Transnationalism

Some birracial negroes like Barack and me have what I like to call "the birracial strut". It is the kind of strut or body language that seems always relaxed, especially if the room is filled with white people.

I've been told more than a couple of times that my body language and demeanor is jolting to white people who don't necessarily expected to have a black latina talking to them as an equal. Actually, the people who have pointed it out as a positive have described it as "a breath of fresh air" or "a pleasant surprise". I just walk into room, make myself comfortable and dispense with the inanities of social expectations. To a lot of people who have not had the joy of socializing regularly with people "outside their tribe", this demeanor and way of being in society can be quite calming.

Yet there's the times that this same exact demeanor is described as arrogant in a "how dare you talk to your betters", sort of way. And even in the black community it is considered more uppity than the uppity negroes that Chris talks about in his post-Iowa post. I've been called an uppity nigger by black people.

It's not that biracial negroes socialize in a completely different way than black or white people. It's just that we socialize as equals to both black, whites (and usually any other race).

We don't see distinctions based on racial categories because in our mind there are none. In our minds, we are white. Not just "also white", but "white".

Think about it. The first expression of love for a biracial negro like Barack came from his white mother.

Biracial negroes like Barack Obama suckled from the tits of white mothers. It was our mother's eyes, lips, hair, voice and smell we fell in love. It was a the face of a white woman that we first gazed into and learned to love.

In a case like me, I look like a carbon copy of my mother. I have my mother's face with brown skin and brown eyes. By the same token, my mother has my face with white skin and blue eyes.

Is it any wonder why Barack walks among white people like it's not a big deal?

But it is and that's where that the t-shirt above comes into place.

While I was hanging out in NYU's CLACS department with economists working at the UN Cuban Mission, advisors to the Sandinists, and your run-of-the-mill academia babes and nerds, Puerto Rico was starting to see the bounty that came out of the assimilation wars of the 1980s.

As a teenager growing up in Puerto Rico during the 1980s you had to make a choice between the rockeros or cocolos.

As a rockera, I would have had to hold myself up as an English-only, gringo loving, boricua denying, wanna-be whitey. As a cocola, I would be reaffirming my negritude, paying homage to my family and my country's salsa roots and more importantly, upholding my country's cultural heritage as a Spanish-only creation.

I was one of those, just like the founders of Puya, who didn't see it as an either/or proposition.

Yet this cultural tension was very real and it happened for a very specific historical reason.