Bird of Paradise
Page 32
“Do the Four Clades of the mtDNA Haplogroup L2 Evolve at Different Rates?,” Antonio Torroni, et al. J Hum Genet, 2004; 69(6): 1348–1356. Full text is available online at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1235545/citedby/makes mention of the L3 branch though focuses on the L2 haplogroup findings in 127 unrelated men from Santo Domingo and San Juan de la Maguana, Dominican Republic.
“Genetic Background of People in the Dominican Republic With or Without Obese Type 2 Diabetes Revealed by Mitochondrial DNA Polymorphism.” Tajima A, et al. J Hum Genet, 2004; 49(9): 495–99. Available online at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/15368103/.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: FLASH OF THE SPIRIT
In true hip-hop fashion, I sampled the title of this chapter from my favorite Robert Farris Thompson book, Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy (Random House, 1983).
The late human rights activist and feminist Sonia Pierre fought for the rights of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent on the island. She founded Movement of Dominican Women of Haitian Descent in the early 1980s. There’s no room here to list all of her accomplishments and the work she’s done for her community. To read more about her, watch videos, and read the latest news, visit: http://rfkcenter.org/sonia-pierre-4?lang=en.
I wrote an article for the Village Voice exploring the use of the N-word in the Latino hip-hop community and generation. The piece, “The N-Word Is Flourishing Among Generation Hip-Hop Latinos” (2008), can be viewed at: http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-10-22/music/the-n-word-is-flourishing-among-generation-hip-hop-latinos/.
It was folklorist and City Lore founder Steve Zeitlin who first turned me on to Jan Rodrigues, also known as Juan Rodrigues. Zeitlin also introduced me to the author Steven H. Jaffe, who put me on to some sources. A number of books briefly tell Juan Rodrigues’s story. One is Graham Russell Hodges’s Root & Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999), in which pages 6 and 7 are really good. Page 318 in Unearthing Gotham: The Archaeology of New York City (Yale University Press, 2001), coauthored by Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall, contains biographical information on Rodrigues. The book Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (The History of New York City) (Oxford University Press, USA, 2000), by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, mentions Jan Rodrigues on page 19. In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (University of Chicago Press, 2004), by Leslie M. Harris, mentions Rodrigues on pages 12 and 13. Simon Hart, The Prehistory of the New Netherland Company: Amsterdam Notarial Records of the First Dutch Voyages (City of Amsterdam Press, 1959), notes “the presence of the mulatto Jan Rodrigues, of San Domingo” on the island of Manhattan. Rodrigues’s ethnicity has been taken away on occasion, including in Ira Berlin and Leslie Harris’s Slavery in New York (The New Press, 2005), which just lists him as solely “Black” on page 34. The primary source from which all of Juan Rodrigues’s biographical information is culled, the New Netherland Institute’s Charles T. Gehring tells me, can be found in Simon Hart’s The Prehistory of the New Netherland Company, Amsterdam Notarial Records of the First Dutch Voyages to the Hudson (City of Amsterdam, 1959). There’s a plaque in Riverside Park recognizing Rodrigues as the first merchant and non-Native-American inhabitant of Manhattan.
The Columbian Exchange is mentioned in Charles Mann’s epic 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (Knopf, 2011), citing a term that historian Alfred W. Crosby coined to describe what happened to previously separated ecosystems after Columbus. On page 11, Mann writes about the dramatic impact that the Columbian Exchange had on humankind by citing Hispaniola, or modern-day Dominican Republic, as an example. 1493 is one of the sources I use for information on La Isabela in 1494 and La Navidad.
The term “hanky-panky,” someone on the island hipped me to, is the Dominican equivalent of Jamaica’s “rent-a-dread,” in which local men rent themselves out to mostly white European and American tourists in exchange for romance and/or sex and attention.
The 21 percent unemployment rate for young men between the ages of fifteen to twenty-four comes from the CIA’s World Factbook, available online at: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/dr.html.
