SO last weekend I binge-watched the first 9 episodes of The Underground Railroad on Prime with my mom. This was after I had already seen the first 9 with my partner, a Korean immigrant who just loved it. I enjoyed it as well, but II will tell you, its was very hard sometimes. That first episode was so painful, that I almost gave up. It was my partner who pushed me to the next one to follow these characters' journey. I let that literary part of my brain kick in, and was patting myself on the back for recognizing the clues of the books that were presented Gulliver's Travels and The Oddysey. I was ready to follow along that symbolic path and parallel journeys they would take, all flavored by those books. Then that 3rd episode happened and forced to throw out all that bullshit out of my head. This was no tale of Lemuel Gulliver experiencing the stupidity of human society. This was no tale of a man's epic journey throughout the magical realm to reunite with his love. This was a story about the horror of America.
So I watched it with my mom, a light-skinned Puerto Rican woman born on the island and moving to the States at the age of 7. There was a weird disconnect between what was happening to Clara and her compatriots and her own experience. I asked my mom if she knew that this was a story about our own history. At first she didn't understand what I was saying. But a few moments into the discussion, something clicked and she acknowledged it. These slaves were our family. These stories are our stories.
My grandfather moved his family to Florida first. My uncle Juancito was the oldest, and the darkest. My grandfather's family was very dark and very light all at once. Everybody's children just ran the gamut of shades. In a place like the Caribbean, the fact of skin color was not connected to the education and social systems. People did not learn about the Indigenous folk except that they all died from disease. They did not learn about slavery except the little they were taught about the European expansion. To talk about race (together than to mock it) was considered very rude and vulgar. But certain words would creep into the language. Indio, Blanco, Negro, Chino, Trigenia, were all ways Caribbean folks described themselves in nick-names or common identifiers. More elaborate and meaning-laden names like Mulatto or Mestizo were not used in polite company. Prieto, the blackest identifier, was often used as an insult or fighting words... yet 'Negrito' was the sweetest word you could use for a loved one. How many times did my grandmother see me crying and reach out her arms , "que paso, Negrito'?
Always. When. I was. Crying.
All this was, of course, colonial as fuck and Latino as hell. Columbus was the great hero who brought civilization to the savages. The horse shit was real and in the school history books, and the colorism found its way into every aspect of our lives.
My uncle, Juancito, was very popular with the young girls, and that was trouble. This was the 50s in Florida, and he could not walk down the White side of the street with the rest of the family. When my grandfather witnessed a lynching, he packed his family (all six kids and my grandmother) and left to the Bronx. He loved his son.
This whole color thing and accepting of shared past with the Afro-Americans was always tricky and scary. In the Bronx, we lived in the same spaces, saw the same movies, watched the same tv shows, ate and partied together... but whenever the shit when done (the assassinations of leaders, the riots, the anger and demonstrations) there was a disconnect. A lot of older Latinos would see that as outside their problems. There was a perceived safety in not getting involved in all that noise. The colonized learned early one that the noisy ones are the ones to suffer first, and they would be made examples. The church made all that part of our morality and social structure. Shit like that erases massacres (countless) from memory.
But the younger ones, the first who came here as kids and teens, they mixed in like they could feel the connection. We all ate the same food, lived in the same spaces, partied and raged together. Shit, we created new music together. What do you think SalSoul, Disco and Hip Hop are, anyway, if not our blended sounds. The Young Lords marched with the Black Panthers and got shit done. Duh, we hung out with Fred Sanford and Son . Just because we got a musical where a bunch of Wypipo were cast in our roles doesn't mean we accepted that shit as okay. But even our outrage was on the downlow, and our voices were less audible than whispers.
My pop was an Afro-Latino and used to get mad if we called him black, yet all his co-workers and drinking buddies and lots of his girlfriends (including one of his wives and another who is the mother of a brother I never met) were 'African-American'. I felt so sad that his dna results came in a month after he died, and showed that he was 35 percent from West Africa. My youngest brother, who took after our pop in skin color, found great difficulty in blending in with that mainstream gay culture cause, you know, America. And yes, I'm mad light-skinned (a point always thrown in my face by my brother), but I'm aware. I know that this skin tone let me sneak into a lot of spaces like a ninja. But let me tell you, as soon as they talked to me or saw me up close, they could tell. This is something different.
But anyway, I digressed a lot. I was watching this show with my mom, and we were in it deep. Clara's struggle and pain were so real and familiar. And it was so understandable and relatable. When the characters would look at the screen and into the viewer's faces, I wonder what other people saw. My mom and me, we saw those faces reach us and tell us... this is what happened to us. This is what happened to your family... your blood. Why did you forget us?
How dare you forget us?
Barry Jenkins is a prophet, y'all.
