Ask the Poet : Alejandra Ortega
Rolling into the CI parking lot in her white 2005 Mercedes, a coffee in hand, with K-pop or ABBA playing through the speakers is usually how Alejandra Ortega starts her mornings at Whittier College. From the parking lot she makes her way to the Quaker Campus office, where she sits at her desk, Lego flowers on display, and mementos on her wall. Pictures of good times with her friends, her trip to New Zealand (which she is always talking about going back to), a picture of Jennifer Lopez with the caption “Mí Gente Latino,” and a picture of. Palacio Bellas Artes in Mexico City (taken by her) that represent a lot of her pride. And though this space she has is small it represents a big part of who Ortega is.
Before the interview, she sat in her soft, black, cotton desk chair, her coffee was finished and empty on her desk, she sits there on her silver iMac editing stories. Her job at the QC is Campus Life Editor. Though she just became editor this semester, anyone in the QC will tell you that she always has the best pitches. However, before she became Editor, she was the one responsible for “Ask a Poet” column. “When I took my trip to New Zealand, we visited Victoria University of Wellington, where they had a student magazine called Salient,” she said with a smile on her face (because she loves to talk about Salient magazine.) She continued, “They have a column, it’s called “Ask Aunt Vicky”, and I was looking at it and thought ‘You know what would be cool? If the Quaker Campus had an advice column.’” The look of. shock begins on her face for what she had to say next, “ I don’t know if you knew this but it used to be really boring here. They used to just print stories and that’s it,” she says while laughing in disbelief. Now that she is leaving, she passes down the torch to another writer, keeping the mystery alive, on who answers the “Ask the Poet” section.
Before Ortega became the mysterious “Ask. a Poet” at Whittier College, she was planning to go to UC Riverside. “I wasn’t driving at the time and my parents didn’t like the idea of me dorming, so Whittier made the most sense,” Ortega said. She adds with a happy tone, that Whittier, “Gave [her] a nice financial aid package,” as sort of a bonus to attend the College. In the beginning, Ortega was a little disappointed because she wanted to have the college experience of going away and dorming but she’s glad she did not. “When I first started college, I was glad I got to see [both my brothers] grow up through the terrible teens,” she says with a traumatic look as she recalled how, “terrible they were.”
. During her first year at. Whittier College, Ortega was stuck doing Zoom classes because of the pandemic. “Oh, it sucked,” she says as she was recalling what school life was like during that time. She remembers being on Zoom, in the kitchen with her brothers, while they were also in high school and middle school classes. “It so was interesting because I had a literature class at the same time my brother had P.E, and so he would be doing P.E in the den and I would be in the living room doing this literature class; it was weird,” she says while laughing about it.
It was in her second year where she began her minor in Business. She laid her elbow on her desk, trying to recall how it exactly happened. Professor Jonathan Burton of the English Department had pushed her to pursue a double major or a minor, but it was her interest in marketing that motivated her even more. “I kind of made this connection that some aspects of marketing do require the elements of storytelling, which goes very well with my English major,” she says with great clarity to show this was a serious topic for her. She adds, “I hated my Finance and Accounting classes, but I’m very glad I have those skills and knowledge under my belt.”
And with this interest in marketing, she created a foundation for her research project on code-switching for her Mellon Mays Fellowship or as she refers to it, “My Mellon project.” The idea came to Ortega. when she heard a Tostino’s ad on the radio. She thought that it was interesting that an ad for Tostino’s was using code-switching as she remembers only hearing it for certain ads like car ads. “If they’re making ads for a specific targeted audience, then they have found that this community or group of people is big enough that making this ad would turn some sort of profit for them,” she hypothesizes. And though she found this interesting, she decided to change her research from code-switching in marketing to code-switching in literature, as it aligned more with her English major. “I thought it was more interesting [because] code switching is a verbal thing and it’s really hard to replicate that kind of phenomenon in written text, because it comes off sometimes as awkward,” she explains. Sandra Cisneros was her main focus in her research because she did code switching very well in two of her books, and just like Ortega, Cisneros is a second-generation Mexican-American.
Ortega recalls her life growing up as. second-generation, “In the first five years of my life it was just me and my mom and my mom only spoke Spanish.” She continues, “When I got to preschool or kindergarten I started learning English through assimilation not because someone was teaching me. They told my mom I was going to fail because I didn’t know English and I ended up learning more words than the other kids.” She mentions it was her mother who taught her most of the English words while leaning in her chair laughing in disbelief. She believes she doesn’t have any accent but certain words she does mispronounce such as saying “sangwhich” instead of sandwich or “saulmon” instead of salmon. And while Ortega’s. mother taught her English, her father sparked her love for literature.
“My dad would read me books out of old literature textbooks from high school and he bought me this fairy tale book that had the morals of each story at the end,” Ortega. says with nostalgia, recalling her love for literature. She jokingly credited the book for being the reason why “she’s such a good human.” She would also read to her mother to teach her about grammar but she wanted it to be clear “my mother does know English, she just isn’t confident in it.”
But besides literature she loved hearing stories about her family. She remembers the stories of her great uncles being born in America and being sent back to Mexico in the 30s and stories of her mom’s pueblo in Michoacán, Mexico. “No one should have been surprised that I went into literature because my life is made up of stories,” she says with a look of cringe on her face. “As cliche as that sounds, we’re all made up stories and we’re all just trying to tell all these people that we’re here,” Ortega says as she was trying to find better words.
And with her love of literature and second generation background, doing a study on code switching seemed like the best thing for Ortega. Growing up, she never could find books that covered code switching, which was something Ortega did a lot with her family. Trying to figure out why it truly interested her, she says with uncertainty, “Maybe it was because I was 19 and was trying to find someone who looked like me.” She adds, “Growing up in Whittier, there were kids who had Mexican heritage but didn’t always speak Spanish, and in high school there was this group of people who were always trying to out ‘mexicanize’ each other.” She looked up trying to figure out how to fully explain the Mexican-American experience, “There’s always something wrong with you because you didn’t grow up on either side fully being this perfect image, or representation of the idealized Mexican or American.” Ortega admits that even when she goes to Mexico, her family refers to her as the “American cousin.” But she doesn’t let that affect her because she is proud of who she is and where she comes from. And she hopes she can teach this to other Mexican-Americans who feel the way she did, but she needs to finish grad school first.
But besides being dedicated to academics, she diverts a lot of her dedication to her job at the Boys and Girls Club. “I love my job,” she says so gleefully. She had been there for three years since back when the Fifth Dimension program was a part of the Community Engagement Center on campus. She laughed as she joked about her love of money being the reason she wanted to work at the Boys and Girls club. But she clarified after laughing that it was the only type of job she could get because she didn’t have work-study, and the description for the job was, “work with children.” “Me being like the oldest of my family, I’ve been around kids, and I was like ‘ I can do this’, and it’s been so much fun and one of the most fulfilling experiences in my life, “ she says while smiling, expressing how much joy this job brings her. She loves the kids she works with and calls them “good noodles.”She plans to continue working there after graduation,where she will be in charge of her own group at the Boys and Girls club.
But for now, Alejandra Ortega. is ready to walk the stage and when she receives her diploma on stage, she will not just be saying goodbye to Whittier College, but all the hard work she has been so dedicated to. From her research on code-switching, to her position on the Whittier ensemble as principal violist, and as Campus Life Editor for the Quaker Campus. Most importantly, she will be saying goodbye to all her friends and leaving a big hole in the tiny space that belongs to her.
Photo Courtesy of Alejandra Ortega / Quaker Campus
