Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism (6 page)

 

Juleyka Lantigua

 

 

 

 

 

I grew up in a wooden house sunk into the sidewalk of what by Dominican standards was a good neighborhood. That meant our sidewalks were cemented and clean, the aqua paint on our house was not fading like cheap makeup and the families on my street knew each other well enough not to mind our business.

Until I was ten, my first family and I lived in the Dominican Republic. My father was a bit of a local celebrity—a hometown baseball prodigy turned civic leader. He was involved in city hall politics and helped our city secure its first national league baseball team. While my father played minor league politico, my mother morphed herself into a beautician, an arts and crafts instructor, a Mary Kay saleswoman, a hairdresser and even a teacher for the deaf. She was superwoman whizzing through town on a sky-blue moped whose long, curved neck made it look like a motorized ostrich. Off she went to hair salons, neighborhood associations, informal women’s clubs and after-school programs.

If her patchwork job history constituted a career, then she was the ultimate career mom. But not in the (North) American sense of it—there was no carpooling to soccer practice, no coming home late at night and fixing TV dinners, no out-of-town conferences that watered-down bedtime stories into cooing answering machine messages. Her work did not take away from the elaborate meals she prepared for us, or from orchestrating magnificent birthday parties with dozens of cousins. She did it all. And she did it with beauty-pageant grace.

My dad took to the role of father the way he knew best. He brought home leftovers from his salary after his binges with friends. He disciplined us when necessary and made sometimes astonishing but mostly common efforts to keep my mother happy. That usually translated into taking us out for pizza and making a big to-do about it, or reminding her that he had returned home early one night in the past two weeks. It was frustrating watching my mother deal with my father’s unwillingness to be an equal partner in their marriage. Of course, that perspective came to me years later when I learned what a partnership really is. But I learned my first lesson in feminism back then: Always take personal responsibility—as a woman, sister, daughter or partner.

By committing herself to fulfilling her end of the deal—raising my sister and I, caring for our house, working outside of home—my mother defied Dominican social standards that make a wife and family dependent on the man of the house. She did not wait for my father to take action, but instead she stood up for herself and for us. Proud, independent and determined, Mom worked as many jobs as was necessary, stayed up late into the night mending school uniforms, rose before dawn had blinked awake, traced the city limits with her moped’s exhaust and kept arguments to a whisper. Yet her relationship with my father worsened by the day. The more she found herself able to handle the household and our care, the less she demanded from him.

When I was seven, my father died following a car accident. After the funeral we moved to the campo with my mother’s extended family. My mother’s scooter excursions became long pilgrimages, because we now lived miles outside the center of town, where her customers /students/clients lived. No matter. She remained as attentive, sharing the rearing duties with my grandmother, who was thrilled to have her granddaughters at home. Aunts and uncles formed a tight circle of mother/father figures who took care of our schooling, trips to the beach, disciplining and caring-after.

A couple of years after my father passed away, my mother began exchanging letters with a Dominican man who lived in New York. They learned about each other from a mutual friend, one of my mother’s clients who owned a hair salon. The striped airmail envelopes crisscrossed the Caribbean Sea for two years before the two met. There was constant busy talk from relatives about my mom, sister and I moving to the States when this man married her. Although she paid attention, Mom seemed too busy taking care of us to notice. I now understand her readiness to ignore the mounting pressure for the young widow to remarry.

Like pieces of torn cassette ribbon, snippets of conversations my relatives had about our future mix randomly in my head:

 

On his first visit our family welcomed my future stepfather like a crown prince atop a royal elephant. There was a backyard cookout with a whole roasted pig, continuous domino games, bottles and bottles of Brugal rum and enough plátano dishes to fill a cookbook. His first stay sealed our fate; wedding preparations started the afternoon he boarded an American Airlines 747 back to Nueva York. I learned my next lesson in feminism then: Your personal choices as a woman depend entirely on how you define yourself. My mother—like all the women in my family—chose to define herself sometimes as an individual woman, other times as a dedicated mother and often as a supportive wife, never to the absolute exclusion of any part.

But it wasn’t easy. My workaholic mother was stretching herself to make ends meet. Her raison d’être was her young daughters, who looked to her for everything. Although our family was generous in every way, the assumption—the expectation, really—was that she would soon remarry. That was her only choice; accept a man into her life so that she could continue charting her daughters’ prosperity. The unexpected twist to remarriage came in the form of long lines at the American consulate, travel visas and green cards, making us all permanent residents of our future.

By any measure my mother is a modern woman; she is fearless, self-reliant, a hard worker and an independent thinker. We would have been just fine, perhaps even great, without a man in her life. But every social nuance and every familiar whisper confirmed the inevitable; she had to choose, and she had to choose to have a man in her life. I often think that by remarrying she chose against herself.

As we prepared to move, I was distracted by daydreams about living in the States. Firmly grounded in her own reality, however, my younger sister was deathly against us moving. She tried everything: brokering secret deals with my grandmother so she could stay with her, bargaining with my mother with promises of good behavior, threatening to run away if she was forced to move. She even tried convincing Mom that she did not need to remarry because we had everything at my grandmother’s. But even last-minute antics at the airport yielded no response from Mom. She had chosen, and she had done so for all of us.

