will jump all over you if you don’t speak English perfectly. Mexicans will jump all over you if you don’t speak Spanish perfectly. We got to be twice as perfect as anybody else… Our families have been here for centuries, and yet they treat us as we just swam across the Rio Grande. We got to know about John Wayne and Pedro Infante. We got to know about Frank Sinatra and Agustín Lara. We got to know about Oprah and Cristina... We got to be more Mexican than the Mexicans and more American than the Americans, both at the same time. It’s exhausting!” – Edward James Olmos as Abraham Quintanilla, 1997. What it means to be a “Coconut” I remember when I was younger, a friend of mine once described as a “coconut.” It was weird for me to be called such a thing because, at first, I didn’t understand what he was trying to say. I wasn’t sure if that was an insult, or some sort of joke. If you‘ve never been called such a thing, allow me to elaborate. When looking at a coconut, you will see a fruit covered by a hard brown outer shell. Within the coconut lies a fibrous white layer of meat called the copra. To put it simply, the coconut is brown on the outside, and white on the inside. I wasn’t sure what to make of the analogy at first. Should I be insulted? Looking back, I probably should have been at the time. However, I laughed and agreed with my friend that I am a “coconut.” That was my first big mistake. What made me a “coconut?”... Find out in the Januanary 2022 edition! Inspired by a great leader, Bright College is taking a new approach to education. Want to do school differently? So do we. Our two-year associate degrees are designed to accelerate your career. drake.edu/bright
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