Everything I do has a personal dimension. Gone are the days in which I used the polite "we" or the impersonal "it" to make a claim for the totality of humanity, an act of arrogance; or when simply I did not want to assume responsibility for my judgments, an act of cowardice. This presentation has a personal dimension because it is from my particular position that I can speak. If you want to share my views, I will be delighted. I am convinced that classrooms are communities of inquiry; therefore, I am presenting my voice to this particular community for you to share. Yet, to share is not necessarily to agree but to converse. A conversation implies both agreement and disagreement. It is a dialectic.
 
 

Our first television set was acquired in 1959. I was four years old. I lived in rural Puerto Rico, in the midst of poverty, but my father liked the horse races, to the annoyment of my mother, and one day a horse named "Lucky Star" won the Fourth of July Classic, and by the eighth of July we had a TV set.

There were no television networks in Puerto Rico, but our TV set seemed to have come equipped with hundreds of American movies from the thirties and forties. They were in English. Some had Spanish subtitles, but I could not read very well. I have two brothers. They loved the Western and combat films. I watched Busby Berkley musicals and screwball comedies. One of the first words I learned in English was "dance." I also learned "honey." I named my dog "Honey."

I loved the movies. The people were so beautiful! They were beige with light eyes. I have seen light eyes. I saw them every night before going to sleep. My grandfather's eyes. But my grandfather was not beige like the people in the movies. His face was white and his neck and nose were red from working on our tiny farm. My mother said that the people in the movies were not beige but black or white, and that these movies were in black and white just like the people.

The people in the U.S. had white telephones and cars, as well as black fat maids with big eyes. The black people in the U.S. seemed to amuse the white people. The black people painted their eyes and mouths white, like the clowns at our town fair. There was only one black person in my neighborhood. He also painted himself. My mother said he was "effeminate." As he walked by, opening his eyes wide and wiggling his hips, the macho men whistled. He grinned and waved. The "effeminate" showed his white teeth like the black servants of the movies. He acted like a woman. The men called him Pedro Prieto. It means Peter Black. I thought they were calling him "black," but I was wrong. His name was Pedro Prieto. Señor Prieto, that was his real name.

The pretty people in the movies lived in a place called Hollywood in which they met and had parties. In those parties they used their real names and in the movies they used fake names. In Puerto Rico we had a club in which all the pretty people with white skin and light eyes went to dance. These people had fancy real names, like "de la Torre," "Auffaunt," "Huyke" and "Fromm." The real name of their club was "Casino." They say they don't have fiestas there anymore because the U.S. Army is using it to entertain the troops. It all started in the forties. Puerto Rico was at war with Japan because the Japanese were treacherous. The pretty white rich people of San Juan gave their ballroom to the brave soldiers that were fighting the evil Japs. The pretty people of Puerto Rico had a gran fiesta to say good-bye to the club. At midnight the trumpets sounded and the pretty people of Puerto Rico handed over their ballroom to the U.S. Army. The U.S. Army is our  army. They say that the pretty white Puerto Rican ladies danced just like Ginger Rogers and that a black singer sang Blue Moon and Summertime without an accent.

I did not like the movies with the lady that sang in a strange language that sounded like Spanish. She had all those fruits on her head. She was pretty with light eyes and beige skin, but she was foreigner, I mean, she was not like our  Katherine Hepburn. The lady with the fruits on her head did not have black maids and she spent her time smiling and shaking her hips. I told my uncle that I did not want to see any more movies with that crazy lady with the funny accent. He said I should like her because she was Brazilian and her real name was María del Carmen. That's my real name also. My fake name is Maricarmen. They called this other "María del Carmen," Carmen Miranda. I have never allowed anyone to call me Carmen. I don't want to dance with fruits on my head, those very same fruits that rot in our front yard and that my grandfather had to sell in the local market to pretty white ladies from San Juan. I was to grow up and live in the city, have a white telephone and a spiral staircase like the ladies of the movies.

I learned to tap dance watching Shirley Temple. She was my age and had as a servant and sort of nanny a very funny black clown who loved her dearly and danced with her. I had Pedro Prieto. He liked little girls and people said he danced very well. I ran to his house and asked him to tap dance with me. I was disappointed. He only danced rumba, Mambo and cha-cha, like the woman with the tutti-frutti hat. He was "effeminate," so he could not tap dance, just as my mother said that my classmate Florentino was "impaired," so he failed the first grade.

