My Beloved World Part 15

I had studied American, European, Soviet, and Chinese history and politics, but I knew next to nothing about the history of my own people. Every people has a past, but the dignity of a history comes when a community of scholars devotes itself to chronicling and studying that past. In the course offerings in Latin American history and politics, however, Puerto Rico was barely mentioned. Fortunately, it was possible for students to initiate courses. Years before, I discovered, a Princeton student had put together a course on Puerto Rican history, and now, under the guidance of Professor Winn, I set out to revive it, bringing the syllabus up to date and recruiting the necessary quorum of students. I didn't make it easy on those who might be interested: my reading list was ambitious, to say the least.

The history that emerged from our reading was not a happy one. Under Spain, Puerto Rico suffered colonial neglect and the burden of policies designed to enrich distant parties at heavy cost to the island. Little effort was made to develop the natural resources or agriculture beyond what was needed to provision and mount the conquistadores on their way to Mexico and South America. Poor governance was compounded by bad luck-hurricanes and epidemics-as well as state-sponsored piracy by the British, French, and Dutch. For the Spanish settlers, as for the enslaved indigenous tribes and those from elsewhere in the Caribbean who took refuge on the island, it was a precarious existence that would not begin to improve until well into the nineteenth century. There was negligible civic life and minimal economic activity beyond smuggling. Any liberties the Spanish crown granted were often quickly revoked.

When Spain ceded Puerto Rico to the United States in 1898, along with Cuba and the Philippines as the spoils of the Spanish-American War, Puerto Ricans held an optimistic faith in American ideals of liberty, democracy, and justice. But that optimism would yield to a sense of betrayal for many. Governed without representation, exploited economically, some islanders came to feel they had merely exchanged one colonial master for another.

It was clear that the idea of Puerto Rico as the "rich port" was never anything but a fantasy. The island had always been poor. At the same time, it was tied to an old culture and several continents. One didn't have to romanticize the past or succ.u.mb to mythology to appreciate its thread in the fabric of history.

One of the books on our reading list to make a profound impression on me was Oscar Lewis's La Vida. It was a contentious inclusion, an anthropological study of one family that stretched from the slums of San Juan to those of New York. Many Puerto Ricans have been offended by its airing of dirty laundry: the granular view of prost.i.tution and a culture that seems preoccupied with s.e.x. But there was much else going on in the lives Lewis described and in his argument about how the culture of poverty persists by virtue of being adaptive, a set of strategies to cope with difficult circ.u.mstances. I couldn't deny that the book triggered powerful moments of recognition, often painful but nonetheless fascinating, as I saw my own family reflected in its pages. I was beginning to understand my family lore in a cultural framework, to spot sociological patterns in what had seemed mere idiosyncrasies, and dark ones at that.

What La Vida was lacking, I realized, was an appreciation of the good, the richness of our culture, however long overshadowed by poverty. There are strengths in our collective psyche that account for our resilience and that equally hold the potential for our renewal, if properly nourished and cultivated. I could see it in my own mother's reverence for education, her faith in community, her infinite capacity for hard work and perseverance; in Abuelita's joyful generosity, her pa.s.sion for life and poetry, her power to heal. Such strong women are no rarity in our culture. I could see resilient strength, too, in the way that Spiritism and the Catholic faith have accommodated each other rather than clashing.

THE CLa.s.sROOM DISCUSSIONS were heated and often loud. We hadn't resisted our colonial masters in any meaningful way, some would claim. Others responded: El Grito de Lares had rallied rebels against Spain. And in the 1950s members of the militant Puerto Rico Nationalist movement, who pursued armed revolution against the United States, went as far as an attempt on the life of President Truman and a deadly shoot-out in the U.S. Congress. And yet others retorted: These moments of resistance were fleeting and never led to the kind of sustained struggle that had won independence for Cuba or the Philippines. If ident.i.ty arises from struggle, and trauma spurs growth and change, did not the frailty of our opposition threaten to define us historically? Cuba's revolution, like the wars of independence fought in the Philippines, had forged those national ident.i.ties in a crucible of violence. Many in the cla.s.s would ask what it was in our character that had led us to a more peaceable accommodation with colonial power.

