strangers. I couldn’t help but think back to all the roommate horror stories that my friends and family had shared to me. As if that weren’t enough to stress over, a weariness came over me because of the fact that I was entering this new semester at such an odd place. Most of my friends started back in Summer 2018 and had established new friendships. It’s a ridiculous thought, but I really believed that I would be outcasted just for arriving at a later time in our first year away at college. 

            Where I’m from in Miami, I was always surrounded by other Latin/Hispanic people. In fact, everyone that I knew was either born in a Hispanic country or had parents who were. Whether it was at school, at the store, or at home, I was immersed into Latino culture. When my abuela moved in with us after my abuelo died, she filled my head with stories from Cuba and filled our stomachs with Cuban food every night for dinner. We watched Spanish television shows, or novelas, and I spent so much time talking to her in Spanish which I would sometimes forget was my first language. Yet as I sit here looking back at my life, I find it harder and harder to connect to my roots. The upbringing that I had and the environment that I stem from, both encompassed Latino culture. It was always so evident and present that when I moved to Tallahassee, I didn’t realize how truly in the minority I was. According to The Office of Institutional Research, only 18.9% of Florida State students are Hispanic (Office of Institutional Research). This is quite a big change if you consider the fact that I came from a high school whose student body consisted of 78% Hispanic students ("Terra Environmental Research Institute Student Body"). When you grow up in a place rich with diversity, where Latino culture is celebrated everywhere, whether that’s in restaurants, art, music, or clothing, you forget that in other places in our country, even just 7 hours away, Latino Americans are widely unrepresented in our government, media, and culture. Something that has been such a big part of me I felt was fading away. My first thought was, I know who I am, and I don’t need a homecooked Cuban meal every night or to listen to El Gran Combo every time I get in a car to remind me that I am a Latina. But as the weeks went by and the time I had spent away from home grew, I felt like I had lost a part of me that I wore proudly. I couldn’t play “El Gran Combo” in the car because no one knew or understood the words, I never asked my abuela how she made her famous ropa vieja, so I couldn’t taste a bit of home either, and no one around me spoke Spanish. I knew I wasn’t the only one who felt this way, and on one of my first nights since moving to Tallahassee, I saw a tweet sent by @Rafisodope that read, “Alot of You Don't Know How Blessed You Are to Live in a City Where Minorities Are the Majority. That's Why Many of You Can Be so Ignorant to the Realities of What the Rest of the Minorities in the US Have to Deal with.” (@Rafisdope, 2018)

            When asked which community I wanted to be a part of, I knew it was Greek life. Ever since the information meeting that I attended at orientation in October, I have been extremely anxious to rush in the fall semester. It became very apparent to me very quickly at this information session however, that I knew way less than I thought I did about sororities here at FSU. That’s another reason I think, that I was excited to look into it and eventually be a part of it. The thought of meeting new people and creating relationships that would last a lifetime was so appealing to a girl from another planet who was worried that because she started at FSU so late, everyone would’ve been ahead of her in the friend-making department. As if this were all really meant to happen, I was assigned to find a community here on campus to want to join, and if that weren’t ironic enough, I learned soon after moving into my apartment that my roommate, Serafina, was part of a Latina sorority here on campus. When I approached her about it, it opened us both up were we began to talk about our families and where we were from. It was the first time in a while that I had talked about my life back home and she, being a Latina American as well from Ohio, shared so many things in common with me yet seemed so different all at once. 

