Us vs. Them

Ensayo personal de creative nonfiction sobre identidad costarricense-nicaragüense, migración, xenofobia y clase social.

“But the older I get, the more obvious it becomes that the dignity in that story was never theirs to prove. It was ours to recognize.”

Ensayo original en inglés.

Growing up in Costa Rica, I didn’t think much about identity. My family is both Nicaraguan and Costa Rican, and for most of my childhood that just felt normal. It was simply how my life was arranged, family on both sides of a border that, to me, didn’t seem particularly meaningful. 

But outside my house, that border carried weight. 

During my childhood, Costa Rica was receiving a large influx of Nicaraguan immigrants. Many families were leaving Nicaragua to escape economic hardship and tyranny. Costa Rica represented safety and opportunity, but it also created tension. A lot of Nicaraguan immigrants work as domestic workers. It was one of the most reliable ways to earn money and send it back home. 

Kids observe the hierarchies they see around them and it becomes part of their life perspective. 

One afternoon at school, I was talking with classmates when one of them stopped and said something, “Wait… you sound like my maid.” Another kid added that I must be from the same city, pronouncing it in an exaggerated Nicaraguan accent. They laughed in the casual way children laugh when they think they’ve said something clever. 

But I knew exactly what they meant. 

It wasn’t just an observation about an accent. It was a social category. In their minds, Nicaraguan women were the ones who cleaned their houses, who raised their younger siblings, who existed somewhere below

the life their families lived. Being compared to them wasn’t neutral, it was an insult. And because my accent resembled theirs, because my family came from the same place, I was suddenly being placed in that same position. 

I remember trying to defend myself. I remember insisting that I wasn’t like that… whatever that means. The words came out clumsy and panicked, the way children speak when they don’t yet have the wording to describe what they’re feeling. My face got hot and eventually I just cried. 

Moments like that didn’t just happen once. Comments about accents, about neighborhoods, about where people “belonged” were common. The border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua wasn’t just geographic, it carried an entire social hierarchy with it. 

As I got older, I started realizing that this kind of tension exists everywhere. Dominicans hate Haitians. Colombians hate Venezuelans. Even places that look culturally unified from the outside have these strange rivalries, these invisible lines people use to separate themselves from someone just slightly different. 

Moving to the United States changed how I see those divisions. Here, those distinctions that once felt so important back home often disappear. Costa Rican, Nicaraguan, Dominican, Colombian, most people don’t see those differences at all. 

We all become one category. 

And that shift forces you to reconsider the hierarchies you grew up with. The rivalries that once seemed natural start to feel strangely small when you step outside them. 

Looking back now, what disturbs me about that moment isn’t only the cruelty of the joke. It’s the realization that the insult depended on the assumption that there was something shameful about those women in the first place: women who had crossed borders, left families behind, taken whatever work they

could find in order to survive, women like my mother who had to raise their siblings elsewhere, whilst parents at home are trying to sort life out. The insult only worked because society had already decided their work meant something lesser. 

But the older I get, the more obvious it becomes that the dignity in that story was never theirs to prove. It was ours to recognize.