“Don’t allow your mind to be stuck in those times either and write everyone off, or you’ll just be acting as backward as that woman with the ridiculous face,” says the woman, sliding into her designated aisle so that I can pass. “No disrespect, mi hija, but some of the Americans de tú generación think you’re above it all, but you’re just as bad, with all that ‘nigga this’ and ‘mi nigga, mi nigga, dímelo locó’—eso sí está bastante feo.”
I hate to admit it, but she’s right. With the fusillade of “this nigga, my nigga, that nigga, come on nigga, tú ’ta pasao nigga, yo nigga, nigga look good, that nigga crazy” you hear walking down my block—any block, playground, post office, supermarket, gas station, restaurant, in any Latino ’hood, really—you wouldn’t be too far off to think the word could be translated to mean everything from “friend,” “foe,” “please,” “egg sandwich,” and “How does my hair look?” If Latino-American rappers from Cypress Hill to Fat Joe and Immortal Technique want to truly rep what the streets are saying, they simply aren’t dropping enough n-bombs into their lyrics. Today, I’d be embarrassed by my nineteen-year-old self for thinking it was somehow cool and revolutionary, in a hip-hop context, to drop it so often.
I walk all the way down near to the last aisle and sink into my way-worse-than-coach window seat. I don’t care that the stench from the bathroom is already overpowering due to the many kids who haven’t been able to make it to the toilet in time and peeing on the floor instead. I don’t care that the loud family with fifteen plastic-wrapped suitcases is sitting in the aisles next to and behind me. I won’t bark, “Yo, my little egg sandwich, can you please stop kicking me?” at one of the little rugrats sitting directly behind me who will kick the shit out of my seat for the duration of the three-and-a-half-hour flight. I’m starting to feel too excited to be going back to the island to even think about bugging out.
Instead, I’ll spend the time rereading an interesting bit of information I recently stumbled upon when researching Latino migration to New York City. I’ve walked by the plaque many times in Riverside Park, recognizing him as the first merchant and non-Native inhabitant of color on the island, but I never gave this guy, Jan Rodrigues (also spelled Juan Rodriguez), a thought until now.
Although he was the first non-Indigenous resident to live in Manhattan, Jan Rodrigues is sort of a footnote in New York City history. There’s currently not a wealth of information on him other than a short, albeit dramatic, narrative he was at the center of and a few mind-blowing biographical details.
Jan was born Juan Rodrigues in Santo Domingo—that’s right, today’s Dominican Republic—to a Portuguese father and an African mother. There are few details describing what Rodrigues looked like: “black,” “mulatto,” and “black Spaniard.”
Rodrigues arrived on the island of modern-day Manhattan in June 1613 as a crew member on the Dutch explorer Thijs Volchertz Mossel’s Jonge Tobias. When Mossel broke out to Amsterdam shortly thereafter, leaving Rodrigues behind, allegedly over some major beef, the sailor was given eighty hatchets, knives, a musket, and a sword. This payment suggests that he was either a former soldier or could have been given an advance on future services, a common practice by sea captains who left crew members behind.
That August, Captain Hendrick Christiansen steered his vessel, the Fortuyn, to shore and anchored in Lenapehoking. There, Christiansen met Rodrigues—he introduced himself as “a free man”—and immediately solicited his services as an interpreter with the local Rockaway Indians. Rodrigues ultimately facilitated a trade agreement between the Indigenous-Americans and Christiansen.
All was well until Captain Mossel returned on the Jonge Tobias in April of the following year. Vexed as hell by all accounts, he contributed a new adjective to describe Rodrigues in the annals of early New York City history: “black rascal.” What ensued was like a scene out of The Warriors: Mossel, feeling too betrayed and distraught to go to fisticuffs with Rodrigues himself, sent his crew to jump him, leaving the Dominican man wounded. If not for the intervention of Christiansen’s posse, Rodrigues’s story likely would have ended right there and then.
Juan Rodrigues, the first freeman of mixed African and European descent to live in Manhattan (he was also the first recorded resident of Governors Island), the first Dominican, and the first person who was racially, ethnically, and culturally similar to modern-day Latinos, disappeared—on paper. There are no records of his death or any more dramas he may have costarred in. What we do know is that Rodrigues, like too many Dominican men before and after him, is said to have fathered several children with Indigenous Rockaway women.
