The Latina's Bible : The Nueva Latina's Guide to Love, Spirituality, Family, and la Vida

Book by Guzman Sandra

Introduction:
The Joy of Being Nueva Latina

For most of our lives the lesson is to love ourselves even more deeply, especially because we are the survivors of colonization . . . that’s our fight against injustice! -- Patrisia Gonzáles, Chicana-Kikapu writer

I am a proud Latina. I am a proud American. I am not exotic. I am two cultures in one fabulous, curvaceous, café-con-leche body. I own English. I dream in Spanish. On most days, I’m delighted to explain this marvelous heritage to the curious and clueless who ask questions like, “So Sandra, what are you?” Other days I just repeat to myself, “I am what I am.”

But I want to tell you what I am, because I think once I do, you’ll understand why I’ve written this book—para ti, mujer!
As a Puerto Rico–born and U.S.-raised woman, I am layers of history that speak of beaches and snowflakes, rain forests and tenements, Spanish and English, spicy food and fast food, hip-hop and congas, apple pie and flan. I have two homes—an America that sometimes refuses to accept me as a legitimate daughter, and a Puerto Rico that sometimes denies me when my Spanish fails me.

For as long as I can remember, I always yearned to belong neatly to just one of them. But greater forces were at play. Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory with unresolved political and identity issues that date back more than a century. It’s neither a state nor a sovereign nation, but an in-between political entity called a “commonwealth”—a euphemism for “colony.” Puerto Rico is still trying to answer profound political questions about who it is as a nation—as a people and as a collection of individuals. We are simultaneously part of the United States and a member nation of the twenty countries that make up Spanish-speaking Latin America. When I think of Puerto Rico’s political dilemma, I am reminded of an old Mexican dicho: “Poor Mexico—so close to the U.S., so far from God.”

I am a Latina who was born into a borderland and raised in a cultural middle. When I was a little girl, my family—my mom, two sisters, and two brothers—made its way north. My mother was a seamstress, but when the factory where she made sneakers (Pro-Keds) closed down, she packed up suitcases full of tropical clothes and we left El Tuque, the small fishing village we called home. We moved to the immigrant working-class town of Jersey City, New Jersey, where some of our other relatives had settled years earlier. Some say that the best thing Jersey City has to offer is a view of Manhattan, but it was there that I became a Jerseyrican—a combination of American and boricua from New Jersey.

There was no such thing as bilingual education in my public school, or even English as a Second Language; it was strictly sink or swim. (Ironically, the school was named in honor of Roberto Clemente, the Puerto Rican baseball legend. Go figure!) But as the daughter of strong and clever people, I learned English quickly. Unfortunately, I also learned to forget Spanish—though I picked up a lot of Spanglish. Lunch, for example, became lonche; roof, rufo; the building’s superintendent, el super.

Though I was quickly absorbing mainstream americana ways, everything in my Jersey home spoke fluent Latino. The food, the music, the language, la familia’s deep religious fervor, las fiestas, las novelas, the traditions. Even the house decor screamed Latino—from the plastic-covered sofas and the pictures of virgencitas to the thousands of ceramic figurines of elephants, angels, and coquís, Puerto Rico’s thumb-size singing frogs.

My barrio friends were fellow boricuas, Dominicans, Cubans, Ecuadorians, and other South and Central Americans, but also Irish, Polish, Asians, and Italians. It wasn’t so much a melting pot as a big mixed ensalada.

My Latino friends and I had different accents when we spoke our broken Spanish, but we shared the same basic cultural Latino customs: family is blood, have faith in Dios and church, all viejitos are respected, girls are of the home, boys not. English was like a glue for us; it held the different Latin American banderas together. I remember a lot of warmth and cariño in this very diverse Latino immigrant community.

Before long, I became the family translator. And just as quickly as I was learning to own the English language, I was embracing American behaviors—the attitude, the fashions, the music, and, ay, Dios mio, the independent and “unbecoming” gringita habit of always expressing my opinion! Growing up, I found it a challenging task to explain myself to Mami. It didn’t help that she never really learned English and I was quickly losing my Spanish; she never accepted what she called this americana in me. She wanted me to be her idea of a good Puerto Rican girl forever.

