When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [90]
Those bold girls with hair and makeup and short skirts, I soon found out, were Italian. The Italians all sat together on one side of the cafeteria, the blacks on another. The two groups hated each other more than they hated Puerto Ricans. At least once a week there was a fight between an Italian and a moreno, either in the bathroom, in the school yard, or in an abandoned lot near the school, a no-man’s-land that divided their neighborhoods and kept them apart on weekends.
The black girls had their own style. Not for them the big, pouffy hair of the Italians. Their hair was straightened, curled at the tips like Miss Brown’s, or pulled up into a twist at the back with wispy curls and straw straight bangs over Cleopatra eyes. Their skirts were also short, except it didn’t look like they hitched them up when their mothers weren’t looking. They came that way. They had strong, shapely legs and wore knee socks with heavy lace-up shoes that became lethal weapons in fights.
It was rumored that the Italians carried knives, even the girls, and that the morenos had brass knuckles in their pockets and steel toes in their heavy shoes. I stayed away from both groups, afraid that if I befriended an Italian, I’d get beat up by a morena, or vice versa.
There were two kinds of Puerto Ricans in school: the newly arrived, like myself, and the ones born in Brooklyn of Puerto Rican parents. The two types didn’t mix. The Brooklyn Puerto Ricans spoke English, and often no Spanish at all. To them, Puerto Rico was the place where their grandparents lived, a place they visited on school and summer vacations, a place which they complained was backward and mosquito-ridden. Those of us for whom Puerto Rico was still a recent memory were also split into two groups: the ones who longed for the island and the ones who wanted to forget it as soon as possible.
I felt disloyal for wanting to learn English, for liking pizza, for studying the girls with big hair and trying out their styles at home, locked in the bathroom where no one could watch. I practiced walking with the peculiar little hop of the morenas, but felt as if I were limping.
I didn’t feel comfortable with the newly arrived Puerto Ricans who stuck together in suspicious little groups, criticizing everyone, afraid of everything. And I was not accepted by the Brooklyn Puerto Ricans, who held the secret of coolness. They walked the halls between the Italians and the morenos, neither one nor the other, but looking and acting like a combination of both, depending on the texture of their hair, the shade of their skin, their makeup, and the way they walked down the hall.
One day I came home from school to find all our things packed and Mami waiting.
“Your sisters and brothers are coming,” she said. “We’re moving to a bigger place.”
Tata and I helped her drag the stuff out to the sidewalk. After it was all together, Mami walked to Graham Avenue and found a cab. The driver helped us load the trunk, the front seat, and the floor of the rear seat until we were sitting on our bundles for the short ride to Varet Street, on the other side of the projects.
I’d read about but had never seen the projects. Just that weekend a man had taken a nine-year-old girl to the roof of one of the buildings, raped her, and thrown her over the side, down twenty-one stories. El Diario, the Spanish newspaper, had covered the story in detail and featured a picture of the building facing Bushwick Avenue, with a dotted line from where the girl was thrown to where she fell.
But Mami didn’t talk about that. She said that the new apartment was much bigger, and that Tata would be living with us so she could take care of us while Mami worked. I wouldn’t have to change schools.
The air was getting cooler, and before Delsa, Norma, Héctor, and Alicia came, Mami and I went shopping for coats and sweaters in a secondhand store, so that the kids wouldn’t get sick their first week in Brooklyn. We also bought a couch and two matching chairs, two big beds, a chiforobe