Depending on whom you ask, Rodrigues could be painted as a shady opportunist or a shrewd businessman. What’s arguably most interesting about the scant details of his life isn’t what he did but how he went about doing things in Manhattan. His facility with the Indigenous-American language was a bonus. It was Rodrigues’s transcultural skills that made him an exemplary settler because he managed to set up shop as a successful trader and eke out a comfortable life in Manhattan without slaughtering or displacing the island’s original inhabitants, but by living peacefully among them.
* * *
My spirits aren’t broken as much as they are frazzled once we land in Las Américas International Airport. I clap louder than anyone else in the ass-crack section of coach the instant the wheels touch down on the runway. La familia Saran Wrap have been screaming at one another since we took off about nothing in particular. The little girl sitting behind me doesn’t miss a beat, kicking what feels like Wilfrido Vargas’s merengue anthem “El Baile del Perrito,” on the back of my seat while we wait in the humid cabin for almost an hour for a gate to become available.
I turn on my iPhone and browse through the photos my grandmother lent me to scan. There are several photos I’ve come across at different times over the years: Rocío and my aunt Paloma as children; Mama and Papa’s wedding; me as a baby in Santo Domingo posing with Antonio, Paloma, my poodle Oliver, my grandparents, and my favorite toy, a Donald Duck mobile. A photo of a born-again virginal Rocío in a white wedding dress with poufy sleeves, gazing into the goat castrator’s eyes on their wedding day, makes me laugh out loud every time I see it.
There are also photos I’ve never seen until recently. There’s one of Rocío’s maternal grandfather, a tobacco-colored impeccably dressed man with severely slanted eyes and a full head of neatly coiffed hair. There’s a picture of a couple of Don Manuel’s sisters, one whose features probably favor her father Elpidio’s Haitian mother, holding a baby Rocío on her lap. I’d never seen a photo of Elpidio’s mother but was told her last name was Durán and that she was either Haitian or half Haitian. Papa’s mother, Emilia, a woman whose own mother was born in Puerto Rico, is as hard on the eyes as I remember her being in person. She is posing with her head covered and wearing clothes that hide her figure. There’s an air of ice-cold prudishness about her that still makes me shiver.
There’s a photo of an annoyed Don Manuel and a giddy teenage Rocío on the day of her wedding to Dad at Paraíso. Papa looks disgusted as he walks his firstborn down the makeshift aisle, surely regretting the day he allowed the esteemed doctor Antonio Zaglul to intervene on the couple’s behalf. I’m told that the flower girl marching in front of them became a drug addict and died of an overdose when she grew up.
Then there’s Casilda, Ismael’s mother, Dad’s paternal grandmother. I know so little about Dad’s side of the family, and like him, I am mostly indifferent toward them. Casilda’s photograph is the most striking out of the bunch because she’s such a mystery, especially now that Dad told me she was a seer. Her hair is pulled back in a bun, showcasing a face that is somewhere between beautiful and handsome. The world is reflected in her features: epicanthic eye folds, a wide nose, and full, unsmiling lips. The photo looks like it was taken for official use; the rust from an old staple marks the upper right corner of the small sepia head shot. I am hoping to trace Casilda’s direct maternal ancestr
y on this trip if her only living son, Dad’s uncle Arquimedes, agrees to let me scrape his cheeks.
* * *
Making my way out of the terminal in Santo Domingo, I try not to look like a zombie as I pass the throngs of people waiting impatiently for family members and would-be theft victims. It’s hard to tell who’s who in the sea of smiling faces cheerfully waving by the exit.
The biggest mistake at this airport is to look or act like you don’t know where you’re going or whom you’re meeting, even if you’re of Dominican descent. An acquaintance from a local nongovernmental organization emailed me something I dismissed as hyperbole back home. I asked her why, after watching a news story on Spanish-language news, there are so many iron barriers enclosing homes in the capital. Why are people locking their homes from the inside, making sections of Santo Domingo look like gated Hasidic neighborhoods dotting Brooklyn. She wrote me back that Santo Domingo is almost like Miami in the 1970s and ’80s, with cocaine cowboys running amok, fanning a rise in overall crime. The gates have become a part of life on this island. Yesterday’s conquistadores, capitalists, and missionaries are today’s drug lords, capitalists, and underpaid policemen, all profiteering off the misery they fuel.
