“Those poor kids,” my mother would say. “The opportunities they are missing.”
My parents didn’t meet in Puerto Rico. Had my parents each stayed on the island, I doubt they ever would have gotten together. My mother is from San Sebastian, a somewhat middle-class municipality in the northwest region of the island. The patron saint of San Sebastian is San Sebastian Martir, or San Sebastian the Martyr. The patron saint was brought to San Sebastian by the immigrants from the Canary Islands in Spain.
My father is from the town of Adjuntas, a small mountain town, with one of the highest peaks on the island. Adjuntas is nicknamed La Ciudad del Gigante Dormido, because of a mountain formation resembling a slumbering giant.
The patron saints of Adjuntas are Saint Joachim and Saint Anne, the parents of the Virgin Mary. In Puerto Rico, every town has a patron saint, and so you could say every Puerto Rican has one, too.
Adjuntas was once a booming mountain town where sugar cane and coffee were the main source of industry, but when the United States instituted Operation Bootstrap in 1947 and moved the island away from an agrarian society to an industrial one, life on the island changed. As industry increased, the need for labor decreased, and there is, in part, what drove the great Puerto Rican migration to the mainland starting in the 1950s.
My father came to the mainland in 1958. He was sixteen-years-old and had twenty dollars in his pocket when he landed in New Jersey. He lasted one day there working on a farm and then made his way to Brooklyn, New York. In Brooklyn, he washed dishes in a nightclub and slowly learned English with the help of his black co-workers who treated him as one of their own. My father eventually found himself in Chicago, and when I asked him what brought him here he said, “Aventura.”
Adventure.
My parents met in the factories along Michigan Avenue. Imagine, there were once factories so close to the Magnificent Mile. My father lived in Lincoln Park back then, which was also once the Puerto Rican neighborhood. Today, Michigan Avenue is a tourist destination and Lincoln Park is dotted with mini-mansions owned by the wealthy. In the 1970s, my parents bought a multi-unit greystone in Logan Square before Logan Square gentrified. After my mother’s mother died, my parents sold the building, and they and my two brothers moved back to Puerto Rico; in search of healing and strength, and there they had me.
Shortly after I was born my parents returned to Chicago. My mother missed the city skyline, the public transportation system, and the ability to walk anywhere. We settled in the Northwest Side of Chicago, in the Polish-German-Greek neighborhood of Belmont-Craigin in 1980. We were the first Puerto Ricans, and overall the first Hispanics on the block. By 1990 the neighborhood was ninety-eight percent Hispanic. White flight happens fast.
In 1985, when I was in kindergarten, I developed the skill that is still my best to this day: procrastination. I told my dad that I had show-and-tell one morning and needed something to present to the class. He didn’t know what show-and-tell was, so I explained to him that I had to take something to school and show the class and talk about it. He took me downstairs to our unfinished basement. It was dark and moldy with exposed beams. In one corner of the basement, there was a heavy, wooden floor stereo that held a turntable and 8-track player. There were boxes that held yellowed, faded documents and photo albums and loose black and white pictures. We moved to the far end where the basement sink and boilers could be found. There, my father pointed to a box that was still taped shut. He asked me to tear away the tape, and I did. Inside, I found aged, balled-up sheets of newspaper, the box was stuffed with them. He told me to reach inside, and I did. When I pulled the contents, I gasped. I held the face of a demon, similar to the one I had seen before.
It was brilliant, and grotesque.
“This one is very old,” my father said. “It’s made of a coconut shell.”
It was unrecognizable as a coconut. The shell was painted an electric blue, speckled with yellow. Yellow horns jutted out from its head, and wide eyes and a wicked open-mouth grin stared on at me.
“It’s scary,” I said.
“That’s the point,” my father said. “You want him to be scary, to scare away the bad things. He can’t get rid of all of the bad things that happen, but he can fight them off.”
“The kids are going to laugh at me,” I could feel tears well up in my eyes and I dropped the mask on the concrete floor.
