The Puerto Rican Diaspora: A Search for Cultural Identity and Acceptance

An excerpt from a recent essay I wrote for college...

"I read the greens in Spanish, but putt in English"
Chi Chi Rodriguez (Puerto Rican professional golfer)


I vividly remember my first Puerto Rican Day parade experience in New York City. After living in the city for six years and always claiming to my friends I was too “busy” to go to one, it was time to see firsthand what all the hoopla was about. My unwillingness to go to one was really not about having a thousand chores to do on a Saturday, but more about feeling a little bit of shame at how the event had become synonymous with violence. This was mainly due to a violent incident that occurred one year when a group of men surrounded several women and groped and molested them. It infuriated me that white people were stereotyping all Puerto Ricans as violent because of this incident, but at the same time it angered me that my own people were doing things to perpetuate this stereotype.

It was a hot summer day in the city and many streets where blocked off due to the large crowds. Puerto Ricans from all over New York and New Jersey were making their way to Fifth Avenue with their flags in hand, wearing t-shirts with colorful patriotic sayings, faces painted red white and blue, and exuding what I thought at the moment was a little too much enthusiasm as they screamed “yo soy Boricua!” But as I approached Fifth Avenue something interesting occurred; the people and the avenue disappeared. All I saw were thousands of Puerto Rican flags being waved back and forth like a sea of red, white and blue covering the black asphalt from side to side and heading hundreds of blocks towards downtown Manhattan. It was a sight that gave me goose bumps. An intense feeling of excitement and pride took over me as I buoyantly jumped up and down, feverishly waved my flag and screamed from the top of my lungs “Yo soy Boricuaaaa!” For those few hours the social inequalities and the stereotypes were forgotten, and I enjoyed with thousands of other children of the diaspora the excitement at being able to share my Puerto Rican pride and culture with the city and the world.

Diaspora is a term that refers to the re-location or the moving of people who share a common national and cultural identity (“Diaspora” n.d.). The Puerto Rican diaspora and their children in the United States are caught between two very different worlds: The United States and Puerto Rico. Is the moving back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean from the Island to the U.S. (both figuratively and literally) having some sort of negative impact on the Puerto Rican diaspora and their children’s quest for cultural identity and social acceptance? What factors contribute to the prejudice the children of the diaspora face in the United States? The identity and social issues affecting the Puerto Rican diaspora and their children are many, and they are caused by many different factors; but the main factor responsible for perpetuating these problems is Puerto Rico’s colonial/dependant status with the United States and the way this complicated relationship is perceived by everyone involved.

Many Puerto Rican scholars, both in Puerto Rico and in the United States, have explored the issues facing the Puerto Rican diaspora and their children. Jorge Duany (2002) calls them “la nacion en vaivén,” or “the nation on the move.” He uses the Spanish folk term vaivén to symbolize a people who are constantly coming and going. He says: “It (vaivén) implies that some people do not stay put in one place for a long period of time but move incessantly, like the wind or the waves of the sea, in response to shifting tides… more ominously, vaivén also connotes unsteadiness, inconstancy, and oscillation” (Duany, 2002, p. 2).

“Incessantly” moving back and forth is something very familiar to me. From age ten through sixteen the only grades finished completely in one place were eighth and tenth grade because during every other school year my family was moving back and forth between New Jersey and San Juan. It wasn’t easy moving back and forth, leaving friends behind and starting with a class midway through a school year. In more than one occasion, I remember my mother arguing with school directors in Puerto Rico who insisted in putting me back a grade just because it was standard school policy if Spanish wasn’t my primary language; she’d quickly take out my neatly folded grades from her purse and emphatically insist: “¡Pero el es un niño inteligente y tiene buenas notas!” Back in the United States, placing children born in the U.S. to Puerto Ricans in a special bilingual class was standard policy too, but my mother didn’t argue about that because she wanted me to be bilingual. It was important for my parents that my siblings and I have a strong connection with Puerto Rico and the Spanish language.

Yet, for my brother and me, making the transition to life in Puerto Rico was hard. The first year in Puerto Rico was the hardest; we hated the island and our parents for bringing us there. We bombarded them with complaints on a daily basis about everything: the school, the heat, the mosquitoes, anything to show them how disgruntled we were. One of the problems that this moving back and forth created was a confused cultural identity. In New Jersey our identity was Puerto Rican and that is how we were viewed and treated by our American friends and our teachers. That changed in Puerto Rico where we became “gringos” or “Americanos.” Many fights erupted in our San Juan school yard between us and Puerto Rican kids who insisted in reminding us daily that we were not Puerto Rican. The name calling didn’t stop with “gringo” and “Americano,” some kids came up with some creative nick names for us like, “huevo blanco.”  The teasing and fighting got so bad that my brother fashioned knuckle rings out of a pair of metal scissor handles. He never had the intention of using them (thankfully!); he just wanted to show the bullies his cleverly crafted weapon, and maybe that would get them to stop.

Fortunately, the teasing and the school yard violence eased and became sporadic incidents few and far between. We started making friends in school and were lucky to live in a great neighborhood with a lot of kids our age who were very happy to have us there; we ended up loving Puerto Rico. It was an amazing experience being able to know life in the U.S. and in Puerto Rico at the same time; and the experience, good and bad included, has afforded my brother and I a sensibility, a greater awareness of our culture, and a better understanding of our unique Puerto Ricannes. I now am grateful to my parents for giving us that experience.