My paraíso, it seems, has been riddled with bullets and gaping holes from Tony Montana’s souped-up M16 assault rifle–grenade launcher. Yet I have learned to love this place over the years, for better and worse, almost as much as I did and do New York City since moving back in the ’80s, bullet holes and all.
I nod and smile at folks waiting for family members. Dominicans carry within them the history of the island in their phenotypes as much as they do in their blood. I see a collage of pre-Columbian, African, and European history on their bodies though it’s difficult for many of us to see ourselves as being more than different shades of white. Over the years, people have told me that there isn’t such thing as a Taíno or African left in the Dominican Republic. They are right—there is no such thing as a pure anyone on the island, much less a pure Spaniard or European. The fukú many people here and the world over shoulder is a bad case of Stockholm syndrome for their colonial masters.
I look through the crowd for the driver I arranged to pick me up, a man named Lenin, whom I quiz before agreeing to leave the airport with him. Driving down El Malecón makes me feel like I’m back home—not my home, exactly, but a close relative or friend’s home—where there is an abundance of confianza. This is a place where magic happens but where I know better than to overstay my welcome.
* * *
This is how spirit works here if you allow intuition, or your guías, to lead the way. Less than two years ago, I came to Santo Domingo to partake in an international film festival. I didn’t call the only person I knew in the city, my aunt Paloma, whom I’d lost contact with over the years. On our day off, I decided to hang out with my then-fiancé Sacha, in the city’s Zona Colonial, a district where I lived with Rocío for a spell and went to grammar school.
I asked my assigned festival driver to drop Sacha and me anywhere near the Mercado Modelo, a large, mostly indoor market where one can buy an array of typical souvenirs, from mamajuana, amber and larimar jewelry, paintings, and carnival masks to love potions, tambora drums, and tambourines. Botanicas, or spiritual pharmacies, where people can buy whatever they’re prescribed to appease the African gods and Indigenous spirits who still charge the land, line the back entrance of the mercado.
“Por favor, drop me off anywhere near Avenida Mella,” I tell our driver.
“No, you don’t want to go around there, even with that tall boyfriend of yours,” he responded. This guy’s job was to make sure I showed up on time to my scheduled panels and other mandatory events. Because I was casi una dominicana, almost a Dominican, he felt the area was too dangerous. He persisted. “There’s nothing of quality here, and it’s getting so dangerous, especially for foreigners.”
I said nothing. Rather, I suppressed an overwhelming feeling to deck this guy and opened the door the next time he stopped, motioning for Sacha to follow me out of the car.
The street was, as it has always been, teeming with activity. Old men sat drinking café. Haitian men and children selling oranges and vendors harassing people to drop cash in their shops made the street challenging to navigate. Teenage guys and young men, dressed in jeans cinched below their asses in an array of bootleg urban clothing brands, gave the old streets the appearance of a hot summer day on Dyckman. Instead of yelling steady clips of “mira, my nigga, yo, nigga, y que, my nigga,” the youngish toughs spent their time catcalling the mostly white American and European female tourists shopping in the area. “Mira, ma-mi, mami, mami, ma-mi, MAMI, ay, que abusadora.”
As stupid as these guys sounded, handfuls of women stopped to flirt and talk to them. They had their pick. Every taste, as mixed an array as one can find in a large box of chocolates, was represented on the streets: short and long, round and thin, dark to white chocolate, some fruity and others nutty. The potential pot of gold waiting on the other side of the rainbow inspired some to hop on the hanky-panky gravy train and get paid, a prospect to consider in a country where 21 percent of the young men between the ages of fifteen to twenty-four are unemployed.
We walked up the steps to the back entrance of the market. I stopped to ask a vendor if there’d been a surge in popularity of all things botanica, because I didn’t remember seeing so many lining the steps of the mercado. Maybe I just hadn’t paid attention.
“Ay, mi hija, I don’t really know,” said a vendor. “You should go to San Miguel, the first botanica to your left at the top of the stairs, and ask the owner—he and his brother are the mercado’s largest suppliers of spiritual products.”