The 1950s study I cited is from late researcher José de Jesús Alvarez Perelló’s paper “La Mezcla de Razas en Santo Domingo y Los Factores Sanguineos (EME EME),” Vol. 2, No. 8 (Sept.–Oct. 1973).
Arlin Feliciano Vélez’s paper Genetic Prints of Amerindian Female Migrations Through Genetic Prints of Amerindian Female Migrations Through the Caribbean Revealed by Control Sequences from Dominican Haplogroup A Mitochondrial DNAs (University of Puerto Rico, 2006) suggests the presence of nine lineages: six possibly Native and three of recent, probably post-Hispanic origin.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: SHE WHO WALKS BEHIND ME
The material from Lynne Guitar’s story comes mostly from my interview with her in 2011. At the time she was devoted to educating her students about Taíno history and to retention as director at the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE) at the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra, based in Santiago de los Caballeros. Her paper “Documenting the Myth of Taíno Extinction,” in Kacike: Journal of Caribbean Amerindian History and Anthropology (2002), is required reading, as is “What Really Happened at Santo Cerro? Origin of the Legend of the Virgin de las Mercedes” in Issues in Caribbean Amerindian Studies (Occasional Papers of the Caribbean Amerindian Centrelink), Vol. 3 (2001–2002).
Dr. Fernando Luna Calderón wrote “Mitochondrial DNA in the Dominican Republic” in the Kacike: The Journal of Caribbean Amerindian History and Anthropology (2002) (online journal), special issue, Lynne Guitar, Ed., available online at: http://www.kacike.org/CalderonEnglish.pdf.
Elizabeth M. Grieco and Rachel C. Cassidy coauthored Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin: 2000 as part of “2000 Census Briefs” (March 2001; available online at: http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/c2kbr01-1.pdf).
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: PARADISE GONE
Jacobo Majluta Azar was veep of the Dominican Republic from 1978 to 1982. He was president for forty-two days after Antonio Guzmán committed suicide.
Bartolomé de las Casas owned slaves until 1544, wrote David Brion Davis in Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford University Press, 2008), pages 354–55.
Frank Moya Pons is inarguably a walking encyclopedia of Dominican and Caribbean history. He is the author of many books and papers on the subject. Here are a few of his writings I leaned on when sourcing Dominican history in this chapter: The Dominican Republic: A National History (New York: Hispaniola Books, 1995), History of the Caribbean: Plantations, Trade, and War in the Atlantic World (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2007), and La Otra Historia Dominicana (Santo Domingo: Librería La Trinitaria, 2008). Moya Pons’s paper “A Mulatto Nation: Notes on the Racial Evolution of the Dominican Republic” (Academia Dominicana de la Historia, 2011) was also helpful, as is “Dominican National Identity and Return Migration,” Occasional Papers of the Center for Latin American Studies, No. 1 (Gainesville: University of Florida, 1982).
The rebellion on Diego Columbus and Melchor de Castro’s sugar plantation is mentioned in the writings of Moya Pons and other books. I cited Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America (Monthly Review Press; Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition, 1997), page 83.
I learned about the passing of Law 391 in September 1943 in an awesome read by Silvio Torres-Saillant titled “The Tribulations of Blackness: Stages in Dominican Racial Identity,” from Latin American Perspectives 25:3 (May 1998).
I emphasized the word “perceived” because when Trujillo’s was in power, it would have made sense that what his goons were witnessing wasn’t a pure African spiritual expression but a mixture of African and Indigenous religious practices. African and Indigenous peoples lived together in runaway slave communities, so the fusion, like our own racial makeup, is a natural consequence of this mixing
.
Ginetta E. B. Candelario wrote an excellent book called Black Behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops (Duke University Press Books, 2007). It’s a good point of departure to discuss racial identity in our community. I found the chapter titled “It Is Said That Haiti Is Getting Blacker and Blacker: Traveling Narratives of Dominican Identity” particularly useful when referring to how Dominicans were painted as white in relation to Haitians by American statesmen, journalists, and travel writers.