            At this point I was convinced and started researching Kappa Delta Chi here at FSU. There were two main things that I began looking for at the initial start of this process. First, how did the girls interact with people, not just who they were looking to induct, but the general population, and with each other. The second part of my research was to examine how Kappa Delta Chi (KDChi), used social media outlets, like Twitter, to make a difference culturally and politically in the Latina community. Kappa Delta Chi is a “service-based, nonprofit” national sorority (Flores). Founded in 1987, KDChi puts heavy emphasis on unifying Latina women and promoting leadership roles in their communities. They host events on campus like academic seminars, fundraisers, and service events. For their members, KDChi has been an outlet for these women to express what it is like to grow up as a Latina in America and what that means when you are applying for internships, jobs, and seeking out other opportunities throughout life. For me, all I ever knew about who I was and where I came from was what my parents taught me being Puerto Rican and Cuban. I didn’t realize until talking to Serafina, how many Latin woman grew up not knowing anything about their culture. Because she grew up in Ohio and went to predominately White public schools all her life, she was never surrounded by other Latin people. As I began to interview her, she shared with me how KDChi had taught her more about her Puerto Rican roots and what changes she saw in herself after joining:

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For one thing, there are so many Puerto Rican sisters and it makes me really happy because we talk about being Puerto Rican, and they have helped me with my Spanish; just practicing with me and teaching me how to speak it in both a professional and social environment. They taught me to see how beautiful I can be. I am not only more confident in my ability to speak Spanish but in my ethnicity. So the fact that I am both White and Puerto Rican, people would come up to me and call me White because I wasn’t “brown” and didn’t speak Spanish and I would get so angry for such a long time and say, ‘No don’t call me White, I’m Puerto Rican’, because I struggled for so long and felt like I had to fight to get that “Puerto Rican” label, just because of where I grew up. My name is Serafina Cruz, and people would give up and want to call me ‘Sera’ which I immediately would say, ‘No, it’s Serafina’, because my name was really important to me. Now I know, that being Latina doesn’t mean I have to look a certain way. My sisters taught me to own how I look and who I am. So now I’m like: Yes. I am White and Puerto Rican.

 

It was evident that Serafina had felt the pressure to prove herself upon entering a Latina sorority when she came from a White town. Despite this, she was welcomed with open arms and educated instead of being put down for not knowing as much about her culture. On the other side of the spectrum, there are women, including myself, who feel a “culture shock” when they move to a new place. One study published in the, “Journal of Hispanic Higher Education”, interviewed women who came from schools with a large Hispanic demographic that eventually went to universities with an even larger White demographic. They held interviews and recorded feelings of “culture shock” and “marginalization” before getting inducted into the school’s Latina sororities and after reporting, “Once our respondents joined their sororities, however, they gained valuable benefits, such as strong peer support and academic capital.” Many people associate sororities and fraternities with alcohol, partying, and hazing, and for good reason. Having experienced college life, I have observed these types of behaviors that aren’t just in the movies and felt as though I couldn’t ignore that when I did my research. That being said, when I read quotes like these, I found it somewhat frustrating that the “home away from home” that these women were describing could be just what someone needs after they’ve moved away from home but hesitated to look into because of the reputation that being in these organizations has created for itself over the years. So how do sororities, like Kappa Delta Chi, spread their messages promoting unity, Latina empowerment, leadership, and success? To answer this question, I chose my text to be an event that KDChi partakes in. “Market Wednesday” at FSU is a great way for students to support each other and their small businesses, get informed, and meet new people. KDChi’s had a table at this event where hundreds of students walk past every day, talking to other Latina women about their work in helping other Hispanic women in need and each other. When I walked up to their table, I was greeted with an excited smile by my roommate Serafina who had been eager to introduce me to her sorority sisters. They asked me questions about where I was from, how I liked FSU, and welcomed me into a previous conversation that they were having. Right away I already felt comfortable in a setting that I would usually find excruciatingly awkward and boring. They adorned their table with bright pink colors and big bold letters that read, “KAPPA DELTA CHI”. Perched in the middle of the table, sat a scrapbook close to 5 inches wide. Inside, the pages were filled with pictures of the women from KDCHi at different events they had partaken in in the last 2 years. As we gathered around this scrapbook, they laughed and shared stories behind some of the pictures. The purpose of these images and why I think it was so important not only to them but for people to see them, was because they were genuine moments. It was a map of where they had been together as a sisterhood and where they were going. The scrapbook was an exceptional tool to spark a conversation with girls who were thinking of rushing. It’s one thing to explain what they do, but to be able to visually show people the type of impact that their chapter has made on them is what got me to want to be a part of it. I saw women in these photographs that had skin dark, light and every shade in between, wore different sizes, had curly hair, had straight hair, and had dark or light eyes. It represented a diversity that you don’t typically see in other chapters. Sorority girl stereotypes are deeply rooted into our brains, and it was refreshing to see the differences that these women had just within their group that brought them together. 

