My parents were then, as they remain now, deeply invested in the lives of me and my brothers. This investment rarely felt overbearing, but the older I got, the more I realized that they loved and nurtured us in a very specific way. My parents loved us with their whole hearts. They wanted the best for us and expected the best from us—at school with our grades and how we behaved in the classroom, at home with how we treated them and each other, at church as we practiced our faith. All of this expectation was intense, but I know no other way of being part of a family, of being loved. And it wasn’t just my parents, both of whom come from big families. My aunts and uncles and grandmothers were and are just as intense in their love. Now that we’re all adults, my brothers and cousins and I have largely adopted our parents’ ways of loving and looking after each other and our children. The only thing really separating us from one another is our skin, and even that is incidental.
Sometimes, when I think of how I am loved, I am overwhelmed. I can hardly breathe. I can’t wrap my mind around people caring that much about me. Even when I rejected my parents, they were there; they were steadfast in their devotion and determination to love a child who did not want to be loved by them, by anyone. They loved me through the worst things I’ve endured and the worst ways I’ve behaved toward them. They loved me through my tumultuous tweens and twenties. In my thirties, as my life started coming together, they became my friends. Now in my forties, we talk daily. They generally use FaceTime because they don’t just want to hear my voice, they want to see me so they can determine, for themselves, how I am doing. They continue to parent, because Haitian parenting does not end when their children turn eighteen. We do not ever really leave home, even when we eventually leave home. Haitian parents parent forever and do so unapologetically.
A few months ago, my mom texted me about my propensity for profanity, particularly on Twitter. “Clean it up; it’s time,” she said. I had no idea what she was talking about, so I asked and she elaborated, chiding me about “the four-letter word you overuse.” I could only respond, “OMG. Stop stalking me,” to which she quickly replied, “I will not.” That stubborn refusal to let me be a fully grown adult who can make decisions about how she speaks sums up our relationship. That she will not stop caring about who I am and how I am in the world is her way of loving me, my boundaries be damned.
My father also stalks my Twitter account for extra information about me. He knows more about my travels and publications than I do. He is the keeper of my archive. He reads the comments on nearly anything I write, even though I consistently warn him not to, knowing the cruel nature of online discourse, and then he gets furious and righteous on my behalf. Both of my parents attend my events when they can, beaming proudly as I talk about my latest book. They are often flanked by my aunts and uncles, cousins and their children. I don’t just have a family, I have an army. They are omnipresent and overbearing and confident that their way of loving is the right way, the only way.
The older I get, the more I understand why my family loves the way they do. I understand what it took for my parents and their siblings to come to the United States. They had no money. They did not speak the language. They had no guarantee that the American dream would extend to them. All they had was each other. All they had was a fierce kind of love to see them through. When I consider what they sacrificed, what they went through as they made this country their own, and how they never let go of where they came from, it makes perfect sense that they would love without boundaries. They are people who have spent the whole of their lives crossing borders that were, often, unfriendly and unwilling to welcome them. They could not, I imagine, tolerate inhospitable borders within their own family, so they loved us in a wild, irrepressible, boundless way. They taught us to love that way in return, and so we do.
Carmen Perez is the executive director of The Gathering for Justice and has dedicated twenty years to advocating for many of today’s important civil rights issues, including gender equity, violence prevention, racial healing, community policing, and ending mass incarceration.
Carmen Perez
IT HAPPENED ON MY seventeenth birthday—that was the day I decided I was going to change the world. I walked into the church in front of all my family and friends. There was a cake with candles and a dozen bright balloons. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CARMEN AND PATRICIA, read the colorful cake that was placed right beside my sister’s open casket.
Patricia and I had experienced everything in life together. We weren’t twins—just sisters with exactly 366 days between us. But our whole lives, we lived like twins and best friends, sharing a bedroom, birthday parties, friends, and all the hardships of our childhood. When she died in a car accident, I had to start a new life without her. And that’s when it happened—when I decided I was going to fight to make the world a better place. I’d had it in me for a long time, but Patricia’s loss made it real—and urgent.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” I remember my other sister, Leti, asking me several years earlier, when I was still very little. Leti was twelve years older than me, and she probably didn’t expect my answer to be: “I am going to change the world!”
“Oh, okay, Carmen!” She laughed skeptically as she dressed me for ballet practice.
Patricia and I were always listening to music, thinking we could dance and sing our lives away. As kids, we took ballet and as I got older, I did modern jazz and hip-hop. In my mind, I was a professional hip-hop dancer, but I also loved Selena. Although we didn’t speak Spanish or understand it, Patricia and I would both sing along to Selena, pretending to be her. Because she looked like us, with her black hair, high cheekbones, and slanted dark brown eyes, it was a lot easier to imagine we really were her when we sang passionately to our reflections in the mirror.
