is that a potato in your mouth?
or are you just happy to see me
There’s a very specific way Mexicans impersonate Cubans. It’s fast, closed, and very shushy. Like they “have a potato in their mouth.”
There are lots of Cubans here since we’re not all that far from Cuba, and every time a Cuban friend comes up in conversation, my Mexican friends automatically switch to their fake Cuban accents—much like Americans might go for a fake British accent when talking about someone like Madonna.
The other day, I heard my boyfriend doing his Cuban accent and turned around to find him talking to a picture of my Cuban grandfather, who was born in Florida and spent his formative childhood years in Cuba before heading back to the States—Key West and then Tampa, where my mom was born—and eventually retiring and passing away in Southern Georgia.
“How did you know that was my Cuban grandfather?” I asked.
“Look at him. Cubans would rather starve than dress badly.”
He was right. My grandfather—Carlos Perez, or Papa Charlie as I knew him—was always dressed impeccably, as was my grandmother, who also came from a Cuban family, but was born and raised in the States. The most cherished staples of my wardrobe come from them.
Growing up in New Orleans, I didn’t really have much of a connection with my Cuban heritage. My mom ended up in New Orleans for college because her cousins Marielena and Margarita went to Saint Mary’s Dominican College and so my grandfather decided to send all of his daughters there as well. While she was in school, my mom met my dad, a native New Orleanian, got married, and never moved back home. When she and my dad divorced, she married a native Metairian, my stepfather, who has lived in Metairie his whole life, which is where they still reside and how I also came to be a native Metairian. I was raised a Yat, surrounded by my yatty-mouthed, Cajun family as opposed to my potato-mouthed, Cuban family.
I often think about what would have happened had my mother decided to move back home after she divorced my dad. I was only one. I would have only known Tampa. I would have never known New Orleans. Metry Marcelle would have been irrevocably replaced by Florida Marcelle, a beast I can only know in my dreams.
I wrote all of that ^^^ yesterday morning, with my grandfather’s picture next to me as I sat in my house overlooking the Caribbean Sea—a view that goes on forever, only interrupted by an occasional cruise ship on the horizon. The sea was calm, like glass. Today, it’s rough, or “movido” in Spanish.
The sea is moved.
I wake up to watch the sunrise every morning. I watch as the sky changes colors and the sea changes colors with it. And then I take my dog out for a walk along the malecón, a pathway that goes along the Caribbean on the east side of the island. There aren’t many accessible beaches on the eastern shore—it’s mostly just rocky cliffs with an occasional stretch of sand.
This morning, as Max (my dog) and I walked, I saw a small boat haphazardly run up on shore. Left there, crooked, rocked by the waves, moved by the sea, a blue covering starting to peel off.
Seeing a boat like that means more Cubans arrived overnight. It means they crossed 128 miles over the sea in a tiny boat either for a new life here in Mexico or to try their luck at crossing into the U.S. from the Mexican border—a phenomenon that has seen a massive uptick in numbers over the last couple of years.
The U.S. used to have a “wet-foot, dry-foot” Cuban immigration policy. Which meant that if they got one foot on American soil, they were automatically granted asylum as a cold war finger in the eye of Russia. But, things have changed, including the end of Cuba’s “special relationship” with Russia, the death of Fidel Castro, the Cuban government’s shift from straight communism to “striving for socialism,” and the U.S. reinstatement of diplomatic relationship with Cuba. All of that to say, for regular Cubans trying to migrate, things have gotten more complicated. Which is why more and more are trying their luck through Mexico, especially as the Cuban economy, largely run on tourism, has tanked with the pandemic.
Yesterday when I wrote, I was thinking about our identities and the narratives we tell ourselves about who we are and how that often gets in the way of the essence of who we really are. Yesterday, I was thinking about the book my friend Tim Miller wrote, “Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell.”
I talked a bit about it here, but basically, it’s a deep dive into how and why “reasonable Republicans,” my friend Tim included, enabled the rise of Trump, and then went along with him for as long as they did, allowing him to do even more harm. It’s about their rationalizations, their justifications, their ambitions, etc.
Spoiler alert: there’s no happy ending. There is not a single shred of optimism in Tim’s words. But I found optimism in his honesty and there’s a theme throughout his book that I can’t stop thinking about.
