A personal reflection on identity, culture, and belonging.
Naci en Ponce but I was raised in the United States. My parents migrated in 1981 to Newark NJ, when by twin brothers were no more than two weeks old. I was just a few months into my first year of life. Still wearing pampers. Still sucking my thumb.
Hay trabajó alla
I can hear the conversations being held in my mother’s voice when titi told me why we left in the first place. And how no one wanted la niña to leave. They begged and pleaded with my mother to leave me there. To take the boys. To come back and get me if things worked out they way they intended.
I’m now in my mid 40’s and so much has transpired since stepping off the plan into Newark Airport. Some say don’t look back. But how can you live in the diaspora and not want to touch your roots?
Bad Bunny’s latest album ignited un fuego in the entire Puerto Rican race. In his song Lo Que Pasò a Hawaii- he said:
Quieren quitarme el riò y Tambièn la playa
Quieren al barrio mìo y que Abuelita se vaya
No, no suelte la banderia ni olvide el lelolai
Que no quiero que hagan contigo lo que pasò a Hawaii
I was just as impacted as social media was. El corazón llamnado abuelita wanting to salvage our oral history no matter how damaging it could be to my mental health. I’ve got to document the individual history pushed into existence by the political climate.
Last summer I spent a year in the campos with my maternal grandmother and an aunt. I just recorded Delores Torres her living her day to day. She’s 80 years old now. She’s got a lot to say and even though she may talk too much, I just listened. That’s history. Living, talking history.
8 decades of PR history she’s lived through.
Bad Bunny{s album pushed me to open the shared drive with the videos of abuela talking. The jewels I captured.
I am a Puerto Rican living in the diaspora with a foot deep in the island and one in the states. Both was not a personal choice. However, how this story ends is my choice.
I welcome you to join me in looking through the diaspora lens of how my identity, my culture and how I define where I belong. Here, I will provide personal snippets of that migration journey, the visits back, the education I sought, the island practice I try to maintain, and the music that helped raise me.
