Life on Holidae

Wait, what?

I know some folks feel this way: “You aren’t really hispanic.  But you are definitely not white.”

Sigh.

I been reading so much this summer.  The words on pages have become phantoms glimmering across surfaces while I commute from work.  The backsplashes of the subway walls appear to have words neatly printed on them. So many beautiful words.

But I am reading the saddest and most real books I’ve read in a while Chango’s Fire by Ernesto Quinonez.  Same with with Junot Diaz’s most recent book its just so fucking sad and real.  I have a particularly bad habit of reading fantasy and sci-fi.  This is all good, but after a while this hungry reader isn’t satisfied.  I’ve dedicated this summer to reading the bastards of my bookshelves: historical fiction, contemporary writers of all backgrounds, politics, philosophy, psychology, and science—a more sobering selection of reading material.

To get back to my initial thought—I feel distinctly other. The more aware you become of the realities of the world and how suffering is so exasperatingly pervasive the more you feel hyperaware to your self.  Its the sort of awareness that leads you to longer and more existential moments of melancholia on subways, buses and walks. I am aware of this burdensome identity crisis that aches to be the center of my anxieties.

I mean there are others like me, 2nd generation immigrants who aren’t culturally tied to their countries loves for food, music, clothing.  Despite my obsessive desire to know more about my country, to know the dates, the names and the places my knowledge is suspiciously manufactured.  Dominicans of a “truer” shade smell me out.  I don’t dance bachata that’s one! I don’t speak the cibaeña spanish and thus I do not speak spanish. It takes most people quite some time to even figure out what my ethnicity is.  I can’t go into a Dominican hair salon without being insulted in Spanish for not straightening my hair.  I get stares from my own people for rocking the afro they have long since chemically straightened, dyed and contorted into something else.  I am not of my people, or so my people communicate to me.