The scrapbook exemplified how KDChi was unlike the other chapters at FSU. Still, it takes more than a few pictures to change people’s mind on how Greek life can really be. I asked 35 random people who were NOT in a sorority or fraternity, what the first word that popped into their head was when they thought of the word “sorority”. Not to my surprise, 15 people answered “white” and 8 answered “blonde”. I think this plays a key role into why a lot of Latina women don’t typically rush and I understand why. Many don’t even know about Kappa Delta Chi either. Our perception of this organization inhibits these women from potentially finding that “home away from” because they feel like they don’t fall into a certain criteria. It all comes down to the kind of message KDChi releases into the world. When I asked Serafina the same question, “What is the first word that you think of when you hear the word ‘sorority’?” she replied with:

Sisterhood. Definitely. Because when I think about my sisters, they are not just my friends, it’s way more than that. I can get mad at them and fight with them as if they were my biological sisters and because of that I can rely on them just like I do my actual sister. They’re the family that I chose.

            How can KDChi then, share this message of sisterhood to a wider audience? The most modern way to connect with people across all platforms is social media.  In fact, Zachary Taylor and Arianne McArdle actually examined 135 Verified Twitter accounts belonging to nation-wide fraternities and sororities and how they functioned to inform and publicly address people, whether it was good or bad. Their conclusion stated that, “By effectively using hashtags, user tags, and hyperlinks…fraternities and sororities will be better able to share the immeasurable positive impact these organizations have on their local, national, and global communities”, (Taylor and McArdie, p.14). Though I do agree that my generation relies on Twitter for many things ranging from world news, updates in pop culture, and simply as a source of entertainment, I think to be able to successfully reach more people, KDChi needs something a little deeper than a lifeless hashtag. Going off the fact that KDChi (@KDChi_Noles) hasn’t tweeted since May of 2016, I think they would really benefit and do some good by extending their philanthropy over the internet. Linda Heidenreich, an author and a professor of Chicanx History/Studies and Queer History/Studies at Washington State University, believes that though raising money for “mainstream charities” is good and worthy of recognition, Latina sororities specifically should encourage their members to be activists. She goes into detail of how Chicana/o students in the mid 20thcentury, “…created bridges between themselves and other oppressed communities within and beyond the United States”, by holding strikes and demanding “representation and curriculum changes” (Heidenreich, p.127). Just as it is important to help the Latin community in Tallahassee, which I think Kappa Delta Chi does well, I think it’s critical of the sorority as a representation of Latin Americans, to bring awareness to the social injustices that our people endure throughout the country. They may not be able to fit all of that proud Latino representation in a single 180-character tweet, but as we have seen, everyone who is anyone in politics has a Twitter account, and we as the next generation have to replace the mindset that has been underrepresenting the minorities in America for far too long. 

            Latinas are “among the most poorly educated women in our society” (Olivas, p.4). On top of that, according to Margarita Olivas, Latina sorority members experience higher levels of stress versus males because “they have chosen to attend college which defies traditional gender roles”. I can testify the reality of this statement being and knowing so many girls who are first generation college students. No matter what part of the U.S. you were born in, us Latina women have something to prove whether it’s to our parents, to men, our bosses, or ourselves to be given the same opportunities as the rest of the world. Achieving greatness isn’t something we can easily do alone and I truly believe that Kappa Delta Chi offers it’s members the proper support and training they need to succeed in the workplace and anywhere for that matter. Their work is the kind that not only gets their members the job, but trains them to become leaders. They place an importance on helping their fellow Latina sisters in and around Tallahassee who face many of the same and different struggles. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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