Again and again, the conversation returned to the island's political status. Did we want to remain a commonwealth, with some self-rule and a preferential trade relationship with the mainland? Half the cla.s.s believed that was no better than being a colony of the United States, living as second-cla.s.s citizens. But if we should aspire to statehood, the full rights of citizenship would come at the price of the full obligations, including a tax burden that, arguably, might have crippled our economy at the time. Some proposed, with pa.s.sionate conviction, that full independence was the only way to preserve our culture and the proper dignity of self-determination. The economic repercussions of each position were as inscrutably complex as they were critical to the arguments. And for those who are eager to discern my own present views on the status question, I can only advise not to give too much weight to whatever ideas vied for prominence in a young student's mind.

WHEN MY MOTHER made good on our wager of a plane ticket and I found myself in Puerto Rico for two weeks, I had my first chance to view the island through adult eyes and with an evolving new consciousness of my ident.i.ty. Some things hadn't changed since childhood visits. We still made the ritual stop for a coconut on the road from the airport, but now the vendor would add a bit of rum to my libation from a bottle he kept out of sight. I still began the trip with a round of visits to every family member in order of seniority, still feasted on mangoes fresh off the tree. But instead of playing the Three Stooges, my cousins and I enjoyed dominoes, dancing, and the ubiquitous bottle of rum. The kindness of strangers was still striking: a flat tire fixed, cups of coffee offered while we waited.

Much of what I saw was familiar but now made more sense. The poverty doc.u.mented in La Vida was visible to me now in the slums of San Juan. Compared with my family in New York, my family in Puerto Rico was modestly prosperous; they had shielded me as a child from realities that I could now reckon with, though certain aspects of the island's social stratification would remain hidden from me until very recently. San Juan also has its gracious homes, its old money, and its high culture.

The stunning natural beauty of the island, which I had barely registered as a child, also made a deep impression on that trip as I played tourist. In the rain forest at El Yunque, waterfalls trick the eye, holding movement suspended in lacy veils. Wet stone gleams, fog tumbles from peaks to valleys, mists filter the forest in pale layers receding into mystery. On the beach at Luquillo, when the sun appears under clouds ma.s.sed offsh.o.r.e and catches the coconut palms at a low angle, the leafy crowns explode like fireworks of silver light. At night there is liquid stardust swirling in the dark waters of the phosph.o.r.escent bay. Almost every evening there are sunsets of white gold where the sky meets the sea.

At Cabo Rojo, a little motorboat came puttering to sh.o.r.e after a long wait and ferried a handful of people across the lagoon to La Isla de los Ratones. There was nothing there-no food stalls, no vendors, no "amenities"-nothing but the skirt of pure white sand and a coral shelf that let you walk chest-deep in crystal translucence for what seemed like miles before the floor dropped into the ocean. I looked down into water so clear that it was invisible, except for the rocks and sand and sea fronds rippling on the floor as at the beginning of a dream sequence in a movie.

As a New Yorker of profoundly urban sensibilities, I was never very attuned to nature. During my first week on campus, a cricket had me tearing the dorm room apart, searching for the source of the chirp until Kevin explained that it lived in the tree outside my window. I've been known to confuse cows for horses. The ocean was always the one grand exception. Even in the chaos of Orchard Beach, the circus of family picnics, crowded surf, and traffic jams, I could find in the rhythm of the waves a transcendent serenity. And anyone who could find peace in the beaches of the Bronx would find heaven in Puerto Rico.

Another revelation of my adult trips to the island was how much the political questions broached in my course, especially about the island's status, infused everyday life. You'd see party symbols everywhere, the straw hat for the faction supporting commonwealth, the palm tree for those supporting statehood, the green flag with the white cross for those who favored independence. Everyone pored over the newspapers, dissected the candidates' positions on economic development, education, health care, corruption ... During one election season, in the plaza of Mayaguez-and in many other towns too, I'm sure-traffic jams proliferated as cars honking horns and flying one party's flags refused to give way to other cars honking horns and flying the other party's flags. It was chaos, but at least people cared. I learned that 85 percent of the island's population had gone to the polls in recent elections.

