When I Was Puerto Rican Read Online Free PDF

middle of hurricane season, and the world grew suddenly bigger, a vast place of other adults and children whose lives were similar, but whose shadings I couldn’t really explore out of respect and dignidad. Dignidad was something you conferred on other people, and they, in turn, gave back to you. It meant you never swore at people, never showed anger in front of strangers, never stared, never stood too close to people you’d just met, never addressed people by the familiar tú until they gave you permission. It meant adults had to be referred to as Don so-and-so, and Doña so-and-so, except for teachers, who you should call Mister or Missis so-and-so. It meant, if you were a child, you did not speak until spoken to, did not look an adult in the eye, did not raise your voice nor enter or leave a room without permission. It meant adults were always right, especially if they were old. It meant men could look at women any way they liked but women could never look at men directly, only in sidelong glances, unless they were putas, in which case they could do what they pleased since people would talk about them anyway. It meant you didn’t gossip, tattle, or tease. It meant men could say things to women as they walked down the street, but women couldn’t say anything to men, not even to tell them to go jump in the harbor and leave them alone.
    All these rules entered our household the minute I was allowed to leave home for the long walk to and from school. It wasn’t that I hadn’t heard them before. Mami and Papi had passed on to me what they knew of buenos modales, good manners.
    But these rules had little to do with the way we lived at home. In our family we fought with vigor, adults as well as children, even though we knew we weren’t supposed to. We yelled across the room at one another, came in and out of our one room house without saying “excuse me” and “may I come in,” or even knocking. Mami and Papi were tú, so were our grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. We children spoke whenever we felt like it, interrupted our parents all the time, and argued with them until Mami finally reminded us that we had stepped over the line of what was considered respectful behavior toward parents.
    In school I volunteered to wipe down the blackboard, to sharpen pencils, to help distribute lined paper in which we could write our tortured alphabets with the mysterious tilde over the n to make ñ , the ü , the double consonants ll and rr with their strong sounds. I loved the neat rows of desks lined up one after the other, the pockmarked tops shiny in spots where the surface hadn’t blistered, the thrill when I raised my desktop to find a large box underneath in which I kept my primer, sheets of paper, and the pencil stubs I guarded as if they were the finest writing instruments.
    I walked home from school full of importance in my green and yellow uniform. It was my most prized possession, the only thing in our house that belonged to me alone, because neither Delsa nor Norma were old enough to go to school.
    But school was also where I compared my family to others in the barrio. I learned there were children whose fathers were drunks, whose mothers were “bad,” whose sisters had run away with travelling salesmen, whose brothers had landed in prison. I met children whose mothers walked the distance from their house to church on their knees in gratitude for prayers answered. Children whose fathers came home every day and played catch in the dusty front yard. Girls whose sisters taught them to embroider flowers on linen handkerchiefs. Boys whose brothers took them by the hand and helped them climb a tree. There were families in the barrio with running water inside their houses, electric bulbs shining down from every room, curtains on the windows, and printed linoleum on the floors.
    Children fought in school in a way unknown to me at home. Delsa, Norma, and I often tied ourselves into punching, biting, kicking knots that