Bird of Paradise

by Raquel Cepeda

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  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Preface

  Part I

  CHAPTER 1: Love, American-Style

  CHAPTER 2: Mean Streets

  CHAPTER 3: Journey into the Heart of Darkness

  CHAPTER 4: Uptown ’81

  CHAPTER 5: An Awakening

  CHAPTER 6: Jesus Christ and the Freakazoid

  CHAPTER 7: Ave Maria, Morena

  CHAPTER 8: God Bodies and Indios

  CHAPTER 9: There’s No Other Place . . .

  CHAPTER 10: Whitewash

  Part II

  CHAPTER 11: Truth, Reconciliation, and Time Machines

  CHAPTER 12: Things Come Together

  CHAPTER 13: Tripping in Morocco

  CHAPTER 14: Running the Fukú Down

  CHAPTER 15: Flash of the Spirit

  CHAPTER 16: She Who Walks Behind Me

  CHAPTER 17: Paradise Gone

  CHAPTER 18: Becoming Latina

  Postscript

  Acknowledgments

  Ancestral DNA Testing: Now It’s Your Turn

  Frequently Asked Questions

  DNA Test Kit Instructions

  Selected Sources and Further Reading

  About Raquel Cepeda

  Index

  Family Tree DNA Discount Coupon

  Because of Djali and Marceau . . .

  For my little sisters at Life is Precious: you are loved.

  Always in your stomach and skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different. . . . Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?

  —GEORGE ORWELL, 1984

  As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day.

  —MARGARET ATWOOD, THE HANDMAID’S TALE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The events in this book are all true. My word is bond. The story of the car wreck that was my parents’ relationship was constructed by interviewing the two of them and other family members. The story about the Indian couple in Chapter 1 was one of the few incidents that both of my parents recounted with no bias or variation. Some of the sequences have been rearranged, and in most cases, I changed the names and certain identifying details to protect the innocent and the guilty. Doña Amparo is a composite of a few elderly women in the ’hood.

  On another note, I capitalized the word “Black”—as I would, say, African-American—throughout the book. I believe that “Black” is used interchangeably, like “Hispanic” and “Latino/a” are, as an identifier for a larger ethnic group bound by their shared transatlantic experience with slavery. I don’t think the same is true when it comes to whiteness. I also use the term Native and Indigenous American interchangeably, preferring the latter but using the former sometimes so as not to confuse readers.

  Last, I prefer to use “Latino” and “Latina” over “Hispanic,” although I don’t find the latter offensive. I personally identify as a Latina when I’m in the company of other Americans, a Dominican-American when I’m in the Dominican Republic or here, in the company of other folks whose parentage hails from Latin America. And sometimes I identify as a pura dominicana when I’m in my ’hood.

  PREFACE

  Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.

  —LEWIS CARROLL, ALICE IN WONDERLAND

  AS I WRITE THIS, MY THREE-MONTH-OLD SON IS STARING AT ME intensely from his bouncy seat. He’s cooing loudly, like he’s trying to tell me something important, something he’ll forget by the time he utters his first word. Marceau has been here before. Of this, I am sure.

  The left half of our brains, programmed to think that seeing is believing, would dismiss this kind of thinking as esoteric new age bullshit. However, there’s the other half that can’t dismiss the idea that there just might be something to it. Many of us have recognized old souls in babies and children. We’ve felt the presence of some force, be it a spiritual guide or God, intervening in our lives at some point. When I look over at my son in his bouncer, I’m reminded of what a rabbi in Brooklyn, a seer in Fez, and a santero in Queens told me with slight variation when I was writing this book. We travel with the same clan over and over again, from one life into the next, until some ultimate purpose is fulfilled and we no longer need to return. When we illuminate the road back to our ancestors, they have a way of reaching out, of manifesting themselves . . . sometimes even physically.

  Last year I embarked on an archaeological dig of sorts, using the science of ancestral DNA testing to excavate as many parts of my genetic history as I could in the span of twelve months. The DNA kits I collected were processed by Family Tree DNA, a Houston-based commercial genetic genealogy company. The company’s founder and CEO, Bennett Greenspan, provided further analysis. I tested myself, my father, a paternal great-uncle I hadn’t met until the beginning of my project, and a maternal cousin I found on Facebook. I wanted to learn as much as I could about my ancestors’ origins before we became Latino.

  I’ve always been intrigued by the concept of race, especially in my own community and immediate family, where it’s been a source of contention for as long as I can remember. The United States has the second highest Latino population in the world, second only to Mexico. And still, the media—they lump us all together into one generic clod—doesn’t get us, either. Are Latino-Americans white? Black? Other? Illegal aliens from Mars? Or are we the very face of America?

  Some see Latinos as the embodiment of this young country’s cultural melting pot. And though Mexicans have been residing here since before the arrival of the first Europeans, many of our fellow Americans view Latinos as public enemies. What our parents see isn’t necessarily what we first- and second-generation American-born Latinos see when looking at ourselves in the mirror. According to the 2010 census, over half of all Latinos here identified as being solely white, and about a third checked “Some Other Race.” I was one of the three million, or 6 percent, who reported being of multiple races. I guess it all depends on whom you ask and when you ask. Race, I’ve learned, is in the eye of the beholder.