I liked Ginger and Fred. They danced so romantically! My first love was José Dolores Torres-Otero, a quiet boy from my neighborhood. He had sky-blue eyes and danced like a feather. He did not have a mustache or say the word "amigo." Cisco Kid had a Mexican friend named Pancho. He was "tonto," smiled stupidly and always said the word "amigo." Desi Arnaz was better. He was married to Lucy. She was white. He also danced the rumba with ridiculous ruffles in his arms and played the maracas. I have never ever seen a man with so many ruffles. Pedro Prieto wears a wig sometimes, but never ruffles. But then, Pedro Prieto is effeminate.
 
 

The lady in the Union Center at Florida State wants me to fill out some papers. I need a student card. She advises me to make a check mark on the form by my race. No one has asked me that before. I had my birth certificate in my purse with the following facts: Name: María del Carmen Martínez Rodríguez. Father: Rafael Martínez de la Cruz, U.S. Army Officer. Mother: María I. Rodríguez Medina, housewife. Place of Birth: Santurce, Puerto Rico, U.S.A.. Race: White. My race had been documented almost 40 years ago. Filling those blanks was going to be easy. It was simply a matter of transferring the information to the new form. I checked "white" and went ahead to take my picture. I went back to the lady to get my student ID. She looks at me, at the picture, at my name, and goes on to erase the check mark. "Scratch that out," she said. "I mean your race," she explains. She is very nice. She speaks loud because she figures I can't understand her. She points to the word "Hispanic." I mark my race. Now I have a new race, the very same race of the lady with the tutti-frutti hat, and I am devastated! I don't even eat fruits. They rot in the font yard and they smell bad.
 
 

My name is Maricarmen. Now I go to school every day. I am so proud to salute the Flag of the United Sates. My teacher is right, if it hadn't been for the Americans we would be starving like all those Banana Republics in which the ladies wear tutti-frutti hats, and the men wear ruffles in their sleeves and say "fiesta" and "amigo." We would eat only mangos and the women would go to church with tutti-frutti hats on their heads.

My blue-eyed grandfather says he was very young when the Americans peacefully entered the shores of the coastal town of Guanica to liberate us from the Spanish yoke and their poor regime of bananas. I know the patriotic words that General Miles said when he entered our Island and saved our people from the bad Spanish kings. Last year I won the Speech contest for the English class by saying these words in perfect English, without an accent, and putting the emphasis where I thought Miles might have wanted it. My teachers had tears in their eyes and my father's heart was filled with paternal and patriotic pride:

We like to give things to our new country. We are generous people like the Spanish, Catalans, Galicians and Corsicans that colonized us. We are docile like the Indians, and as obedient as the blacks. We are Catholic like the Irish that came with the Spaniards, and romantic like the French and English pirates who came to rob ships and then changed their minds and stayed because they fell in love with our women. My mother says that Puerto Rican women are very pretty because they are "voluptuous" and "subservient," unlike my Katherine who is skinny and always misbehaves in front of Spencer Tracy.

We are indeed generous. We gave our beautiful ballroom, in which the pretty people had their gran fiestas, to the American troops so they could have a place to dance. I bet the troops danced like Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly, had cute sailor suits, and blond girls who could also tap dance. All this I know because of the movies!

My uncle took me to see West Side Story. There are a lot of brown people dancing in that movie. They are the Puerto Ricans and they live in New York. I think they are related to us, but they would rather live in the city of the skyscrapers. Those Puerto Ricans are very violent and the women like the island of Manhattan better than they like the island of the Free Associated State of Puerto Rico. The women of West Side Story were not criminals. They were very vivacious and wore orange dresses and purple high heels. They liked to live in America. I like it too. I don't like Puerto Rico that much anymore. Only the Puerto Rican gangsters of West Side Story like Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico

My heart's devotion,

Let it sink back into the ocean.

Always the hurricane blowing,

Always the population growing,

And the money owing,

And the sun light screaming,

And the natives steaming,

I like the Island Manhattan

Smoke in your pipe

And put that in:

I like to be in America

OK by me in America!!!!
 
 

My teacher got me a pen pal in Akron Ohio. Her name was Marcia Boyce. We should keep in touch with our fellow citizens who live on the mainland. They got to know us. We are proud citizens. Marcia's father also fought in Hiroshima and he is as patriotic as my father. My father killed two "yaps" and Maraca's father killed two Japs. So we are even. I don't think our fathers ever met because my father liked to stay apart with the black soldiers that painted their faces. My mother said he was "segregated" because he is brown and has "Moorish" blood. But then, my mother likes big words like "effeminate" and "impaired." She says that the Americans did not attack Puerto Rico but "entered" and "penetrated" the island. She is right. My history book says exactly those same words. I am sooooo proud of being an American! Like those witty girls of West Side Story, I am also Hispanic and Puerto Rican and American!
 
