{"id":55627,"date":"2018-01-29T18:56:45","date_gmt":"2018-01-29T18:56:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=55627"},"modified":"2018-01-29T18:57:04","modified_gmt":"2018-01-29T18:57:04","slug":"killing-us-softly-with-the-us-colonial-song-puerto-ricans-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=55627","title":{"rendered":"Killing Us Softly With the US Colonial Song: Puerto Ricans Matter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Killing Us Softly With the US Colonial Song: Puerto Ricans Matter<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Radiant Roots, Boricua Branches: Musings on My Tri-racial Black and Puerto Rican Ancestry<\/a>
\n2017-12-31<\/p>\n

Teresa Vega<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

On Becoming Comfortable with My Rice & Beans & Collard Greens Self<\/strong><\/p>\n

On December 27th, 2013, I wrote one of my first<\/a> blogposts about what it meant to find my Boricua<\/a> Branches \u2014 my father\u2019s side of my family. I will always say, without an ounce of hesitation, that the best part of taking my DNA tests<\/a> was finding my Puerto Rican cousins. My father\u2019s absence for 20 years of my life \u2014 from the age of 3-years old until 23-years old \u2014 resulted in a critical disjuncture in how I saw myself. While I always knew I was half-Puerto Rican, my pre-23 year old self did not know what that meant having been born and raised in Brockton, MA<\/a>, a suburb of Boston<\/a>. Brockton was not the diverse community it is today when I was growing up. It was a predominately white community with a small African-American and Cape Verdean population. We were often seen as Black and sometimes as Cape Verdean. Pre-23-year old Teresa was definitely Black culturally-identified. Though I always knew I had a diverse maternal extended family and equally diverse ancestors, having been raised by my maternal grandparents, I grew up within the confines of an African-American community.<\/p>\n

I arrived in New York City<\/a> in the Fall of 1990 to attend graduate school in a city that had one of the largest populations of Puerto Ricans outside of Puerto Rico. With a name like Teresa A. Vega, I had a hard time convincing anyone that I was anything other than a Latina. People assumed that I was either in denial about being a Latina or had some sort of hangup about speaking Spanish. It never occurred to most people that maybe I didn\u2019t grow up with my Puerto Rican father, that maybe Spanish wasn\u2019t my first language, or maybe I was raised in a place that didn\u2019t have a Latino community…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Becoming Comfortable with My Rice & Beans & Collard Greens Self<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,21,459,14646,8,23674,20],"tags":[2654,27972,27971,27970],"class_list":["post-55627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-latincarib","category-history","category-latino","category-media-archive","category-social-justice","category-usa","tag-puerto-rico","tag-radiant-roots-boricua-branches","tag-teresa-a-vega","tag-teresa-vega"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55627"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55628,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55627\/revisions\/55628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}