But I was becoming something else: a new breed, a new woman, a confluence of Pan-Latino consciousness and American influences: yo me convertí en una nueva latina.

Identifying as Latina was a politically conscious move on my part. I understood “Hispanic” to be a term made up by the U.S. government, so I didn’t want anyone labeling me that way. On the other hand, the friendlier “puertorriqueña” and “Jerseyrican” described only parts of me, not the whole.

As a Nueva Latina I am a combination of all of the Latinos I came of age with: Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, Tejanas, Chicanas, Dominicans, and Central and South Americans, as well as the African Americans, Asian Americans, and Anglos who I call friends. As a Nueva Latina, I am three languages: English, Spanish, and Spanglish. I embrace fast food as well as (and more often than) home-cooked feasts. My opinion counts—within my family and outside it. I stand up to authority when I need to, with my eyes firmly planted on those I challenge. I refuse to look away in shame or fear. I never walk with my head bowed, like those campesinos made so famous by the great painter Diego Rivera. Blood is sacred. I honor it by honoring me. I own my body; as much as I believe in God, it is not his place to tell me when and with whom I shall share it. I am neither a martyr nor a sirvienta. I refuse to be defined solely by how well I cook a plate of arroz con pollo or how nicely I can keep house. My Latina femaleness is beyond the walls of my casa and womb. Are you feeling me yet? I am—we are—indeed a new breed. We are new women. Calling myself Latina (instead of, say, “Puerto Rican” or—no lo quiera Dios—“Puerto Rican American”) means validating and celebrating the fact that I feel closer kinship with a Chicana raised in Los Angeles or a Tejana raised in San Antonio than I do with a Puerto Rican woman raised in Ponce, where I was born. Everything, from our survival in America’s schools to Univision and The Brady Bunch, has made us comadres. Not long ago my son reminded me of this powerful reality experienced by so many of us.

He was watching a kids’ show on television and started screaming that the Puerto Rican kid had won a pie-eating contest. I rushed to the living room and saw that a boy named Luis Jiménez, draped in a Mexican flag, had devoured fifteen pies in two minutes.

I said, “Listen, baby, this kid isn’t Puerto Rican. He has the Mexican flag draped over him, so I think we can safely assume that he’s Mexican American.”

My son looked at me with a cocked eye, as only a little kid can, and said, “It’s the same thing, Mom!” He understood the difference—he knows the colors of both the Cuban flag (his dad’s side) and the Puerto Rican flag—but he saw parts of himself in that other little brown boy, and could celebrate the boy’s victory as his own. This is what has happened to us, the sons and daughters of Latin America’s immigrants—a feeling of Pan-Latino consciousness and kinship. We are an hecho en América reality.

So sure, as I said at the get-go, Latinas in the United States battle racism, discrimination, border harassment, racial profiling, police brutality, invisibility, and exploitation. We battle old-country traditions that sometimes stifle us. Yet despite—or maybe because of—all the external and internal luchas, U.S. Latinas are among the fiercest and strongest women I know. We or our foremothers crossed oceans, rivers, and time zones and survived nightmares to get to America, and we continue to survive and thrive en América. We raise families in homes and neighborhoods deemed dysfunctional by society, and look great while we’re doing it. We’ve made up a new language, Spanglish. We’ve made up a new culture with a synergy of rhythms old and new. We’ve made up new rules that combine Mom and Abuela’s old ways with new and more modern ones. We are true survivors. And that is because U.S. Latinas—those of us who speak Spanish and those of us who don’t—are a new breed, and the diversity of our faces, values, and traditions is at the heart of the American future.
As a Nueva Latina I pledge allegiance to both parts of my soul, the “American” and the Latin American within. But no matter how warmly I embrace my inner Anglo or African American chica, there are some things that I can do only in my native tongue: I curse, dream, and make love in español. And it’s physical, too—I can go only so many days before my body craves pasteles, arroz con habichuelas, mole chicken, and anything with chiles; or my soul yearns for an Ismael “Maelo” Rivera salsa or Juan Gabriel ballad.

Coming to terms with my cultural identity—and feeling comfortable with the different parts of me that make me who I am—has been an emotional roller-coaster ride. During my adolescence, surrounded by my very Latin...