There are least thirty-two hundred Taíno words in the Dominican and Caribbean Spanish lexicon. Emiliano Tejera’s book Palabras Indígenas de la Isla de Santo Domingo (Editora del Caribe, 1951), Dr. Cayetano Coll y Toste’s Prehistoria de Puerto Rico (CreateSpace, 2011), Nicolás Fort y Roldan’s Cuba Indígena (R. Moreno and R. Rojas, 1881), and Manuel Álvarez Nazario’s El Influjo Indígena en el Español de Puerto Rico (Editorial Universitaria, Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1977) are several dictionaries and sources detailing Taíno retention in our Spanish-based Creole. Some American English words influenced by the Taíno language are: barbecue (barbacoa), hammock (hamaca), tobacco (tabaku), guava (guayaba), potato (batata), and savannah (sabana), to name just a few.
Speaking of pajonasos—or untrained, wild, and worse, not fried straight—hair: Kimberly Eison Simmons is the president of the Association of Black Anthropologists and associate professor of anthropology and African-American studies at University of South Carolina. I dig her accessible and balanced book Reconstructing Racial Identity and the African Past in the Dominican Republic (University Press of Florida, 2011), especially for the clear parallels she draws between Black-American and Dominican culture and the differences between “denying” and “hiding” one’s blackness on pages 2 through 4.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: BECOMING LATINA
CNN originally reported on the elderly woman in Azle, Texas, titled “Racist Sign Targets Hispanics” in 2009. It’s available online at: http://cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/us/2009/07/24/hispanics.keep.out.WFAA.html.
To read more about the resurgence of the antigovernment “patriot” movement, visit http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/ideology/patriot-movement, and for the weird wild world of the sovereign citizens’ movement, check out http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/ideology/sovereign-citizens-movement.
Every Tuesday afternoon in the museum’s rotunda, Jorge Estevez gives these spirited talks about Taíno artifacts and history. If you find yourself in New York City, it’s a worthwhile trek to the National Museum of the American Indian, on Bowling Green, to check him out. Visit http://nmai.si.edu for more information. Tell him I sent you. Estevez is quoted in an interesting article by Robert M. Poole titled “What Became of the Taíno?,” published in Smithsonian magazine (October 2011; available online at: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/What-Became-of-the-Taino.html).
Amy Green wrote a wonderful article titled “Some US Hispanics Trace Their Jewish Past” for the Christian Science Monitor, about a Latina who discovers her Sephardic Jewish roots through ancestral DNA testing (December 2008; available online at: http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2008/1229/p03s05-ussc.html).
Rav DovBer Pinson is a world-renowned scholar, author of more than a dozen books and booklets, a Kabbalist, and a master of both the revealed and hidden aspects of Torah. I’m forever grateful to him for fitting me into his crazy-busy schedule for the interview from which his section is sourced. His book Jewish Wisdom on the Afterlife: The Mysteries, The Myths, and the Meaning (Q&A Books, 2006) is required reading to learn more about gilgul neshamot. Rav DovBer Pinson heads the IYYUN Center: www.iyyun.com.
RAQUEL CEPEDA is an award-winning new-media journalist and documentary filmmaker. A cultural activist, she focuses her work on issues affecting communities of color around the world. She produced and directed Bling: A Planet Rock, the critically acclaimed film about American hip-hop culture’s obsession with diamonds. Cepeda lives with her husband, a writer and television producer, and children in her beloved New York City.