Though pretty small, San Miguel was fly in comparison to the other spiritual bodegas in the area. An oil painting of the divine dragon slayer that once stood watch behind Maria and Casimiro’s door, and others depicting Dominican life, lined the wall outside San Miguel. Even in the dim light, I could see that all the products were stacked meticulously.
The collales, or colored beads strung into a series of protective necklaces representing the different gods and spirits, glittered. Every Chango Macho, Niño de Antocha, Virgen de la Altagracia, and other saints were lined up like soldiers in formation. The lucky perfume and spiritual water labels faced the front and sparkled as if they had been dusted that morning. The smell of fresh herbs permeated the air.
The customer service wasn’t nearly as good as the presentation. A woman wearing glasses, with long raven hair, sat eating lunch toward the back of the botanica, ignoring me as I tried making small talk. A short burnt caramel–complected man in slacks spoke loudly, even by Dominican standards, to someone at the other end.
“Is that the owner of this botanica?” I asked the woman.
“Sí.” She nodded. “He’s on the phone with a sister-in-law who’s very old.”
I looked around the tiny store, giving myself two more minutes before promising Sacha we’d jet. As I nodded goodbye to the apathetic woman and started to leave, I caught a section of products labeled “Cepeda.” I picked up a bottle of honey and told the woman, “My last name is also Cepeda.”
“That’s nice,” she said. “My husband on the phone is a Cepeda.” She went back to eating.
The man turned around, still on the phone, to change positions. I noticed he wore a mustache and a button-down green gingham shirt, a bit formal for botanica wear. His complexion was as dark as Dad’s would be if he lived in the tropics. The man looked at me and smiled and put his call on hold. “Hola, do you want to buy that bottle of honey?”
“Yes, it would be great to take back home to New York as a recuerdo, because my last name is also Cepeda.”
“Is that so?” he asked. “Are you visiting any Cepeda relatives here?”
“No, I don’t know anyone on my dad’s side here. I know they exist, but I grew up knowing more people on my mother’s side, and most are living in the States now.”
&nbs
p; The man’s face grew serious. He scanned me from head to toe. “Can I ask you a question? What’s your father’s name?” I tell him. “Ay, mira eso,” he told his wife. “I’m her father’s uncle, and she’s my great-niece.” He turned to me. “Your father’s father and I had the same father and were raised together.”
“I’m talking to my sister-in-law, who just saw your father when she was in Nueva York,” added the man, who hold me his name was Jorge. “Let me take you across the hall to Botanica St. Elias to meet your father’s other uncle. He is maybe even younger than you are.”
“This is so weird,” I told Sacha as we headed across the hall. “In a city of more than two-point-two million people in a country about twice the size of New Hampshire, I meet this guy?”
“There are no coincidences, Raquel,” said Jorge. “Nos vemos pronto.”
Of course there aren’t, I thought. There is only divine time.
* * *
And this time will be no different.
I came to la capital with a long list of things to do while in town, which will have to be dramatically cut down because, well, I’m here.
Things don’t get done in Santo Domingo on anybody’s time. The traffic here rivals that of Calcutta and Mexico City, especially in the afternoon. What should be a six-minute car ride without traffic will take at least thirty on the narrow roadways, busting at the seams with guaguas, taxis, trucks, women barely holding on to newborn babies and small children on rickety motoconchos, and horse carts. On the way to the Zona Colonial, I see impossibly old women selling newspapers by the traffic lights under the unforgiving sun, and homeless Dominican and Dominican-Haitian kids, and Haitian children, many smuggled in scores by Haitian traffickers after the earthquake, peddling whatever, to make their daily quotas.
* * *
The cabdriver comes to a screeching halt on the charming Calle Las Mercedes. I stumble out of the car. I’m dizzy from inhaling toxic fumes and emotionally drained. As many forgotten children as I’ve seen and met across continents—the homeless, the sexually abused, those who have miraculously survived being set ablaze, the amputated, the starving, the hated—I have not yet come across a face that has been able to desensitize me. Somehow the bags I’m carrying become heavier with pessimism.
Bird of Paradise Page 23
