Honey Mustard

            Honey mustard: Its peculiarity doesn’t lie in the melding of sweet and spicy or in its designation as a dipping sauce, spread, AND salad dressing. It’s in this sauce’s sheer variety. Different ranch dressings differ slightly in taste and consistency, but in the end, ranch is just ranch. It’s white, specked with spices and it tastes like only ranch can. Hidden Valley tastes cheep while home-made ranch can be a cathartic experience. However, it’s still frickin’ ranch! Honey mustard, on the other hand, can seem to make up its mind about who exactly she is. Sometimes, the sauce is vaguely sweet, with a nice, toned down mustard kick, other times the thick, sticky mess would hold the name, “mustard honey” much more appropriately. Still, in other instances, what’s called “honey mustard” resembles neither part of its composite name (wtf?). No one seems to agree. What parts mustard and honey constitutes the right ratio? What exactly makes honey mustard?

I grew up in the Chicago suburbs with a Puerto Rican family. That means rice and beans. Lots of rice and beans. And being embarrassed when my mom would talk to me in Spanish as I peered through Captain Underpants in the gym on my elementary school book fair days. And riding my bike by the ticky tacky homes on a blistering summer day, chasing down the sound of “Do Your Ears Hang Low” ringing in the air. And lots of ignorant Mexican jokes that didn’t apply to my heritage at all. Once, a good friend’s mother asked me if Puerto Ricans ate tacos and burritos. I had to keep myself from screaming at this otherwise kind woman (mainly because I was sitting next to her daughter in the back of her van. “No, tacos and burritos are more boarder food. Its Tex-Mex. Puerto Rican food is very different.”  

Being Latino in a well-off, predominantly white suburb parallels being an 18^th century time-traveler working management at Best Buy. I learned that my home culture and my school culture were very different, but who the hell was I? Where did I actually fit? My mom would often bash American cuisine and cultural idiosyncrasies. “We aren’t Irish, why would we celebrate St. Patrick’s day?” She’d question when March came around. “These Americans don’t know anything about dinner parties. They play board games all night and everyone’s out the door by 10:00.” But her “us and them” dialogue conflicted strongly with my grade school kid desires to fit in with my peers, whose home lives seemed so foreign to me.

Throughout High School, I played around with the recipe. I’d listen to Reggaeton to feel in touch with my roots. I learned the basic steps of merengue and salsa at quinceañeras by reluctantly dancing with the older women whose husbands would rather sit and converse. These steps became a way to impress my friends with my ethnic-ness, convincing the skeptics about my roots despite my pale skin. Puerto Rican culture became my honey. I spent my four years and Naperville Central High School testing how much of it to mix into the mustard seed suburban culture I’d learned in school. Other students went all out. They became their home cultures fully, wearing flags on their clothing, spackling their vocabulary with Spanish phrases, or working comments about their exotic escapades into every conversation. As high school trudged on I realized that I only need a dab of honey. Representing my family’s culture is important and simply sharing my knowledge with others at appropriate times is sufficient. After all, my culture, the culture of my peers and the people who’ve surrounded me for most of my life, is that of the middle suburban class. I’m honey mustard. Mostly mustard (with a dab of something different).