As we got older, our big brothers (who were older than us by six and fourteen years) introduced us to NWA. I didn’t understand the lyrics any better than Selena’s Spanish, but I knew right off the bat, this music was for me. I was beginning to form my own identity and loved Snoop, Dr. Dre, and DJ Quik. I joined a dance crew called Something Too Sweet that performed at our junior high school and at the local Boys & Girls Club. As a crew, we were about as sweet as Eazy-E himself. Which means we were not sweet. We were hard. At least that’s how we liked to act. I was always the tomboy, with Eazy’s Jheri curl, and I dressed, acted, and walked around like I was in a rap group. I remember being in junior high school when our dance crew performed “We’re All in the Same Gang” by West Coast All-Stars. I wore a black Sacramento Kings hat, a black bomber jacket with Nike Cortez shoes and black Dickies. I rapped the lyrics of the various artists in the song, trying to convey the message to all the other kids in the audience—we were all impacted by gang violence.
Thank God for hip-hop and music in general. Nothing else besides basketball made me so happy at that age. Nothing saved me from the difficult day-to-day in my hood like rapping, playing ball, dancing, and putting on a front of hardness. Hardness with so much joy underneath because I was with my girls.
My dance crew in those days was as diverse as the neighborhood we lived in—made up of the same girls on my basketball team: Mexicans, Chicanas, African-Americans, Samoans, Koreans, and Filipinas. My neighborhood in Oxnard, California, was home to gang violence, drugs, alcohol, poverty, and a whole lot of racial and cultural diversity. There were three naval bases and a lot of migrant workers living side by side—most people surviving on small incomes. Ironically, I look back on it as a wonderful little bubble where I could be whoever I wanted to be. I am the youngest of five kids, the daughter of an American-born Chicano father and a Mexican immigrant mother. My favorite food growing up was the lumpias and pancit made by the Filipina moms in my neighborhood, and one of my nicknames was “Little Samoan.” This was not a dig but a celebration of my kinky hair and facial features. Somehow I resembled my Samoan friends as much as my own parents. I could say “I love you” in several different languages—would yell it to my girlfriends when s
aying goodbye—but I didn’t speak Spanish—my mother’s only language.
I used a lot of slang with my friends, saying things like “Whazzz sup?”
“¿Por qué hablas así?” (“Why do you talk like that?”) my mom used to ask me, her eyes wide with concern, love, and confusion.
She was a Mexican immigrant who was mostly monolingual and extremely monolithic in her love for the Catholic Church. She left her family in Mexico to marry my father in California, after they fell in love on a dance floor in Jerez, Zacatecas, when he was on a road trip with his cousin. Once in California, my young, strong parents worked the fields, but by the time I was born—their fifth child over the span of fourteen years—my father was working as a forklift driver and my mom packed frozen food at a plant. She worked very long hours but still made time for her side gig: praying hard for the community. There was not one incarcerated family member, drug-addicted friend, or gang member on the streets who didn’t receive her prayers. On the daily. Even though she married a Chicano man from California with a good twenty years on her, she was a proper, God-fearing woman who never dreamed her own daughter would dress like a rapper and play ball like the boys. She did her best to raise her five children, but the long hours she and my father worked meant leaving Patricia and me to be raised by our older siblings.
Unlike our mother, Patricia and I were not monolithically anything, especially not monolithically Mexican. Our three older siblings were bilingual—the bridge between my Spanish-speaking parents and me—and they brought me and Patricia up to speak English—and only English. I was not part of the protective Mexican family you hear about who lights candles and goes to church. Our older siblings made sure we played sports and were out in the community. On holidays, we’d exchange food with the Wilsons, a black family across the street. They gave us pecan pies and we provided them with tamales. We loved growing up in a neighborhood with so many different cultures. I was never uncomfortable speaking with someone else about their background or their home life. I gladly tasted their foods, listened to their music, and drank in all our differences. I was culturally fluid and happy and not tightly connected to just being Mexican.
If anything was first and foremost about my identity, it was that I danced hip-hop and played basketball.
Since Patricia was older than me, we usually played on different basketball teams, but we shared the same coach, who was often like a dad to many of us. Pat Bell was a brave black man stepping into a diverse community that was very much not his own. Our parents relied on Pat to keep us safe and off the streets. He was hope for them. They knew that if we were with Pat, we were going to be okay. Pat was a man who demanded respect. He was dark-brown-skinned, five feet eleven inches tall, and had a nineties flattop. He spoke assertively, and he himself could do anything he asked of us on the court. Thinking back now, Pat only spoke English, but somehow he knew how to communicate with our parents. Pat’s family came from the South, and he was rooted in Southern traditions, raised playing the guitar in his Baptist church. He would often make us attend church with him to keep an eye on us, and, believe me, there was no dispute coming from our parents, even though they were devout Catholics. As long as we were praising God and off the streets, they were content.
Coach Pat had so much confidence in us, and he was the first adult in my life who told me through his actions that I had power in me and he would help me find it. On his court, I sometimes felt that I really would change the world. He was not concerned with what language you spoke at home, how little you saw your parents at home, or what kind of hardships you dealt with behind closed doors. He just knew you needed a home away from home to clean the slate and keep you safe.