  I don’t look all the way white or all the way Black; I look like someone who’s a bit of both and then some—an Other. In Europe, people have mistaken me for Andalusian, Turkish, Brazilian, and North African. In North and West Africa, I’ve been asked if I’m of Arabic or Amazigh descent. In New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, it varies: Israeli or Sephardic, Palestinian, Moroccan, biracial Black and white American, Brazilian, and so on. I’ve been mistaken for being everything except what I am: Dominican. My own racial ambiguity has been a topic of conversation since I was a teenager. Blending in has filled the pages in my book of life with misadventures and the kind of culturally enriching experiences that make me feel, truly, like a world citizen.

  In more recent times, I found the idea that we live in a so-called post-racial society downright fascinating. I suspect someone at the White House or Disney created that catchphrase after the election of President Barack Obama, to fool us into thinking we’re now living in a parallel universe where race is suddenly a nonfactor. The term “post-raci
al” is an epic failure. More than four years after the fact, our first Black president’s skin tone is still getting people punch-drunk with hate. It has fueled the dramatic rise in hate groups and the revival of the so-called Patriot movement. Sure, our sucky-ass economy factors in to the foaming-at-the-mouth vitriol against President Obama, but there’s something else contributing to the mainstream’s arrogant contempt for him. As intangible and trivial as our differences are, we cannot pretend that race doesn’t matter anymore.

  The exploration of and how we choose to identify ourselves is something else that compelled me to set upon this journey. Our identities are as fluid as our personal experiences are diverse. How I arrived at my own is one of 50.5 million possibilities. While Latino-Americans share enough cultural traditions to relate with one another and whatnot, we are also crazy different. One size doesn’t fit all. That’s why Part I of this book is a memoir. I grew up in a household where I was discouraged from celebrating, much less expressing, the Dominican half of my hyphenated identity. I was, quite frankly, sweated hard to mask it. In the first part of the book, I detail how I resisted the pressure to bend and how I constructed my own identity. My parents’ Dominican roots, my father’s apparent low self-esteem and hatred, ’80s hip-hop culture, and growing up in my beloved New York City are all significant.

  * * *

  The results of our ancestral DNA tests are outlined in Part II.

  Both of my parents were born close to the site of the first European settlement in the Americas, Santo Domingo, on the island of Hispaniola. The Indigenous people we now refer to as Taínos—they stumbled upon and were subsequently duped by Columbus and his crew—originally inhabited the island. Our eastern part of the island is also the wellspring of blackness in the New World (and the site of the first slave rebellion on record). Modern-day Dominican Republic is also where English pirates, Europeans, crypto-Jews and Muslims, Arabs, Asians, our Haitian counterparts, and people from all over the world contributed to the cultural and racial tapestry of her people. With this in mind, I had absolutely no idea what I would find in my own DNA.

  I’ll share one of the results here. What I didn’t expect to find, other than in spirit, was a direct link to the Indigenous peoples of the island. I’ve been taught over the years that the Spanish, through disease and genocide via slavery, killed off virtually all Taíno people throughout the Caribbean; they basically do not exist and are figments of our self-loathing imagination. When I saw an episode in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s series Black in Latin America focusing on the Dominican Republic and Haiti, I heard it again.

  The documentary opened with Gates mistakenly calling a Cuban guaguancó a Dominican merengue (the mistake was later corrected). While I tried not to see that musical snafu as an omen of things to come, I couldn’t help but brace myself. I was certain that Gates, a man who’s become famous for connecting celebrities with their ancestral past, would shed some light on the complexities of identity and race in the Dominican Republic. I thought he would wax poetic on how racially diverse we are and how, thanks to ancestral DNA studies being done on the island, we are finding that significant numbers of people carry indigenous mitochondrial DNA. Indios have, alas, found ways to survive, like everything else on the island—in fragments.

  As Gates strolled down Calle Conde with an employee from the Ministry of Culture named Juan Rodriguez, he asked the man how he’d be identified or racially categorized on the island. Rodriguez, a dark-caramel-complected man, replied, “indio.” Rodriguez went on to state that by the nineteenth century, there were no more Indigenous people left on the island like there were in South America, so Dominicans used the term to negate their blackness. Yeah, I know many dominicanos and other Latinos who deny their blackness, but the conversation could have been pushed further by exploring the reasons why, adding to the complex narrative about race and identity in our community. It would have been less archaic. A conversation with younger Dominicans and transnational Dominican-Americans about how and why these ideals are shifting would have been less archaic. That cipher never went down.

  At the time of this writing, the Dominican government has passed a bill called the Dominican Republic Electoral Law Reform, eradicating the term indio on its citizens’ ID cards. The categories mulatto, black, and white will be the only ones people will have to choose from. I find it troubling that if I wish to officially recognize the Indigenous fragment of myself, it won’t be legal. Foisting an identity on people rather than allowing them the freedom and space to create their own is shady.

