Here, Differences Yield A Parting Of The Ways

I was born in Puerto Rico, but when I was 5, my father joined the Air Force and we moved to the United States. He left the service nine years later and we moved back to Puerto Rico, where he started a successful practice as a psychiatrist. I attended junior high and high school there.

When I came back to the states for an enlistment in the military, I realized something that I had never in all my previous years in America noticed. The races here stay in their own groups. Whites in their groups, African Americans in theirs, Mexicans in theirs and so forth.

Each group has its customs and mannerisms and words. For those who have lived with this fact their whole lives, that may not seem like an epiphany, but after eight years in Puerto Rico, I found it strange and disconcerting.

You see, Puerto Ricans are a blend of the indigenous people originally on the island, the Spaniards who colonized and conquered them, and the black slaves the Spaniards brought with them. Puerto Ricans vary in skin color and physical characteristics, from extremely dark-skinned to very fair. But when it comes down to it, they are all Puerto Ricans.

In high school, I often went to a kiosco, a ramshackle hut made of bamboo and banana leaves. These huts are common on public beaches. There, I often saw all sorts of people, from fishermen and accountants to sugar cane harvesters and doctors, each of them black, white or mulatto. They were busy ordering traditional meals, eating and talking.

It was wonderful because they could all talk to each other. It wasn’t just that they all spoke the same language. They were all in accord. They thought the same. They all liked to dance to salsa and merengue music. They all ate rice and beans for dinner, and drank rum. They all sang the same holiday songs. If the doctor started a joke, the fisherman could finish it. They all told their children the same bedtime stories. It didnt matter what their skin color was.

I have gotten used to the split along racial lines so common here. Sometimes Im not even conscious of it. But I only have to think back to the kioscos in Puerto Rico to be reminded how strange I felt when I first came back to America and realized that we celebrate diversity with zeal and tolerate divisions, yet seldom take the opportunity to celebrate unity or encourage solidarity.