Abuela was born in Puerto Rico around 1942. You could never be too sure with their birthdates. I know
a few people who were born in the islands, either Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic, and they don’t know their birthday. She never spoke much about her days in Puerto Rico, but I never asked her why.  She used to have one picture from Puerto Rico in our family album. It was wrinkled, black and white and she has one of the few smiles I had ever seen on her face. She sat in a decorative chair looking into the camera, her eyes youthful and vibrant. Two hands put a white crown on her head, her hair short but well done. There were few people in the background of the picture but no one paid her any mind. A queen lonely at her throne.

She touched down onto the Bronx soil when she was 17 years old.  Their first apartment was on 168^th Street and Trinity Avenue.. She came with her mother, our great-grandmother, who died before we could ever get to know her. Abuela didn’t talk about her much either; she held on to her flickering flame of her memory with a single wallet size picture. It was discolored and worn; with a single date written on the back. Her hair was dark gray and white; it was not styled and laid flat against her face. Her eyes were dark and unquestionably tired. Her skin was wrinkled and seemingly hung from her facial bones. Her neck leaned forward and her shoulders slumped against the background curtain. Her shirt was patterned and unbuttoned at the collar. The shirt looked too big and her pants too small. She looked battered; life had taken its fair share of homerun swings at her. She couldn’t keep score anymore. Abuela kept it tucked on the corner of her mirror in her bedroom, the picture never moved. It was a constant reminder of what they had gone through; and a peek into her a possible futurelife. But abuela was too vibrant and loved Barcadi too much for that shit. She hung it there, but that picture would never be her mirror image.

She witnessed police brutality; she saw her fellow Puerto Ricans and Bronx natives mistreated and ostracized.  She always said she never understood why they were so silent; she said maybe they didn’t know their rights.  Maybe they were too scared; maybe the heat of a bullet was enough to silence the frosty nature of cultural assimilation.  The true meaning of the old Bronx Cheer.

Abuela wasn’t alone for long. In three weeks after her arrival, her two younger sisters and her brother arrived to the Bronx. The three of them moved in with Abuela and their mother. Her father was a mystery. No one knew where he was. Shit, I never even heard her talk about him. He was such a mysterious figure I always wondered if my great grandmother had her children via the Immaculate Conception. Fathers were always some kind of surreal figure to most people like us. We would see them a handful of times and each moment you would just stare at them; wondering where they had gone. Questioning whether they would ever come back. They were strong enough to fight it; they all went to school for a short period of time, but that didn’t last long. Neither did abuela’s single status.

He was rather dark for a Puerto Rican. Without question he was short, but strong willed and closed minded. Abuelo was already here in the Bronx by the time he met her. He was a young superintendent for a dilapidated building over on Grant Avenue. He had a thick mustache that hung over his thin lips and his hair was straighter than 9:15 on the clock. Moms used to tell us that it was only that straight because he didn’t want the world to know that he was more Moreno than Spaniard. He hated his dark skin and his
coarse, curly hair. He spent his limited wages on hair relaxers and all types of poisonous hair products. His smile was charismatic and could light up the basement of the apartment that he lived in. They met at a party on the Grand Concourse; he sent her a barcadi rum and coke in a small plastic cup. She accepted it out of courtesy rather than interest. He wore a pair of brown bell bottoms that were too tight around his flat Puerto Rican ass and were ball busters in the front. His polyester shirt was opened at the top collar; too bright and big for his frail body. His platform shoes were black and hard. The heel was over three inches high; the first of many lies that abuela never saw coming.

After about seven or eight of those small cups of rum, they were dancing salsa in the middle of the living room.  Abuela was always a good dancer, shit I wished she taught me how to move. Before she knew it, abuela was pregnant. There was no love affair, no dates at the Botanical Gardens or strolls on Orchard Beach.  Only a pissed off mother who wondered aloud what was her sixteen year-old daughter thinking. Abuela found herself on the outside looking in; her mother didn’t exactly tell her to leave, but she didn’t show her enough support for her to stay. So she packed her small amount of clothing and the last of her teenage innocence and left the house with her marido, as her mother used to call him, only two weeks into their crazy courtship. She moved into his basement apartment and found a small space to store her stuff. The apartment, if you want to call it that, was built for a single, drinking callejero who didn’t give a fuck if the space around the toilet had piss stains. But she made it work. With her growing belly, she picked up after him and cooked small dinners that he rarely seemed to appreciate. The bigger the belly got, the more he was in the streets drking and fucking other women. Each night got longer for her and the cans of Budweiser that brewed a monster. He stumbled his way home and when he found that his pollo wasn’t warm and the rice wasn’t soft enough he erupted into a rage. He yelled, he screamed; his words
resonating so much that the baby in her belly felt the wrath. She didn’t want to fight back; she couldn’t. She apologized as much as her pride would allow her to. But when he called her a pendeja and said she wasn’t worth the ground she stood on, she lashed back. She slammed the lukewarm plate onto the small, makeshift dinner table. The last of the chicken legs rattled off the plate and dropped to the ground. Dinner was his constitutional right; she had to make it right but she didn’t. She had to pay for fucking it up. He pushed abuela into a wall and she fell. When she collapsed, her water broke. But her spirit didn’t.

Alone and battered, she walked to the hospital and she pushed my moms out of her womb within hours of smacking against the wall. Even as abuelo smacked her face, she continued to love him; spawning two more daughters and a baby boy. Abuelo’s space was too tight and his world was collapsing from within. The alcohol was his only escape from a planet that was spinning off its axis. He couldn’t handle it anymore; his hands lost control more and more as his family grew older. He moved them from Grant
Avenue to Cypress Avenue. When he couldn’t hold his job as the super, he moved again this time without his family. Abuela had enough of his booze filled battery; enough of short changing her children with tattered clothes and shoes too small that my aunts’ feet would bleed when they walked. Her turbulent flight was finally over, as she finally landed on St. Ann’s Avenue. What a blessing.

*The opinions and ideas expressed are solely those of the author, and may not reflect the opinions of The Bronx Brand*

Ricardo Santos is from the Mott Haven Neighborhood of the Bronx.  The father of two loves the Bronx for its real diversity, its honesty between the people and its constant energy and feedback.  From vernacular, to swagger and attitude, the Bronx has influenced him in every facet of his life.

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