The Puerto Rican Literature Project

Mami is not from here.

She comes from cold weather, colder people,

high buildings and higher expectations.
 

Mami comes from a big family,

eternally divided over

what province Grandpa came from,

where the best place to buy dim sum in Chinatown is,

who has a thinner and pointier nose.
 

We have not been together since

my grandmother’s death.
 

Yet, Mami remembers her kindly,

Miss Chinatown in her youth,

beautiful and pursued by the successful men

who wanted the traditional life of their women

bearing babies.
 

My ancestors would have never imagined that

I would be raised by salsa

or that I would so affectionately learn to love my

Abuelita Nidia from Jersey

who cooked everything with lard.
 

But it was Mami,

with her heart in New York

and her body in Santurce,

who made sure I was a cangrejera,

because I did not want to be like her.
 

“38 years I have lived here and

the buses just get worse,”

she always says.

“You should not go to school here,”

she comments,

“It’s no good.”

Pero Mami has stayed.
 

And I know that for her, moving to her promised land

scares her.
 

She has lived more years on these waters,

mangle and sand,

than in the jungle we passionately call Nuyol.
 

There is one thing that my mother

does not seem to understand.

While this was a temporary paradise for her,

this earth, with all its broken corners, is home.
 

And I, the small girl of an island,

with my head constantly in the clouds,

have always enjoyed taking apart,

piecing together.
 

Mami may be a state,

following the idea of a false liberty,

but I am land

in the middle of the sea.

Unwilling to be overthrown by the ocean

as people swim, fly, project themselves into hands

that are prepared to drown them.
 

It is Mami’s love for those hands

that made me.