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How I Learned That Success Didn’t Mean Losing My Culture
I used to leave my heritage at the door. Here’s the journey I took to accepting all parts of myself
It took decades for author Denise Soler Cox to overcome the belief that rising to the top required her to erase traces of her heritage.
Derek Abella
I say it now like I was born saying it, loud and without apology. I am a Puerto Rican woman from New York. But for most of my adult life, I rarely said those words at all.
The door was never locked; I just wouldn’t walk through it. At every family gathering, in rooms full of people who looked like me and sounded like me, I’d choose to stand just outside. Close enough to feel the warmth, but never comfortable enough to enter.
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It would take decades to understand what that reticence cost me, but a routine phone call to my doctor’s office in Miami, where I’d settled after college, is when I began to wake up.
Reclaiming my name
I’d mispronounced my last name my entire life.
My grandfather Horacio Soler, Cuban-born and New York-made, married into our Puerto Rican family, and his name came with him. It was never SO-ler, always So-LEHR.
But when my family moved from the Bronx to Westchester County, the pronunciation got mangled. No one sat down and actually decided this. It just happened gradually, the way assimilation does.
An author, filmmaker and keynote speaker, Cox is currently based in Colorado.
Courtesy Denise Soler Cox/Andrea Flanagan
Teachers mispronounced our name, and we didn’t correct them. Over time, I stopped noticing there was anything even worth correcting at all.
So when the receptionist at the doctor’s office heard me say “SO-ler,” she gave me an earful. “Ay no! Tu apellido es So-LEHR, no SO-ler! Si no lo pronuncias bien, es el principio del fin de nuestra cultura.” If you don’t say it right, she implied, it’s the beginning of the end of our culture.
She was talking about my name, but she was also talking about everything.
From that day forward, I pronounced it correctly. But claiming my name and embracing my Latinidad are two different things, and I wasn’t quite ready for the second one yet.
A few short years after moving to Denver, I married a real cowboy from Oklahoma, and my last name became Cox.
Standing at the Social Security office, I decided to give myself a middle name: Soler. I tucked it in there like a piece of me I wasn’t ready to leave behind. It was the smallest act of holding on, and it still wasn’t enough to keep me fully tethered.
Colorado isn’t as diverse as people might think, not in professional spaces and the neighborhoods I was moving through. There was no mirror. No one to catch me the way the Miami receptionist had. My Latinidad simply never came up, and I never volunteered it.
I’d drifted so far from myself, one compromise at a time. You just wake up one day and something’s missing.
According to a 2016 study by global think tank Coqual, 76 percent of Latino professionals expended real energy pushing parts of themselves down, not just at work but everywhere. Nearly a decade later, Coqual’s 2024 research found that 40 percent of Hispanic and Latino professionals still felt it necessary to change aspects of themselves to succeed. The number decreased, but the experience stayed the same.
In my late 30s, I started working on a documentary about first-generation, American-born Latinos — never fully American enough for the country they were born in, and never fully Latino enough for the country their parents came from. My Oscar-nominated creative partner, Henry Ansbacher, told me midway through production that he felt I should be in the film.
I pushed back hard. I wasn’t Latino enough, I said. My Spanish wasn’t good enough, and I didn’t represent the culture well enough. I was so busy arguing my case, I couldn’t see the irony. I was telling the man I wasn’t Latino enough while making a film about exactly that feeling.
Eventually, I agreed. And for the first time, I was forced to recognize my value as it is. Straight out of the box. Nothing added, nothing removed.
The film came out a year later, and the messages began to roll in. People shared stories with me they’d been holding on to for years, with nowhere to put them. People like Jesús, who told me that as a young adult he’d shortened his name to Jay. At that age, he was convinced it was easier to say and easier for people to accept him without question.
He reached out to say his reckoning had already begun and that watching the film confirmed he was doing the right thing. He was in the midst of the painstaking process of updating every related legal document, email signature and official record — every instance of Jay was being replaced with Jesús. He was saying his name and being proud of it for the first time in years.
I was in Virginia for a speaking engagement when he invited me to have dinner with his wife, his son and some of his dearest friends. Watching him that night, I realized his choice to reclaim parts of his Latinidad brought him closer to everyone around him. Presenting an edited version of himself “for ease” is what had placed a barrier between him and the world.
I’ve since met many other people standing outside the door, not even knowing they’re doing it.
Maybe you, too, have spent your whole adult life with some part of yourself set aside: your name, or the language you stopped speaking in public. Don’t be embarrassed if you’re 50 or 60 or beyond, and only reclaiming your heritage now. You might be inspiring someone coming up.
The door was always unlocked. It’s never too late to step through.
AARP essays share a point of view in the author’s voice, drawn from expertise or experience, and do not necessarily reflect the views of AARP.
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