Capicú

Remarks at Lanterns 2023

A Multicultural Leadership Council Event, Vanderbilt University

But we also have a distinct culture. We mostly speak Spanish, and a very particular Spanish at that. For a sample, listen to any song by Bad Bunny.

Our cuisine is built on inexpensive but tasty food stuffs, meats like pork (pernil), fish like salted cod (bacalaítos), legumes rich in protein like all kinds of beans (gandules, habichuelas colorás), and everything deep fried, please…

Many of us were raised Catholic or Pentecostal. We are either mountain people or beach people. And early Puerto Ricans named their original gods (and I named my two cats), Yukiyú after a mountain, and Juracán after a hurricane.

Being from San Juan, the capital of the Island, I grew up exposed to both American and Puerto Rican culture.

Except for Spanish class, all my classes in school were in English. I played dominoes in Luquillo Beach and backgammon at the Caribe Hilton. I drank Medalla beer and Budweiser in the school parking lot with my buddies. I watched Telenovelas with Braulio Castillo, and James Bond movies. I danced salsa and disco. And I loved Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff.”

So, when I turned eighteen, and travelled to the US to go to college, I thought I was more than ready. I was scared but also excited and eager to try out all that I had learned back home.

Thanks to Affirmative Action, I’m sure, I was accepted to Amherst College in Central Massachusetts. But when I got there, I found that people saw me as an international student.

When I introduced myself, they asked, “where are you from?” I would say, “I’m from Puerto Rico.” And they would invariably answer, “Really, but you don’t look Puerto Rican.”

Because of the prejudice against Puerto Ricans at the time, I didn’t know how to respond. There were only about eight Puerto Ricans in the school. Half of us were from the Island, half were from Bridgeport, CT.

I embraced my new international identity and became friends with students from all over the world, and I soon learned we shared many of the same strange experiences, like switching between different cultures and personas during our journey.

I loved life in the Amherst bubble. Initially, it felt as if I had turned on my TV back home, and had landed on “Fantasy Island,” where I was introduced to the characters I had grown so fond of.

In class, I felt like I was on “The Price is Right,” and I was asked whether I preferred door number one or door number two. And every time my professors called on me, I thought I was chosen by Vanna White to spin the Wheel of Fortune. I loved it. And I took to it like a frog to a pond.

That’s not to say that it wasn’t hard. It was difficult when I got comments on my papers like, “run…do not walk… to the Writing Center,” or like, “you are not Amherst material.”

But I ignored them and pushed forward.

I majored in English and went to graduate school right out of college. I was accepted to only one program at the University of Texas at Austin.

I landed in Austin and took a cab from the airport to a motel under Interstate 35, unpacked my bags in the small dingy room, put on my pjs, and looked out the window.

There, towering under the interstate was a huge red neon sign for the Austin Motel. It was shaped like a standing male sexual organ. It had a big cowboy hat on top. And it had a sign underneath that read, “Hot Stuff!” I stared at the sign for five minutes, called my grandfather and cried into the phone, “Where have I landed?” My bubble had burst.

Four years were not enough to make the transition to the US. I had grown used to the protected life of Amherst, but I was not ready to be released into the wild.

I realized that I had spent four years trying to learn how to adjust to the United States, to make the transition from my Puerto Rican culture to America, to fit into the new environment, to the new language, to the new foods, to my new identity, and then everything changed.

The shock felt like the end of a game of dominoes. Somebody had played the bone that shuts close the two sides of the open layout, la pieza del tranque, leaving me stuck with the worst bone of them all, the double six, the dreaded “false teeth.”

I was stuck with an American identity that felt as clunky and heavy as la caja de muelas, a domino that only works on one side of the table. I upped and high tailed it back to the Northeast.

I studied Spanish American literature in graduate school in New Haven CT for six years. One day, I was walking down Inman Street in Cambridge MA, when I recognized a friend from college who was coming out of the T station. It was Jacob. He was two years older than I was, and I hadn’t seen him since he had graduated.

He was wearing a cloth skullcap. I asked him where he was coming from. He said that he was just arriving from services in the East Boston neighborhood where he lived with his mother, and he was going back to work his shift at my local grocer, City Market, where he was the manager of the store.

When I asked him if he ever thought about Amherst, he answered he had mixed feelings about the place. Surely, he said, you felt the same way. After all, he winked at me, we were not what they liked to call “Amherst material.” And he laughed.

He said he had learned to take it all with a grain of za’atar a mixture of herbs from the Middle East and the Mediterranean. He laughed again.

Jacob helped me to realize why I was so unprepared to start a different life in Texas after four years at Amherst. Life in the US required me to become more aware of the challenges that my cultural difference presented and to learn to meet the changes of life with resilience and a twinkle in the eye.

After graduate school, my first academic job was in Austin Texas. This time, I was able to stay for six years. That’s where my life in the US truly began, no longer as a character from a fantastic TV show, but as a person more aware of his complicated surroundings, with faith in his difference, and able to play both sides with a sense of humor.

The best bone in a game of dominoes is the piece that ends the game, and works on both sides of the open layout, like a palindrome. If you win the game with this tricky bone, you hit the table and say its name …

You guessed it …
¡Capicú! …