This manic enthusiasm that gripped the island in election years, and still does, was a marked contrast to the political despondency felt by Puerto Ricans on the mainland in those years. The summer that I won the bet with my mother, I worked as usual in the business office at Prospect Hospital before going to Puerto Rico. For a couple of weeks, however, Dr. Freedman, as part of his community outreach efforts, lent me out as an intern to Herman Badillo's ultimately unsuccessful campaign for mayor of New York City. Badillo was our congressman, the first Puerto Rican ever elected to the House of Representatives. It was then I first saw how difficult it was to energize a community that felt marginal and voiceless in the larger discourse of a democracy.

Puerto Ricans in New York then felt their votes didn't count. And so why should they take the trouble even to register? Having experienced discrimination intimately, they knew they were seen as second-cla.s.s citizens, as people who didn't belong, with no path to success in mainland society. Their chances of escaping from the undercla.s.s, from the vicious cycle of poverty, were no better than those of their similarly alienated black neighbors and probably worse for those who didn't speak English.

Puerto Ricans on the island, by contrast, didn't have full consciousness of being a minority because they'd never had to live as one. There were inequalities in their world, but no one's dignity suffered merely on account of his being Puerto Rican. Whether content with commonwealth status or aspiring to statehood, or even independence, they took it for granted that they were fully American: American citizens born to American parents on American territory. To be mistaken for foreigners-aliens, legal or otherwise-would have been a shock.

It was dawning on me that if the Puerto Rican community in New York ever hoped to escape poverty and recover its self-respect, there were lessons to be learned from the island. The two communities-islanders and those on the mainland-needed to work together for their mutual benefit.

FOR THE FINAL PAPER in the Puerto Rican history course, Peter Winn suggested a marvelous project, a family oral history. It was a challenge befitting any serious student of history: going mano a mano with primary sources, my ca.s.sette recorder planted on the kitchen table. Not everyone warmed to it: "You're wasting your time! Nothing interesting ever happened to me." For some, it was a grudging surrender to interrogation, slow and halting; others, the natural storytellers, proved surprisingly eager and voluble.

I was amazed by how many of these stories I'd never heard before. People had left their past behind when they came to New York. Memories of hardship and extreme poverty were of no use starting a new life on the mainland. With so much to deal with in the present, who had the luxury of dwelling on the past? My mother had told me very little about her childhood. Now it unfolded, hesitantly at first-her mother's death, her orphan loneliness-and then, with more confidence, she recounted joining the army, coming to New York, falling into a new family at Abuelita's. She said very little about my father. Those stories, as I've said, came out only recently.

The experience of hearing my Princeton reading echoed in family recollections had the effect of both making the history more vivid and endowing life as lived with the dignity of something worth studying. When, for instance, I had read that "a woman who takes ten hours to finish two dozen handkerchiefs earns 24 cents for them," I could picture t.i.ti Aurora holding the needle, my mother leaning over the iron. Nor were these lives lived beyond a broader scheme of historical cause and effect. It was America's wars that would transform us into real Americans, not only by reason of my mother's decision to enlist, but even earlier, with the granting of American citizenship to Puerto Ricans in 1917-after two decades of limbo-just in time for Abuelita's first husband, my grandfather, to be drafted into World War I with a wave of young Puerto Rican men. After the war, that same grandfather rolled tobacco in a factory in Manati, listening all day as a reader read from novels and newspaper stories to keep the rollers entertained. From my reading I knew that a tobacco factory worker made between forty cents and a dollar a day and that tuberculosis, from which my grandfather died, was the most common cause of death on the island, and particularly lethal to those who worked long hours in air heavy with tobacco dust.

