I should have known that I wasn’t Puerto Rican. I remember the one and only time Griselda took Alex and me to the Puerto Rican day parade, it was by accident. She had seen on tv that the city was sponsoring a free “Melanoma Check Up” event. So, thinking this would make a fun family outing, she packed some sandwiches and took my brother and I on a trip to the New York Center for Skin Disease. Even though I was only 10 years old, as we rode the F train from Jackson Heights to midtown Manhattan, I knew there was something unusual going on. More and more people kept pouring into the subway car, most of them wearing tee-shirts with the Puerto Rican flag and the “Coqui” – the little frog emblematic of the island.
Once we arrived at mid-town, we, along with the company of tee-shirt wears, pushed ourselves out onto the subway platform. Through the steamy summer subway tunnels, and up the jammed packed stairs we travelled, until finally we were extruded onto the mass of thousands of people lined along 5th Avenue. We had arrived in the middle of the Puerto Rican Day Parade. In retrospect it is a little odd that my mom was well-informed about free melanoma checkups but seemed unaware that there was a parade of about a million people taking place that same day in more or less the same location. As soon as we emerged from the subway station mom grabbed both of our hands and pulled us close. People were squishing us on every side. The crowd was so thick, I couldn’t even see Alex, who was standing on the other side of Griselda. I did hear him yelp “I’m crippled!” when some lady in a wheelchair accidently ran over his foot. Behind me a man was blasting “Mi Gente” on his portable radio. Griselda pushed us forward through the throng, and fueled by claustrophobic fear I clung to her. It took us about ½ an hour just to cross over to the other side of the street. Once we did, we quickly walked away from the parade route and into a less congested area.
Finally, we came upon the clinic and saw that Griselda was not the only person who thought free melanoma testing would be a good idea. Waiting on line to have my potentially cancerous moles inspected – it struck me how even though we were Puerto Rican we were different. (At that time, I firmly believed the lie that all three of us were Puerto Rican.) My perception of being different had nothing to do with genetics, nor our appearance. The parade crowd were in fact, super diverse. Most attendees were brown-skinned brunettes, but there were also alabasters and the ebonies, with various combinations of hair color and texture.
There was even an East-Asian looking lady, middle-aged belting out “todo mi gente se mueve” as she swayed to the rhythm. She too had on one of those tee-shirts. I looked down at the peach-colored romper I was wearing. It was summery, with spaghetti straps, and shorts cut above the knee. On the front was a colorful cartoon drawing of a marshmallow roasting over a flame. There was no flag, no coqui. Young though I was, I suspected that there was something more at play here than just the mere accident of blood. Identity contains some element of choice, maybe even affectation. But I was too young to articulate such things. In my mind, I simply wondered “Do they even make s’mores in Puerto Rico?”