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INDEX
A
Academia Dominicana de la Historia, 216–17
Aceyalone, 131
Adnane (Moroccan guide), 176–77, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188
Africa
ancestry DNA project and, 150
Dominican ancestry and, 234, 245–51, 254, 255, 274
See also specific nation
African American Lives (television series), 157
Alhambra Decree, 233
Alvarez, Cucho, 238
Amazigh people. See Berbers
American Airlines crash (Queens, New York), 137
American Dream, 108
Americans, hyphenated, 177
Amerindians, 218, 221, 225, 233–34, 263, 266, 273–74
Amina (Moroccan tourist guide), 178, 181, 182, 183, 184, 186, 187, 188
Amparo, Doña (Maria’s neighbor), 126–27, 128, 129
ancestry DNA project
Blacks and, 157
Chickasaw Indians and, 157
Guitar and, 232–34, 244
haplogroups in, 191
Latinos and, 151–52, 158
Life is Precious teens and, 273–74
mothers and, 159
Raquel’s travels and, 154
Raquel’s views about, 156–57
as road to self-discovery, 269
as time machine, 145
See also Genographic Project; Morocco, Raquel’s trip to; Santo Domingo, Raquel’s ancestry trip to; specific person
anti-Semitism, 82–83
Anzaldua, Gloria, 87
Arabs/Arabia, 138, 139, 160, 163–64, 173, 189, 234, 239, 240, 256–57. See also Berbers
Arawak people, 218
Atlas (Greek god), 184–85
B
b-boys, 52–53, 54–55, 117
b-girls, 53, 59
Balaguer, Joaquín, 207, 250, 251
Baptiste, Gerard, 33, 37, 38, 39
Baptiste, Jean, 33, 35, 36–37
Baptiste, Pascal “Papito,” 26–28, 29–40, 74, 203
Beat Down magazine, 153
Beat Street (movie), 57–58, 72
bembé (spiritual drumming), 180
Berbers, 161, 163, 173, 175, 176, 179, 184, 185, 189, 240
Blackie (Maria’s neighbor), 96–97, 99, 100–101, 106–7, 116, 117, 124, 140
Blacks
ancestry of, 157
as dancers, 59–60
Goetz shooting of, 61–62
resentment against, 62
as “sisters,” 71
Taínos as, 263
See also specific person
Bling: A Planet Rock (Raquel’s documentary), 155
Blondie (singer), 42, 47
Body Rock (movie): filming of, 56–57
Bolaño, Robert, 160
Boston, Massachusetts: Raquel’s visit with Rocío in, 73–78, 174
botanicas
in Harlem, 225–26
in Santo Domingo, 213–16, 221, 224, 228
Brand Nubian, 109, 111
Brooklyn, New York
race relations in, 135
Raquel’s interest
in, 132
brothels
Antonio’s experiences in, 14–17
in New York City, 56
Bumpurs, Eleanor, 108
Bush, George W., 177
C
car/truck accident
death of old lady in, 128–29
Eduardo’s dream about neighbors’, 166
Carib people, 218, 219
Casimiro (Maria’s common law husband)
Angel-Raquel relationship and, 92, 101
drugs of, 100
Eduardo’s refusal to shake hands with, 93–94
leaves Maria, 106–7, 109, 112, 127
Maria’s relationship with, 89, 90, 91, 92–93, 94, 95, 97, 101, 111, 137, 140
racial views of, 111
Raquel in Pittsburgh and, 121
Raquel’s conversations with, 91–92, 93–94, 104, 117, 121, 156
Raquel’s relationship with, 89, 101, 112
and Raquel’s spiritual guides, 93–94, 131, 156, 194, 225
St. Michael painting and, 214
womanizing of, 93, 101
Catherine (teacher/Sister at St. Thaddeus), 67
Catholicism, 68, 72, 220, 222, 233, 246, 250
census, U.S.: classifications in, 164, 235, 255
Cepeda, Alice (Eduardo’s second wife)
ancestry DNA project and, 153–54, 163–64, 227–28, 264
appearance of, 43, 55
as cook, 46–47
Eduardo-Raquel relationship and, 48–49, 53–54, 69, 88, 104, 113, 115, 139, 147
Eduardo’s family stories and, 171
Eduardo’s illness and, 146, 147
Eduardo’s marriage to, 41
Eduardo’s relationship with, 44–45, 47, 48–49, 53–54, 78, 88, 113, 133, 149, 164
Ercilia and, 62, 65, 66, 79
family photographs and, 115, 162, 163