My father didn’t move. “The vejigante is special because he’s magic. He helps people. He helps people who are struggling.”
I remember stomping my feet and whining and saying I didn’t want to take that mask with me to school. When I turned to look for my dad, I found I was alone there in the basement. He was gone. It was just me and that mask. I dove into the box, pulling out the remaining newspapers, hoping that there was something else inside the box that would be fantastic and exciting that I could take to school instead—but there was nothing. I begrudgingly took the mask of the vejigante with me to my kindergarten show-and-tell class. Other kids proudly showed off their Teddy Ruxpin’s, Barbie dolls and Transformers. When it was time for me to present, I remember pulling the mask out from a bag. There was silence.
“This is a vejigante. He protects people.”
And that’s all I said.
No one said anything. No one asked any questions, and so I returned to my seat with my mask, embarrassed and angry that my father didn’t have anything else to give me. I kept the mask in that plastic bag in the basement for a long time.
Years later, when my brother Tito went looking for a suitcase in the basement he found the mask. He brought it up to my room and said it would mean a lot to dad that I keep it safe. When Tito went to the Army there were tears, but we all knew he was doing a great thing. He was an American fighting for America. Before he left, my mother gave him a scapular of the Guardian Angel; a cloth necklace with the image of an angel hovering over two small children. Tito spent time in South Korea, patrolling the Korean Demilitarized Zone. I remember what it was like to talk to my brother on the phone back then, and how soft and muffled and crackling he would sound, like he was a ghost calling from another dimension. When the Gulf War broke out, I remember being in my room playing Super Mario Brothers on my Nintendo and my mother screaming into the phone very early one morning. Tito had received orders to deploy. In a panic, she left the house and told me to stay in my room. She said she was going to fix it, and that she was not going to lose any more family. I don’t know why or how, but Tito’s friend went to war in his place. The friend was shot, but survived.
My brother Coco would go on to serve, too, a few years later, with the 101st Airborne Infantry. My mother gave him a rosary of Saint Michael, the patron saint of soldiers. He went to war, and my mother was not going to stop him. He fought and served in Bosnia. Coco didn’t come back right. He screamed at night, and one time he choked me so bad I passed out. I started locking my door because he had a growing gun collection—antique weapons and semi-automatics—and because, my in my brother’s mind, he was still riding that tank at night, pointing his machine gun at enemies. One day, my brother came into my room and threw a stack of photographs at me. Pictures he had taken. They were mostly of the countryside, but many of them were of mass graves. He told me that was part of his job, locating mass graves; Christians killing Muslims. Muslims killing Christians. Humans killing humans, and piling their bodies in open air pits. In one of the pictures I could have sworn I saw the shadow of horns and the outline of that demon.
Still, my brother had come back home, broken and shaken, but he came back home. And as my mother dealt with his wreckage of a human, I enlisted in the Army Reserve, because that’s what we did, we served. In boot camp, my platoon had a handful of women and the rest were men. Most of them had never met a Puerto Rican—I had never met white men from the south. They became my brothers, my family. We stood out in the rain together holding our rifles overhead. We marched up and down hills for hours, and when one of them would
collapse from exhaustion our drill sergeant would shout at us in the rear to stop and make sure we had taken care of our buddy. I don’t recall why or how, but the men were woken up earlier than the women one day and they were marched for hours in the freezing cold. When they returned back to base, I remember some of them had snot and tears frozen on their faces. I remember running out of the barracks with blankets in hand to cover their heads. Through chattering teeth, they thanked me. When I was medically discharged, I remember hugging those men so hard. They were from Louisiana and Kentucky, and Georgia and Texas. Missouri and beyond. They called me their Puerto Rican sister, and told me to be safe up in the big city.
When I got home, ashamed and deflated because of my discharge, I went into my room, sat down on my bed and cried. When I looked up, my father was standing there with a smile on his face. “It will be okay,” he told me. “You will go to college, and you will be okay.”
