After the Hurricane(111)
Puerto Ricans do not have good immigration stories because Puerto Ricans are not immigrants, we are migrants, and have been for over a century. It is an unfortunate fact that means our narrative is different than anyone else’s and people do so hate being different. Luckily, many Puerto Ricans were also desperately deeply dirt poor, thank goodness, so that part of the Latinx narrative is right where it should be, but the rest, the easy plane ride instead of a desperate run for the border, really confuses people and loses us street cred.
To be born in Puerto Rico is to be born in the United States, and this has been true for over a century except that most people don’t know. So what does it mean to be Puerto Rican? What does that say about your makeup, your background, really? What stains of humanity have made their way into the mix? Pick a flavor. Spanish, yes, but what kind, even, old monarchists or immigrants from Mexico or people fleeing Santo Domingo or giving up on Cuba, moving from here to there as the 19th century becomes the twentieth, as you, a merchant, a tradesman, a con artist, follow the money from place to place. French, British, Dutch? Yes, yes to all, and perhaps even mixed with someone else, an African slave whose own country of origin is lost to history. Or maybe not mixed, the island was a haven for many slaves fleeing other islands they had been brought to by force, or had been born on as life-long prisoners. Or maybe not mixed because you became a part of the thin crust of de facto aristocrats and attended lavish balls in the white house where the captain-general governs the island on the birthdays of your distant monarchs.
Others? Of course, this is a brave new world that has such people in it. Irish and Scottish immigrants, redleg Protestants leaking off the British islands, bored of plantation condescension. German and Italian men, in droves, leaving a conflicted Europe for a conflicted Caribbean. Then, mixes of all of the above, blending together, traveling themselves, the wealthy ones, of course, abroad, to become educated, to become radicalized, to marry foreigners and bring them home with them, blending in again, and again, and again, until the genetic makeup of the island is a smoothie, a blended soup, everything swirling together, each flavor blurring into the next.
Many of these colorful Puerto Rican people would come to New York City, the elite trickling in in the 1800’s, a new onslaught after 1917, and the deluge, the great migration, a preponderance of Puerto Ricans, came in the 1950’s. They took over neighborhoods, renaming them, titling the Lower East Side Loisaida, stepping into the run of laborers that previous generations of immigrants were just stepping out of, custodians, garment workers, maids, elevator operators, cleaners. The name they would give themselves, Nuyoricans, began as a taunt, a way for island natives and first generation New York dwellers to shame their assimilated relatives and friends, isn’t that cute? You are not a part of our island, anymore, but this one, more loyal to your new land than your old. You are other here, and other there.
This would only layer onto itself over and over again, as the push-pull of identity encountered time. From a generation that started organizations to teach their elders and their disadvantaged English, to a generation struggling to teach its children Spanish. From fighting for equality, activism, community, on the mainland, to fighting to rid the island of corruption, violence, brain drain, economic depression.
Every immigrant’s child has known the in between state of being, the futile hours and days and years and lives spent chasing enough; become enough, they tell you, and you will be something, at last; stay not-enough and what will you be? Pastel, and secondary, never bold and true, never primary colors. The multiplicity of in-betweenness is infinite, a line whose limit does not exist.
It is this entry that drives her to do the thing she knows she should have done from the beginning, and she sends her cousin a message on Instagram, asking to meet up, telling her what her words have meant to her, how they have said the things that Elena has often felt, or didn’t know she felt. Elena sends her the photos of her trip, and tells Jessenia what she has done, leaving out the most painful parts, and when the response comes from her cousin, a girl she met once as a child, it is effusive and welcoming and so warm Elena could cry. Jessenia is traveling right now, with her boyfriend in Eastern Europe, of all places, learning about Jews, according to her message, which makes Elena smile. She has promised that when she returns to the island next they will meet, and talk, and she will tell Elena everything she knows, because they are cousins, they are family, and they have to share their stories so they don’t die. Elena couldn’t agree more.
She prints the photos at a Walgreens, and finds an album that is empty in her father’s everlasting clutter, and she makes her own album, like she decided to do. She puts them all in the living room, where they should be, the photos that piece together her family’s past. And its present.
She thinks again about going back to school. She looks for programs that are strong in Latin American history, Caribbean history, she reaches out to old professors, asking for advice. She buys new sheets, after finding holes in every single set that her father had in the house, some splitting the linens almost in two. She rips the old ones up and uses them as rags. She takes her time, she has nothing but time now. She fixes the kitchen, then the living room, and on the final day of her cleaning, she restores the second-story bedroom, hers now, to a livable space. She makes the bed with the lovely new sheets, and takes a shower, rubbing herself dry with a new towel, and then, finally, spent and done, she collapses on the bed, sleeping a dreamless sleep.