  * * *

  Henry Miller, in his book Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, wrote: “One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.” This journey—as the most unforgettable ones often do—led me to places I hadn’t expected to go. The skeleton of this book is my exploration of the concept of race, identity, and ancestral DNA among Latinos, using my own story as one example. Race and identity have been a source of bitterness between my father and me since before I can remember. How I arrived at some sort of understanding and peace with Dad, something that never would have happened had I not invited him to take this trip with me, is the proverbial meat on the bones. I look over at Marceau, thankful that this illuminating ride has stopped here, in a place where logos and mythos exist in tandem, guiding me from one place to another with purpose.

  PART I

  CHAPTER ONE

  Love, American-Style

  Every wo/man is the architect of her own fortune.

  —APPIUS CLAUDIUS CAECUS, REMIXED

  MY STORY BEGINS BEFORE I WAS BORN, SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN my parents’ memories of when they met and how, with the quickness, they fell in and out of love.

  * * *

  Rocío stares out a window of the new apartment she shares with her husband, Eduardo, in Washington Heights. Looking to her right, she can see that the slabs of concrete lining Broadway are littered with trees in full bloom. On her left, a groundswell of people moving about in tribes of four and five women, with as many children, are bustling toward 181st Street, the shopping district for folks who rarely leave the relative comfort of their neighborhood.

  “Everybody’s always in a rush in this city,” Rocío says to her husband. “People rarely make eye contact with each other here, like my vecinos did back home in Santo Domingo.”

  Eduardo shrugs, only half listening.

  Everything here is foreign to Rocío. The streets are dirty, and the trains are full of jodedores who look you up and down like they’re planning to stick your ass up or worse. But here, lounging across from her papi chulo, the teenager feels impervious to the dangers lurking in the strange new city. She is full of hope, with me growing in her impossibly large belly.

  Rocío looks over at her bonbón, Eduardo, sitting cross-legged on the couch, reading a newspaper. She spends most of her days thinking of their kismet meeting back home, how it all happened so fast. Reliving the fairy tale helps Rocío get through the hours she spends cleaning other people’s apartments and working at the fábrica. Today she wouldn’t recognize her life back in the Dominican Republic if it played before her on a screen.

  It was all Paloma’s fault, the meeting. Although she was less than a year younger than Rocío, the two sisters were nothing alike. Paloma was the wild child to Rocío’s santa in training. A crazy-popular teenager in their barrio of Paraíso and at the local country club, Paloma was more interested in being the neighborhood census taker—she made it her business to know everybody, and everybody knew her—than a good or even fair student. Sometimes opposites attract, or so they say, but Paloma and Rocío were like arroz and mangú: they didn’t really mix well.

  Mother Nature had been much kinder to Paloma than to Rocío. Paloma developed into a bottom-heavy human hourglass with golden skin like fried ripe maduros, skipping that awkward phase that vexed most of her peers, aside from being bucktoothed, which was sort of sexy in a weird way. Her laugh was a contagious roar erupting deep from withi
n like lava, complementing the girl’s joie de vivre. What Paloma did have in common with her older sister and their baby brother, Antonio, were those amazing eyes. When any of them grinned or laughed, their eyes moored into a slant that evoked an alleged maternal ancestor who made the impossible trip to the island from a place called Indochina, di’que.

  Right before she met Eduardo, Rocío had been slowly recovering from an onset of acne that left faint scars in its wake. Her hair was un poco duro, but lusciously thick, like Paloma’s culo, another gift bestowed upon her by Mother Nature, which came with a perfect set of tetas. A spitting image of her father and hero, the esteemed and dapper Don Manuel Mancebo, Rocío was much prettier in person than in photos. Don Manuel had an unforgettable and unusual face, with a complexion that made one crave a taza of café con leche with a little extra milk. His rather coarse hair was shellacked with pomade into a style that never moved. Ever. They say his father’s half-Haitian mother, apellido Durán, was the ancestor who made her mark on his head. Don Manuel didn’t look like too many other Dominicans lighter or darker than he. And neither did Rocío.

  Rocío’s gift was the left side of her brain. She started reading Socrates by the time she was twelve. Later, Rocío got into Jean-Paul Sartre and decided she wanted to be a poet or a nun and retreat into a life of solitude and reflection. Rather than hanging out with the girls from her school or going to Club Paraíso with Paloma and Antonio on the weekends, she chose to spend hours in her bedroom alone. When Rocío did go out, she preferred the company of her elders, particularly her mentor, the recently published psychiatrist Dr. Antonio Zaglul, for whom she worked part time as an administrative assistant.

  Unlike Paloma and Antonio, Rocío rarely got in trouble with her parents, but her peculiar antisocial behavior did cause them to freak out on occasion. As punishment for refusing to act like a normal girl her age, Rocío was regularly banned from her room and forced to tag along with her siblings to the neighborhood country club. This was torture for Rocío, who hated pools and having fun.