During my first year at Harvard, I was invited by a new friend to visit her in Manhattan before heading home for Christmas. I’m not sure how she traveled back to the city from Cambridge—I took the Fung Wah, a bus that went from Boston to New York for $10—but we eventually met up at her parents’ palatial apartment on the Upper West Side. I had never been in a New York apartment before, much less one with multiple floors. As I arrived, she was mid-argument with her mom. Apparently her sister had been given a chandelier in her bathroom during a recent remodel and she had not, causing great uproar.
I have recounted this story many times in the last 20 years, partly because it’s a guaranteed crowd pleaser that plays into people’s (often accurate) image of Harvard as a place full of the super rich. But thanks to affirmative action, in the fall of 2000, I was there, too. A Latina, daughter of a Cuban immigrant, product of the Miami-Dade County public school system.