Everyone agrees what a shame it is to have lost the chance to gather the stories of Abuelita's mother. Bisabuela's memories of Manati, the town where Abuelita grew up, vividly recalled Puerto Rico when the island still belonged to Spain. Still older stories survive in hand-me-down recollection beyond any living soul's direct experience: The Sotomayors, I heard, might be descendants of Puerto Rican pioneers. On my mother's side, once upon a time, there had been property too. I heard rumors of family ties to the Spanish n.o.bility. Somehow there was a reversal of fortune. Was it a gambling debt that had cost them the farm? Disinheritance? The tatters of old stories are tangled, weathered, muted by long-held silences that succeeded loud feuds, and sometimes no doubt re-dyed a more flattering color.

My family's shifting fortunes followed the island's economic currents: coffee plantations sold off piecemeal until yesterday's landowners took to laboring in cane fields that belonged to someone else. Child labor and illiteracy were normal; girls were married at thirteen or fourteen. We moved from mountainside farms to small towns like San German, Lajas, Manati, Arecibo, Barceloneta; and after a time, on to what were then the slums of Santurce in San Juan; from there the mainland beckoned, and we answered, boarding the venerable USAT George S. Simonds, the army transport that carried so many Puerto Ricans to New York, until Pan Am offered the first cheap airfares and we rode la guagua aerea, the aerial bus, between mainland and island. We were not immigrants. We went freely back and forth. We became New Yorkers, but we did not lose our links to the island.

Of all the links, language remains strong, a code of the soul that unlocks for us the music and poetry, the history and literature of Spain and all of Latin America. But it is also a prison. Alfred talked about moving from Puerto Rico to the South Bronx in third grade. His experience was common: no help in the transition, no remedy for his deficiency but to be held back. After that, teachers just shrugged and pa.s.sed him from one grade to the next, indifferent to whether he'd understood a word all year. The sharpest kids would eventually pick up the language on their own and come out only a few years behind. Still, Alfred said, "the white kids were always the most advanced. The black kids were behind them, and the Puerto Ricans were last."

My cousin Miriam was listening in on our recording session, nodding in recognition. At the time, she was studying for a degree in bilingual education at Hunter College, and today she is no less pa.s.sionate about that calling with decades of teaching experience behind her. "I want to become the kind of teacher that I wish I'd had," she told me. She'd had it rough in the public schools, where the teachers knew so little of Latino culture they didn't realize that kids who looked down when scolded were doing so out of respect, as they'd been taught. Their gesture only invited a further scolding: "Look at me when I speak to you!"

I felt my own shiver of recognition too, remembering my early misery as a C student at Blessed Sacrament, in terror of the black-bonneted nuns wielding rulers, a misery that didn't abate until after Papi died and Mami made an effort to speak English at home. It seems obvious now: the child who spends school days in a fog of semi-comprehension has no way to know her problem is not that she is slow-witted. What if my father hadn't died, if I hadn't spent that sad summer reading, if my mother's English had been no better than my aunts'? Would I have made it to Princeton?

Recently, those recordings I made have resurfaced. As I listen to them now, too often I hear my own voice. There I go again, inserting opinions and jumping on the faintest hint of racism in their comments. It was my campus conditioning: I found it unfathomable that people who'd themselves been subject to so much prejudice on the mainland still clung to ideas about color as a gauge of status, as the way to keep score of how many of your ancestors had come from Spain, how many from Africa. I also cringe to hear myself lecturing Ana and Chiqui about how women's roles are culturally constructed and therefore changeable. "Read Margaret Mead!" I yell at them. "In certain tribes in Papua New Guinea, it's completely reversed. What you consider male, the women do. And what women do here, the men do over there."

"That's over there. It's different over here," Chiqui says with finality. She wasn't taking guff from a college know-it-all. It's embarra.s.sing, sad, and amusing, all at the same time. My own biases were exposed every bit as much as those of my informants. In those moments when arguments flared on the tape, the distance I'd traveled at Princeton was revealed, but it could also be erased in a moment when someone pushed my b.u.t.tons. I could be yanked for a time into one world or the other, but mostly now I would be living suspended between the two.