The first time someone called me “spic,” I was sitting in a college class. It was my journalism professor and she asked me what I thought of the word, spic. Honestly, I had never heard it before. When I got home I asked my dad what it meant and he laughed. He told me it would get worse before it got better, and it did.
“Do you still have that vejigante mask?” He asked.
“Yes,” I answered.
“It would be nice if you hang it on your wall.”
For some reason, I listened to him, and I hung that mask on the wall above my bed.
That first year in college I tried to get a part-time job at The GAP. I applied in person, a paper application, and the manager called me into his office for a quick interview. When he looked at the application and saw that it said Puerto Rico under my place of birth he asked me if I had papers.
“Puerto Ricans are American citizens,” I said.
He literally laughed in my face. I told him that Puerto Ricans were made US citizens by an act of Congress with the Jones-Shafroth Act of 1917 signed by President Woodrow Wilson. He didn’t believe me, and I didn’t get the job.
A few days later a white guy in my Introduction to Reporting Journalism class said, “Oh, wow. I know about you Puerto Rican girls.”
I genuinely didn’t know what that meant. I asked him to elaborate. His face flushed red and he said, “Forget it.”
When I asked my dad, he said the guy was trying to insinuate that Puerto Rican women were fast—sluts, prostitutes. I started crying and said I was never going back there.
My dad got the angriest with me he had ever been. “They used to send dogs to bite us. People would spit in our food, drag us out of restaurants. Police would pepper spray us. Hit us with clubs, and you are mad because someone called you a name?”
I went back to school and never complained again when someone called me a name, sneered at me, laughed at my clothes, my lack of a base education, or the way I pronounced or said something.
Before completing my undergraduate degree, I took two semesters off and worked as a flight attendant for American Eagle Airlines. I am my father’s daughter and sought adventure. It was an easy way to travel and see much of the US. I got to visit the south and hear those accents I had come to fall in love with when I was in the Army. One of the pilots, upon learning I was Puerto Rican, told me Puerto Ricans didn’t bathe, and each morning when I boarded the plane he asked me if I had showered. The next time I learned I was going to fly with that same pilot I quit.
My father was right. Things got worse before they got better.
While I was training for the Chicago Marathon one summer, a car slowed alongside me and a white guy leaned out of the driver side passenger window and shouted “Nice tits you fucking spic,” and he spat at me.
I finished my undergraduate without any friends. As people stood around hugging their fellow classmates, trading flowers and cards at graduation I stood off to the side, alone, listening as they noticed my gold tassel and loudly whispered, “She’s graduating with honors?”
After the ceremony, my mother pulled me into a tight embrace. I was the first in our family to graduate from college, and we sobbed right there in a crowd of people, many of whom had terrorized me over the years. Through the tears, I thought I saw its reflection in a mylar balloon. That billowing costume, that wicked, wild grin. Those wide-open eyes—black, and its horns. The vejigante had come to celebrate with me.
In my room that night, I noticed a small, worn wooden statue on my dresser.
“It was your grandfather’s,” my father told me. “It’s Saint James.” Finally, I had received my patron saint.
I asked why Saint James.
“It’s said that Saint James aided once in defeating his enemies by dressing up his troops as vejigantes. He’s a symbol of our culture and resilience. He is a symbol of the fight between good and evil in Puerto Rico. You have overcome a lot to get here. Things will never be easy, but you will overcome them. If our ancestors could endure what they did, you will do the same, endure.”
Graduate school went a bit smoother, but still, even the person who you think is progressive is often the person to be the most shocked to see you sitting in the classroom. Most of my college career I have been the only Puerto Rican sitting in class. Most of my life, I have been the only Puerto Rican sitting in that room, boardroom, boarding that plane to another city, state, country seeking what my father sought all of his life—aventura.
Looking back on it now, all I can think is that I wasn’t supposed to be there. I was not supposed to be in college. I was not supposed to be working as a flight attendant. I was not supposed to be in graduate school, with two degrees and a PhD. Like my father, decades before, to them I was supposed to be just a Puerto Rican washing dishes and working in a factory.