He said one of the reasons he was finally able to leave the Republican party and become a Never Tumper before his candidacy was solidified was because he had already gone through such a transition before. He had already shed an identity that he had thoroughly internalized and that others had become to know him by when he came out. He went from being Tim The Bro to Tim The Bro with a “preference for peen,” as he put it in his book.
He had already done the hard work of leaving behind a constructed identity, a process that blew up his life in so many ways—not just internally, but also externally. Coming out changed not only the way he related to the world, but how the world related to him. The process was a real fucking doozy, but a necessary doozy for him to get back to his essence.
Leaving behind his identity as a Republican—the only identity he had known professionally for his entire life—was also necessary to fully inhabit his essence—AKA Tim The Bro with a Preference for Peen AND Principles. Lucky for him, he already had a template on how to survive hard transitions.
His friends weren’t so lucky.
Yesterday, I was wondering if Metry Marcelle and Florida Marcelle would have had the same essence—if they would have been able to discard all the narratives they picked up along the way to reveal a single, united, essential Marcelle.
If they would have had the bravery to do what Tim did.
Today, I’m thinking about that boat that came from the same island my grandfather came from. Today, I’m thinking about the small twists of fate, the stupid luck of privilege, and the generational decisions that came before me that give me a dry foot on sturdy shore no matter where I go.
Since I finished Tim’s book, I started reading “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration” by Isabel Wilkerson. It was recommended to me by Mama J at the Community Book Center on Bayou Road. Mama J has led many of my book choices over the years—she has the gift of looking at a person and knowing exactly what they need to read. The first time I walked into her bookstore, she very firmly placed “White Fragility” in my hands.
The Warmth of Other Suns is about the Great Migration, a period of six decades ending in the 1970s when six million Black southerners left for the North, seeking to escape the strict caste system mandated by the laws of Jim Crow. Wilkinson writes about the Great Migration’s impact on nearly every aspect of American life:
So, too, rose the language and music of urban America that sprang from the blues that came with the migrants and dominates our airwaves to this day. So, too, came the people who might not have existed, or become who they did, had there been no Great Migration. People as diverse as James Baldwin and Michelle Obama, Miles Daves and Toni Morrison, Spike Lee and Denzel Washington, and anonymous teachers, store clerks, steelworkers, and physicians, were all products of the Great Migration. They were all children whose life chances were altered because a parent or grandparent had made the hard decision to leave.
Max stopped suddenly on our walk back home. Trying to figure out why, I noticed a woman with long blond hair and dark roots, sitting on a rock with no shoes on and dirty feet. Early twenties. My first thought was that she was a stupid gringa tourists who got wasted and lost her bearings, but then I saw her friend next to her. They looked weary. Then I looked closer and saw six more people huddled under a tree. None of them had shoes on. A man was walking towards them from the shore, his grey shirt wet from midway down. They were the inhabitants of the boat I had seen.
I initially kept walking because I didn’t want to alarm them, but I turned back around and caught eyes with the man in the grey shirt. I asked him if everything was ok.
“Yes,” he said.
“Do you need anything?”
“No.”
“Water?”
“No,” he smiled. And although he looked tired, he looked triumphant. I put my hand on my heart and he did the same.
I bet Florida Marcelle is a beast.
I imagine that she still smokes cigs and loves a millie lite. Perhaps has slightly more sun damage and maybe a Cuban accent in her Spanish as opposed to a primarily-Mexican-sometimes-Argentine accent. And I bet she either really loves or really hates Ron DeSantis. It just depends on which constructed identities she’s worked to shed to let the good stuff shine through.
As for Metry Marcelle, shit. I’m still working on it. As we all are. I’ve shed some identities and I’m lighter for it, but there’s always more work to be done. And it’s not easy work.
But I won’t give up, because I know that the decisions I make today—the words I write here, the work I do in politics, the narratives I help construct—will invariably alter the life chances of generations to come. For better or for worse. Because everything we do lives on, in one way or another. Even if we waste away our turt-fert years and have no offspring.
Although Papa Charlie did tell me once—right as I was on the cusp of puberty—that I got the “Cuban, child-bearing hips.” So maybe it’s written in the stars.
Mucho amor xxxooo