 

I looked up the definition of my new race in the U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Division, Development of Race and Ethnic Items for 1990 Census... There, on page 51, I found: "A Hispanic is a person of Spanish/Hispanic origin if the person's origin (ancestry) is Mexican, Mexican-American, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Ecuadorian, Guatemalan, Honduran, Nicaraguan, Salvadoran; from other Spanish-speaking countries of the Caribbean or Central or South America; or from Spain."
 
 

Inca,

You are Hispanic.

Maya,

You are Hispanic.

Aztec,

You are Hispanic.

Children of the Slaves,

You are a Hispanic.

Children of the Master and the Slave,

You are Hispanic.

Dominican,

You are Hispanic.

Brazilian,

You are Hispanic.

Black Pedro Prieto,

You are Hispanic.

White Blue-eyed Grandfather,

You are Hispanic.

Carmen Miranda,

You are Hispanic.

President Fujimori,

You are Hispanic.

Rita Hayworth,

You are Hispanic.

Celia Cruz,

You are Hispanic.

Christina Aguilera,

You are Hispanic.

Chi Chi Rodríguez,

Roberto Clemente,

You are Hispanic.

Gabriel García Márquez,

You are Hispanic.

Miguel de Cervantes,

You are Hispanic.

Power, O'Neil and Auffaunt,

Laboy, Estefan and Huyke,

Tollinchi, Antonsanti and Georgetti,

Franco, Alemañy, and Serbiá,

Ayala, Lind, and Zapata,

you are all Puerto Ricans,

you are all Hispanic.

Christopher Colombus,

or, rather, Cristóbal Colón,

You are Hispanic!
 
 

And the three million citizens of Puerto Rico U.S.A., along with the millions of Puerto Ricans on the mainland; you are all Hispanic!
 
 

The term "Hispanic" is opaque. It brings together concepts that refer to different objects into one single category that is more limited than the concepts it contains. Among these concepts are race, culture, language, religion and place of origin. In order to logically group together all these concepts, it is necessary to find a concept that has a great degree of generality. But the only concept which contains race, place of origin, religion and language is the concept of "person." Thus, it can be correctly stated that a person has a language, a culture, lives in a particular geographic place on the planet and has some type of religion. In this sense a Hispanic is a person, just as an American, an Eskimo or a Chinese is a person. The term "Hispanic" has a smaller extension than it is thought to have.

It could be argued that "Hispanic" means a person of a particular race, a particular place of origin and culture. Yet, there seems to be no agreement on what this particular, race, culture, or place of origin could be. No one really knows what counts as race and ethnographers are still debating this issue. However, the common use of the term refers mainly to skin color and hair texture. Usually people distinguish three main races: Caucasian, Black and Mongol. But the term "Hispanic" seems to refer to a person who is brown. Therefore, white Hispanics, black Hispanics and Hispanics with Chinese and Japanese ancestry are excluded from the term "Hispanic" when it is thought of as a race.

Ethnic labels are devised to sort out individual citizens according to what they are not, rather than according to what they are. This definition-by-negation implies the presence of a standard, which in the United States, is the white citizen. The non-white citizens are thus "deviant" citizens. Moreover, the division of people in term of racial or ethnic categories also carries with it the representation of non-white Americans as "foreign" faces, making bona fide members of this country immigrants in the white world. Every non-white face in America lives on the border of the white culture. Thus, American cities are divided into neighborhoods neatly separated by ethnicity while the suburbs continue to be mostly white territory.

However, the borders between cultures and races are closer than we imagine. In fact, whenever two or more cultures meet, peacefully or violently, there is a border experience (Gomez-Peña, 46).

A Hispanic is a person who immigrates within America. She does not emigrate from Asia or Africa to America, but from el sur  to el norte, the south to the north. America extends from the cold regions at the North Pole to the plains of the American Midwest; from the South Pole to the snowy peaks of the Andes; and from the tropical forests of the Amazon River and the deserts of Mexico to the shores of the Caribbean. But the image of Hispanics created by the U.S. Census confuses geographical representations. The confusion becomes somehow absurd when the term "Hispanic" is also used to refer to the natives of Spain, since it evokes the representation of Spain as a "south of the border" country and hence removes her from her home in Europe where she has been safely located since pre-Roman times. This implies that, for example, my radical Basque friend who has been living in the U.S.A. for thirty years is also a Hispanic, and this hurts her Basque pride.

Moreover, there is a Sur  that is here in the Norte, in places such as Miami, Texas, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, California, New Mexico, Arizona, New Jersey, Orlando, etc.. Each one of these "sures"  is different and has a particular way of existing within the Estados Unidos. All these people are people of the borders. The borders are what they have in common. The Third World is now inside the First World, but it continues to exist on the First World's border as non-whiteness.  People cross the border geographically, but they still constitute a Third World, existing within the dominant white culture of the U.S.A..