ABSTRACT
My autoethnography discusses my journey of immigrating to the U.S. as a child and ripping out my Latinx identity to assimilate into U.S. English-speaking, white culture in order to thrive. I discuss meritocracy in engineering and how I used my masculine identity to find belongingness in engineering. Then, I discussed coming out as gay and the threat I felt coming out in engineering to my engineering and Latinx identities. Lastly, I discuss how validation from “authentic” engineers can allow/disallow people with minoritized intersecting identities from existing in engineering. The chapter ends with my ask for expanding the spectrum of who passes as a “genuine” engineer by making the template of an engineering identity more flexible to embrace a greater breadth of who is considered an engineer.