 

Crammed into a one-bedroom on Montgomery Avenue in the South Bronx, my new taped-together family quickly fell into a routine. My stepfather continued his job of ten years at a frame factory. My sister and I were enrolled in public school. Mom stayed home in the beginning, because she didn’t know her way around and didn’t speak enough English to look for a job. For a while our synchronicity worked. Everyone was up at the crack of dawn. Mom made breakfast, dressed us and we were off to school. Stepdad went off to work. Mom cooked and cleaned and dealt with our schooling. We’d come home and there would be the same elaborate meals we were used to. My sister and I would do our homework, eat dinner, watch some TV and go to bed. Stepdad would come home in the early evening, shower, eat, read his Bible and go to bed. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Soon my stepfather’s salary was not enough for the bloated household, and Mom found work in a factory in a faraway place called New Jersey. I knew it was far because she had to meet a van every morning to get there. The house had to adapt to a new routine and now I was responsible for getting my sister and me to school and back. Mom would lock the door from the outside as early as 5 A.M. My stepdad started missing his morning coffee. Mom would leave semicooked meals that I would finish preparing when I returned from school. Most of the time, my stepdad came back earlier than she did. He’d spend the evening in their room watching TV or be off to church for the circulo de oración. For a while that worked too. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

The one person daring enough to point out the change from the Dominican Republic was my sister. She started getting restless and with every discomfort of our new life she demanded to go back “home.” Because both adults were now working and there was no money for a sitter, my sister and I spent endless afternoons and weekends locked inside the tiny apartment, whose living room had been split in two with wood paneling to create our bedroom. I was blinded by the newness of it all. Born a wanderer, I wanted more than anything else to walk around my new city, see all the places I’d seen in postcards, ride every subway train to its last stop. I was looking ahead, not backward, as if my neck had been locked in place with a medical brace. On another level, I also knew that it would be a while before we would go back “home,” because we were struggling to make ends meet.

 

My stepfather and I lived under the same roof for more than twelve years, and it would be a gross lie to say we spoke more than a thousand words to each other the whole time. He was quiet around the house. Except for the occasional argument with my younger sister (usually over control of the remote or her predilection to turn the radio up full blast), he rarely addressed us directly. I suppose my sister and I were not his children to discipline. After a while—especially after my mother gave him two wonderful children of his own—my sister and I were not his to acknowledge: “Go ask your mother.” Sometimes it felt like we were unwanted dowry my mother had brought to the altar. She, in turn, was a secondhand dress prized for its ornate beauty and nostalgic value, purchased with glee despite its flaws. This was explicit in the codified language of absolute silence.

Years passed and everyone became accustomed to my stepdad’s continuous hush. We often forgot to include him in major decisions. He would come home and there would be a new overstuffed couch in the living room or the television would be pumping cable programming into the house. Sometimes he would come home and we wouldn’t even be there; off to the park or to play in the snow or down the block at Mom’s friends. For as long as I can remember, it was him and us.

At this point, whatever notion of family had been ingrained in me by my first family back in the Dominican Republic was slowly eroding. I started to understand that family means everyone involved doing their part to push forward, to get over the common hurdles and help each other overcome personal obstacles. Mom had exemplified that virtue for so long that it was easy for me to model it; doing much more than I thought was required of a young girl. At age twelve that meant I bagged groceries at the local supermarket. The couple of dollars I earned each day were lunch and snack money for my sister and me.

Because of my stepfather’s lack of involvement with the family, socially prescribed roles didn’t fit in my house. The sisters were the mother. The mother was the man. Back then, my mother, sister and I didn’t philosophize about the meaning of our shifting roles. We never called it feminist or felt liberated or patted ourselves on the back for being self-sufficient. Each of us did what had to be done, from babysitting every weekend so Mom could work a double shift to lying about our age to get an after-school job at thirteen. My stepfather held steadfastly to what he understood as his place in our home: he would hand over a portion of his weekly earnings to my mother and spend his free time in church or playing dominoes with friends. He never really opined or questioned what we were doing to make it work, satisfied that he had done enough.

Little by little his silence painted him invisible.

We didn’t quite take him for granted. That would have required first recognizing his presence. We simply went about our lives, bumping into him like an old rocking chair left around for its evocative significance. My mother wasn’t much help either. She was so consumed by threading together the delicate coexistence of two families—she, my sister and I, and she, her husband and two new children—that his eventual erasure went unnoticed. At times it seemed she was still making sense of the big-city marriage meant to rescue her from the provincial life her first husband’s death had led to.

In the beginning, my stepfather accepted his role as breadwinner with the grace and discipline of a mule conditioned to toil the earth. He went to work, went to church and played husband and father with the dignity his rural upbringing and elementary education had endowed. That suited everyone fine until I became a teenager full of ideas and opinions. Why didn’t my stepfather help around the house more? Why did I have to sacrifice my after-school activities to baby-sit his children? Church became his sanctuary, a place to run to when the demands of a full-time family became too great. He joined the choir, became a deacon’s assistant and rose to leader of the circle of prayer. My mother accepted his divine therapy, but I failed to understand why he was allowed to hide in church on weeknights while my mother, sister and I raised his kids.

 

Soon my questions evolved into confrontations laced with spite and resentment. I started feeling trapped, but luckily college was around the corner. Like a soldier off to basic training, I came back from my first year with more ideas, questions and artillery. Even after just one semester of college I was armed with the arrogance and ignorance of an intellectual ashamed of her beginnings. Why was my family so incapable of getting it together? Why were we not as progressive as the families who dotted my college campus on Family Weekend?