I thought we had progressed. I thought we had moved beyond all of the hate. We had Sonia Sotomayor serving as a United States Supreme Court Judge, after all. JLO, Marc Anthony, Ricky Martin, Lin Manuel Miranda, Benicio del Toro, Rita Moreno, Bruno Mars, Rosario Dawson—all famous Puerto Ricans. They had seen us. They knew us. So, I assumed things had changed.
When Hurricane Maria hit, all of those words struck again. They sliced.
I know about Puerto Rican girls.
Do you have papers?
Nice tits, you fucking spic.
Did you take a bath?
When you’re hundreds of thousands of miles away and your family is being engulfed by a hurricane and there’s nothing that you can do, you sit there in shock, a penetrating sting. Days after Maria hit, I remember sitting in my living room, speaking with strangers through a walkie-talkie app, begging for any information on Adjuntas or San Sebastian. Tired of the silence, Coco found a flight and made it to the island with cases of supplies, many of which were stolen after he landed. He managed to make it past toppled trees, flooded roads, and through the decimation to my grandmother’s house in Adjuntas. We learned that my cousin Papo had taken on the grisly task of chauffeuring bodies from town into San Juan because Adjuntas did not have a working refrigeration system in its morgue. A trip that once took two hours became a day long, overnight trek. People did what they could to survive.
I finally got in touch with my cousins, those cousins my mother had felt so sorry for after they left the US years before. They sent us pictures of themselves with their post-hurricane stash, Tostitos tortilla chips, canned cheese, and canned sausages. They sent us videos of them singing in the night, serenading the spirit of Borinquen. They were tired. They needed clean running water, but through all of that suffering they still smiled. They still laughed. They were successful.
They endured.
When things stabilized on the island, my father said it was time for him to return. It had been years since he visited. Perhaps before I had even started kindergarten. I worried about that trip, because I was worried about how the devastation on the island would affect him. Thousands had died. The infrastructure was still damaged in parts of the island, and while Puerto Ricans were getting th
eir life back together, they were pained by the slow response, and lack of attention to their suffering. They were Americans, after all, so why were their American brothers and sisters delaying aide? It was difficult enough to watch the tragedy unfold on television, but to be there, with the pain so raw? I did not know how we could process it, but my father insisted, it was time for him to go home.
I purchased a plane ticket and rented a car. With the roads somewhat cleared, the drive from San Juan to Adjuntas took us a little over the estimated two hours. During the drive, my father told me all he knew about his family, that his grandfather had come from Spain, but he could not remember from where. He did remember that his grandfather’s surname was Mendoza, as well. He said my mother’s family was as difficult to trace back, but that her grandfather had come from the Canary Islands. Their surname was Nieves—the same group of immigrants who had given the town of San Sebastian its patron saint.
I would later learn that Nieves translates into snows and Mendoza means cold mountain. Snows and cold mountain. It’s brilliant that my parents found each other, two people from a warm island who settled in a cold city, whose names were both related to the cold.
On the drive, my father started talking to me about jíbaros, people from the mountains where he was from. He told me about their way of life, waking up early morning, putting on their güayabera shirt and pava hat, and reaching for their machete. They spent hours each morning clearing brush from around their mountain home and cultivating coffee beans and sugar cane.
As the car wound up the mountain I noticed a mist settling over the trees tops. We climbed up the Ruta Panorámica, and my father told me about when he was a boy, and the first time he had ever seen an automobile. It was a Model T Ford and had to be cranked by hand. He said a white man came out of his car and offered my father and his friends money if they would help him start his car. My dad remembered clearly how the man looked that day, with his clean, pressed clothes, and how he thanked them all for their help. He then told me how once on the mainland he stopped in a diner for a cup of coffee. When the waitress noticed he didn’t speak English, she told him to hurry up and finish his drink and get out, unless he wanted trouble.
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