"My own grandparents, whom I was to respect as well as love, were said to be jibaros. But I couldn't be one, nor was I to call anyone a jibaro, lest they be offended. Even at the tender age when I didn't yet know my real name, I was puzzled by the hypocrisy of celebrating a people everyone looked down on."
"A bubble of rage built inside my chest and forced out a scream meant for Mami's harshness and Papi's indifference but directed at Delsa who was smaller. I pushed her off the stump."
"'Well, it is the soul of a person that writes poetry ... The soul lives inside a person when he's alive. It's the part of a person that feels. A poet's soul feels more than regular people's souls. And that's what makes him write poetry."
"There was no rice on the chart, no beans, no salted codfish. There were big white eggs, not at all like the small round ones our hens gave us. There was a tall glass of milk, but no coffee. There were wedges of yellow cheese, but no balls of cheese like the white queso del pais wrapped in banana leaves sold in bakeries all over Puerto Rico. There were bananas but no plantains, potatoes but no batatas, cereal flakes but no oatmeal, bacon but no sausages."
"And I wished that I knew how to pray, because then I could speak to God and maybe He or one of His saints could explain things to me. But I didn't know any prayers, because Mami didn't believe in church or holy people, and Papi, even though he read the Bible and could lead novenas for the dead, never talked to us about God."
"But he didn't, and when Abuela came out from her prayers, we sat by the door, working our needles in, around, up, and out, silently making patterns with thread that might have told a story had either one of us known how to transform our feelings into shape."
"I dressed to their murmurs in the other room, their voices soft but strained, and I wondered if men ever talked like this, if their sorrows ever spilled into these secret cadences."
"I buried my face in the soft space between her neck and shoulder and sought there the fragrance of oregano and rosemary, but all I could come up with was Cashmere Bouquet and the faint flowery dust of Maybeline."
"Someone down there can look up through the hole and see my private parts, I thought. There is someone down there. A dead person is in that water waiting for me to squat so that it can claw me in and drown me in turds and pee. There are eyes looking up from that black pool, seeing parts of me that even I can't see."
"I tossed until dawn, unused to so much room on the bed, while on the other side of the wall, my sisters and brothers slept, their bodies gently rising and falling in rhythm with one another's breathing."
"I crouched against the wall and watched them injure each other without touching each other, hurling words that had the same effect as acid on metal."
"For me, the person I was becoming when we left was erased, and another one was created. The Puerto Rican jibara who longed for the green quiet of a tropical afternoon was to become a hybrid who would never forgive the uprooting."
"I dozed, startled awake, panicked when I didn't know where I was, remembered where we were going, then dozed off again, to repeat the whole cycle, in and out of sleep, between earth and sky, somewhere between Puerto Rico and New York."
"They dressed like Americanos but walked with a jaunty hop that made them look as if they were dancing down the street, only their hips were not as loose as Puerto Rican men's were. According to Mami, they too lived in their own neighborhoods, frequented their own restaurants, and didn't like Puerto Ricans."
"Men only want one thing, and until then, I thought it was up to me to give it up. But that's not the way it was. A little girl leaning out a window watching the world fulfilled the promise Marilyn Monroe made with her eyes. I who had promised nothing, who knew even less, whose body was as confusing as the rock and roll lyrics accompanying the trucker's hand pumping up and down to words yelled, not sung."
"We could count on her in a way we had never been able to count on Papi, Tata, or Francisco, who had made everyone happy for such a short time before dying and becoming a ghost that haunted us all for the rest of our lives."
"The men they beat up; the women, they raped. I couldn't stop thinking about it as I walked to school, or home from the library: every man was a potential rapist, and every dark doorway was a potential hiding place for someone waiting to hurt me."
"'You'll be exposed to a different class of people,' she assured me, and I felt the force of her ambition without knowing exactly what she meant."
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