FOR THE TOPIC of my senior thesis I chose Luis Munoz Marin-the island's first governor to be elected rather than appointed by a U.S. president-whose efforts at industrialization brought Puerto Rico into the modern world. I was inspired by his work in marshaling the jibaros, politically marginalized peasants, into a force that could win elections. Some part of me needed to believe that our community could give birth to leaders. I needed a beacon. Of course I knew better than to let such emotion surface in the language and logic of my thesis; that's not what historians do. But it kept me going through the long hours of work, and it counterbalanced the fact that Munoz Marin's story had no happy ending, as initial success generated other economic challenges. How could this have happened? It was hard to imagine a more fruitful area for study.

ONE MORNING, a small headline in the local paper caught my eye. A Hispanic man who spoke no English had been on a flight that was diverted to Newark airport. No one there knew enough Spanish to explain to him where he was or what had happened, and in his frustration and confusion he made a scene. He was taken to Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and held there for days before a Spanish-speaking staff member showed up and helped him reach his family. This, I fumed, is not acceptable.

When I called the hospital and asked some questions, I found that there were a number of long-term patients who spoke no English and had only intermittent access to Spanish-speaking staff. I could imagine nothing crueler than the anguish of mental illness compounded by mundane confusion and being unable to communicate with one's keepers.

The Trenton Psychiatric Hospital was beyond any influence of Accion Puertorriquena. There was no way we could pressure the administrators to hire more Hispanics as we had the university. So I resolved to take a different approach, organizing a volunteer program under which our members spent time at the hospital on a continuous rotation so that there was always someone who could interpret for the patients and intercede with the staff if necessary. We also ran bingo nights and sing-alongs, finding that some very uneasy minds were nonetheless able to dredge their memories for the comfort of old songs their parents had sung. And before heading home for Thanksgiving and Christmas, we threw holiday parties for the patients, recruiting our mothers and aunts to prepare the traditional foods that were too complicated to attempt in dorm kitchens.

The program in Trenton was my first real experience of direct community service, and I was surprised by how satisfying I found the work. Modest as the effort was, I could envision it working on a grand scale-service to millions. But the operations of major philanthropy being then beyond my imagination, government seemed the likely provider. And so it was I began to think that public service was where I was likely to find the greatest professional satisfaction.

UNDER A BANNER reading "Feliz Navidad," we had set out the stacking chairs for the patients, and on the folding tables we'd arranged a bounty of pasteles and arroz con gandules. This was not an audience you could expect to settle down and listen attentively, but when Dolores strummed the strings of her guitar, the harsh fluorescent light seemed somehow to soften. We mustered some Spanish carols, Nuyorican aguinaldos. But it was when she turned to old Mexican favorites that Dolores's voice truly shone as she serenaded those broken souls on a silent winter night in New Jersey:

Dicen que por las noches

no mas se le iba en puro llorar ...*

They say he survived the nights on tears alone, unable to eat ... Dolores sings the Mexican ballad of a lover so bereft that after he dies, his soul, in the form of a dove, continues to visit the cottage of his beloved. Even my heart, as yet untouched by such pa.s.sion, is captured, and I am transfixed as Dolores coos the song of the lonesome dove: cucurrucucu ...

In the audience, an elderly woman is staring into s.p.a.ce, her face as devoid of expression as ever. She is always the unresponsive one, who has not spoken a single word since we've been coming to Trenton. Tonight, even she is tapping her foot gently as Dolores sings.

* They say that all those nights

All he could do was cry ...

(from "Cucurrucucu Paloma," a popular Mexican song)

CHAPTER Eighteen

FELICE SHEA WAS SITTING at my desk, waiting for me to walk over to the commons with her for dinner. She was that very fair-skinned Irish type, blushing at the slightest discomfort, and I had gotten pretty good at reading her reactions. Seeing at this moment a virtual red tide, I asked her what was up.