![]() ![]() Puerto Ricans who thought they were a mix of white, Taino, African were seen by the Anglo Americans as Black. Soon, Anglo Americans imposed on the island a binary concept of race at odds with the color spectrum that Puerto Ricans saw: blancos, negros, trigueños, mulattos, morenos, etc. What if my mother is right, and I’m racializing relatives through my assimilated eyes? But how I see my relatives is different from how many of them see themselves. Racial identity is as personal as it is a product of how we’re seen. I can’t tell whose mind is more colonized, mine or my mother’s. “Why are you looking at f––– race? To separate people like ganado, like caballos?” “We’re the human race,” she says, sharply. But she sees me as obsessed with race I see her as in denial about its ongoing role in this country. When I tell her about the government documents I found classifying her mother and her grandmother as Black, she concedes that her family had Black ancestry. It’s grating to talk with her about this. “He’d identify as Puerto Rican,” she says. “Don’t you think if he were still alive he might identify as Black?” But activists and demographers recently mobilized to encourage more people in Puerto Rico to claim their Blackness to counter disproportionate white identification and to get a better idea of racial disparities that need addressing on the island. It’s true that when my Tío kept his hair short instead of his Afro and stayed out of the sun, he looked ambiguous. “He was white.” I scrutinize the photos, confused by her conviction. ![]() “My brother was not Black,” my mother tells me. Saying our true names is one way to fight that idea. Hate mail from MAGA trolls inspired me to reclaim it.ĭenigrating multilingualism is rooted in the desire to restrict who can belong here. Opinion Guerrero: For years, I anglicized my Mexican last name. Why had I never seen anybody’s Blackness? I’d met many of these people on trips to Puerto Rico. On page after page I find photos of pale relatives beside relatives who look Afro Puerto Rican to me, including my mom’s brother, my Tío, who died of a heart attack more than a decade ago. Today, as I flip through Abuelita Coco’s albums, I’m bewildered by my former blindness to our afrodescendancy. And his mother was a seamstress named Pura Feliciano, labeled “mulatto,” part Black, when that was a designation. It wasn’t just my mother’s maternal side that was judged as Black. On a later population schedule, Abuelita Coco, then 2, was also put on the Black side of the black-white binary. Searching for public records online, I discovered that my great-grandmother Monserrate Torres was classified as “C,” or colored for Black, in the 1930 United States Census, which judged people with any detectable drop of Black blood as Black. Perhaps her mother was “ trigueña,” or wheat-colored, she said. When I replied that there is nothing wrong with being Black, her eyes filled with tears. ![]() “Her skin was as white and as beautiful as mine,” she replied in Spanish, lifting her shirt to expose her pale belly. “ Tu mamá era afro-puertorriqueña,” I said.Ībuelita Coco’s face crumpled. She was beautiful and undeniably Black, with dark chocolate skin. In the photo, a woman with high cheekbones and a coy smile rested her chin on Abuelita Coco’s shoulder. One evening, after weeks of gentle inquiries, she brought me a black-and-white photo. Each time, she thought I was asking for the first time. Without explaining myself, I asked Abuelita Coco for photos of her mother every time I visited. He’d asked Abuelita Coco once and it made her “real mad.” He could see it in her face, in my mother’s face. He told me he thought my mother’s mother had Black ancestry. I recalled a conversation I’d had with my father, from Mexico, when I was writing a book about his side of the family years before. It occurred to me that maybe she didn’t want me to see her mother. There was no way she forgot photos of her mother when she moved in with us when I was a teenager in the early 2000s. Perhaps she never brought them from Puerto Rico, she said. She told me she had searched and searched for photos of her mother, and couldn’t find any. “That was my father,” she said in Spanish, peering at the photo with smiling eyes. Later, she brought me a photo of a wiry, white-passing man. ![]() We wore masks and were vaccinated, but I gave her space while she looked. She pulled out photo albums of her life in Puerto Rico and placed them on her bed. She went to her bedroom to rummage through her closet. But she enjoys recalling fragments of her far-away past. We were spending a lot of time together during the pandemic in a COVID bubble.Ībuelita Coco, a pale, parenthesis-slim woman, is losing her short-term memory. Two years ago, at my mother’s house in San Diego, I asked my 86-year-old Puerto Rican grandmother, who lives there, if she could show me photos of her parents. ![]()
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