“Run it off, Perez!” he used to say when I would arrive at practice visibly shaken, tired, or angry about one of the many hardships of my life. I was the best at suicide drills, running off the pain so fast on the court that he got me into track and softball too, which he also coached. He offered me a place to be, where the best part of myself was awakened, relevant, necessary. Sports were my salvation, and Coach Bell was our home base throughout our entire childhood—even when my sister Patricia and I would fight. He would show up to pick me up from my home and take me to his house for dinner or to the court to shoot around.
There was comfort on the court, in the drills and regimens, in getting so sweaty and loud with your best friends every day. At every single practice and game, Coach made us repeat his five values:
1) Never give up
2) Dedication
3) Determination
4) Confidence
5) Family
Every girl on the team could repeat these backward and forward. The team looked something like this: Vanessa (who we called Vern) was Mexican. Charleen was a light-skinned Mexican girl whose family was super Chicano—her brothers would all drive nice old cars. Then there was Korina, who we called Popcorn because she used to pop up to get the rebound and then pop up to put the ball right back in. She was from a household with monolingual Spanish-speaking parents and was very culturally Mexican, but she knew how to navigate both worlds. Trish was Korean but adopted and raised by a white mom. We rubbed our skinned knees together to become blood sisters in fifth grade, and we are still best friends to this day. Shawanda, who was black, was the Michael Jordan of our basketball team. She had hops! And Louisa was Samoan. As kids, we were curious and loved listening to Louisa’s parents speak. In fact, we learned how to address all our teammates’ parents with respect, calling them mom or dad in their native languages.
Our lineup may sound more diverse than your typical girls basketball team, but in Oxnard, it wasn’t that unusual for Latinas to hang with black girls, or Korean girls to hang with Samoan girls. Our overlapping struggles both on and off the court made us more alike than different. But when we left our neighborhood for traveling games we encountered racism right and left. People couldn’t believe that Samoan and Chicana girls could play ball. It was outside their expectations and just plain threatening. Especially given how confident and spirited we were rolling into a gym together. The best possible reaction to the sight of us was usually a raised eyebrow, and the worst was a crowbar to our taillights and windshield.
There were many times when we were underestimated, and that just made us more determined to show the other teams where we came from. We would dust them up by thirty, forty, and sometimes fifty points, which didn’t make them too happy. We caught a lot of aggressive shoves in the lineup after the game when you’re supposed to slap hands and say “good game.” One time, the shoves led to an actual fight, so we were kept inside, handed a box full of all our trophies, and finally excused—only to find that our van had been vandalized.
Getting our car smashed in by rival teams was nothing. As we got older, we were waking up to the world outside our bubble of sisterhood, and that world included all kinds of violence and racism. We watched on TV while Rodney King was beaten by the police and saw Los Angeles go up in flames less than an hour away. One time on the drive home from one of my games, my brother got pulled over. Patricia and I were in the back seat, and my teammates were in the bed of the truck—all of us still in our uniforms, sweaty and ready to go home and shower. I’ll never forget the police officers making my brother get out of the car with his hands up and then throwing him to the ground, hog-tying him at gunpoint right in front of me and all my teammates. Then the police made all of us put up our hands, and we were escorted to sit on the curb at gunpoint. As I watched my brother’s face being pushed into the pavement, I wished the police could see my brother the way I saw him. The way my Samoan, Korean, Filipina, Chicana, black, and white sisters all saw each other: as family.
Coach always taught us that you can’t get the ball in the basket if you have drama with your teammates. You won’t communicate well on the court if you don’t legit hang out with each other off the court. And unless you truly see each other as sisters, you cannot protect each other and you cannot win games.
I thi
nk Coach knew we would need each other well beyond the basketball court. And he was right—we would need each other our whole lives. When each and every one of us went through personal hardships, we always had each other’s backs. It was a blessing that I was never on the same team as Patricia, because it allowed me to form a sisterhood with other girls, who I would need after Patricia passed. We were all there for each other. Throw anything at us, and the friendship of our crazy little circle would get us through.
And when Patricia died, I survived because of them. It was through their prayers and visits that I felt Patricia near. Having this sisterhood helped me understand it was one of the greatest strengths in my life. There was so much violence and hardship around us, and if anything was ever going to change, we would have to stick together. After losing Patricia, I wanted to fight all the wrongs I saw in the world. My sister wasn’t going to be able to speak anymore, so I would have to speak for the both of us.
After the funeral, my mother took me to Mexico to visit her family for the first time. It was a part of how she mourned her daughter. To go home—the place of her birth, where she hadn’t been for so many years. It was strange to grieve for Patricia in a place she herself had never even been. I felt her absence strongly in that new place. I was lonely, sad, and for the first time in my life, I felt very foreign. I felt out of place—among people who were my family. I was shocked to find that my cousins there all spoke English, which they had learned at school—no big deal. They wondered why I hadn’t learned to speak Spanish at school—or at home with my own parents. I recognized an internal hidden sadness that I was not connected to this Mexican part of myself. I wondered if I had grown up too disconnected from what I was supposed to be. Was I missing something by not knowing more about my roots? Was it wrong to feel more urban, more basketball, more hip-hop than Mexican?
American Like Me Page 7
