Newton, MA
LIVES: New York, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Community Preservation Corps, Underwriting Efficiency
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: Sole had given clues that she wanted to discuss her sexuality on a number of occasions, but I did not know how to respond. One day, she talked candidly about her displeasure with the sex-education course at school because it ignored same-sex couples. This was the beginning of our ability to talk more openly about sexuality. For this, I am infinitely grateful to Sole. It really felt like Sole was the adult in creating this opening.
This piece began as an exploration of masculinity through the lens of a young Afro-Latino boy but became an exploration of my own struggles with my identity through this character, Ozzie.
Who is Oscar Rosario? What does he look like? No—what should he look like? Ozzie was already familiar with his own face. The same brown skin, brown eyes, and curly-almost-kinky fro sitting on top of his head like a lion’s mane. Wild and free. Como el espíritu de Puerto Rico, his mom used to tell him as she pulled and yanked at the tangled knots forming at the back of his head. Every damn morning he saw the same person in the mirror, intently studying the tiny mole on the left side of his cheek, or the slight widow’s peak that only could have been inherited from his grandfather, whom he had never met, and heard from only occasionally. Every year on March 16, his abuelo would call from Puerto Rico to sing him a feliz cumple and remind him of the protests in New York to Free Oscar Lopez from incarceration. “Siempre pa’lante negrito”—always go forward—he would say, and Ozzie would picture his abuelo sitting on a plastic lawn chair in front of his little red casita, drinking rum and wearing a white guayabera with the socialist flag swaying behind him.
Sometimes when Ozzie stared at himself for too long, his image started to dissolve into the features of his ancestors: his nose resembling that of his defiant abuelita as she would cook maduros in hot oil during the day and teach the other campesinos (farmers) how to read at night. Or his infamous, untamable fro resembling that of his cigar-smoking black grandfather, who chased chickens during the day and held secret radical meetings with the neighbors about the revolution in Cuba by night. But he never just saw Ozzie. It was as if his face carried the reminder of only the oppression and poverty of the Puerto Rican people.
As Ozzie finished rubbing leave-in conditioner through his hair, he could see the ghosts of his heritage flickering inside the reflection of the mirror. Clapping and hip-bumping. Dipping and swaying. The colors before him flashed like a memory across his mind: the red, yellow, and blue skirts of the local women dancing to the beat of the conga drum. “That hijito is Bomba y Plena,” his mom had whispered as they watched the Puerto Rican Day Parade pass by. He had never seen so many coffee, cream, and brown faces like his own, all crammed into one place, eating and drinking together as if they had never left the island to begin with. He was so captivated by the movement of the parade that he let go of his little sister’s fingertips and ran right into the heart of the crowd. His mother’s urgent calls for him to come back were quickly drowned out by the throaty sound of what Ozzie would later learn was a guirro.
The older man next to him looked down at Ozzie and offered him the toffee-colored instrument. At first Ozzie just stared, perplexed by its oval shape and strange marks indented in the middle. Finally, he took the small instrument into his even smaller eight-year-old hands and ran his fingers along its body. “Put it to your ear and you’ll hear the ocean waves from Puerto Rico,” said the man, gesturing to the hole at the top, and then held his hand up to his ear like he was holding a cell phone. As Ozzie was just about to put the delicate instrument to his ear, he felt a hand grip his Star Wars shirt tightly and yank him away from the man. The instrument fell with a clunk onto the ground and as he was dragged away by his mother yelling words she had banned him from saying, Ozzie wondered if he would ever get the chance to hear the sound of Puerto Rico’s ocean.
Now the memories swirling in his mind blinded him to his surroundings as he tried grasping for . . . for what? Every day Ozzie walks past the posters plastered across the 191st Street train station entrance doors, wondering if that’s what he should look like . . . like a light-skinned rapper with triangles tattooed on his shiny bald head and fake, gleaming gold chains hanging from his neck. This year the new Latino icon was Bad Bunny, but only a couple of years ago Pitbull had taken over the radio, rapping about naked girls in Spanglish. So when he couldn’t find himself in the posters, Ozzie tried rummaging through the old comic editions at St. Mark’s Comics bookstore, searching for a brown face and kinky fro dressed in a Spider-Man suit. And yet, even after searching New York’s most famous comic book store, Forbidden Planet NYC, Ozzie always left with his money still in his wallet and disappointment hanging over him like a thick cloud ready to pour. Ozzie couldn’t tell anymore if what he saw every morning in the bathroom mirror was him or a reflection of years of searching through the city he calls home and always feeling like a lion swarmed by a crowd of eagles.
A Gen F’er Meets Her Great-Great-Grandparents
The novel I am working on is about the impact of one generation on the next. So, when thinking about the meaning of Generation F, I immediately considered it in relation to preceding generations.
What would my grandparents think of Generation F? (And what, by the way, should their generation be called? Generation Sh, for shtetl? Generation S, for survivors? Generation TR, for Teddy Roosevelt?)
I picture my great-niece, the Generation F’er Madeline, at her great-great-grandmother’s dining table. My grandma’s head is shaking, as it has at least since my generation gathered at this same table for matzo ball soup and matzo sandwiches of haroset and bitter herbs.
Madeline is peeking at her iPhone beneath the white embroidered tablecloth, under which my generation ducked to sneak sips of sweet and sticky Manischewitz.
Madeline knows this shaking may be Parkinson’s. Her generation knows these things. It’s the beneficiary of the gradual ending of the hush around so much—illness, sex, race, gender.
My generation, Madeline’s grandmother’s generation, when it sat at the same table, thought the shaking was an expression of disapproval. Grandma, we thought, was onto us and the Manischewitz.
The shaking, as we saw it, was an incessant reproach for our wayward thoughts, for whatever we secretly did that the grownups didn’t want us to do.
But this, Madeline’s generation, isn’t prey to that. It’s been brought up to be unashamed, proud of whoever they are. They live by their beliefs and values; they don’t compartmentalize to make their way under present circumstances.
Madeline’s parents, too, would know the shaking was probably Parkinson’s. But they retain some of the fear of being disapproved of by earlier generations. Possibly the shaking had something to do with the contrasting colors of their skin.
“Shvartze,” the great-great-grandfather had been heard to say—a racist Jews’ word for a person of color. All succeeding
