{"id":55648,"date":"2018-01-30T15:56:33","date_gmt":"2018-01-30T15:56:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=55648"},"modified":"2018-01-30T16:01:08","modified_gmt":"2018-01-30T16:01:08","slug":"you-do-not-belong-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=55648","title":{"rendered":"You Do Not Belong Here"},"content":{"rendered":"

You Do Not Belong Here<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

KR Online<\/a>
\nKenyon Review<\/a>
\nSeptember 2017<\/p>\n

Jaquira D\u00edaz<\/strong><\/a>
\nGambier, Ohio<\/em>
\nJune 2017<\/p>\n

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

A few years ago, during a summer in Puerto Rico<\/a>, I went back to my old neighborhood, El Caser\u00edo Padre Rivera. When I was a girl, El Caser\u00edo, one of the island\u2019s government housing projects<\/a>, was a world of men, of violence. A world that at times wasn\u2019t safe for women or girls. There were shootouts in the streets, fourteen-year-old boys carrying guns as they rode their bikes to the candy store just outside the walls. We watched a guy get stabbed right in front of our building once, watched the cops come in and raid places for drugs and guns. Outsiders were not welcome. Outsiders meant trouble.<\/p>\n

What you didn\u2019t know unless you lived there, unless you spent time there, was that most people in El Caser\u00edo were just trying to raise their families in peace, like anywhere else. The neighbors kept an eye on all the kids, fed them, took them to school, took them trick-or-treating on Halloween. All over the neighborhood, people told stories. El Caser\u00edo was where I learned about danger and violence and death, but it was also where I learned about community, where I learned to love stories, to imagine them, to dream. And it\u2019s a place I love fiercely.<\/p>\n

That summer, I drove into El Caser\u00edo to look at our old apartment, my first elementary school, the basketball courts where my father taught me to shoot hoops. I\u2019d been there less than five minutes when a boy on a bike approached the car, motioned for me to roll down my window.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat are you doing here?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust visiting,\u201d I said. \u201cI was born here.\u201d<\/p>\n

He kept his hands on the handlebars, looked inside the car for a while, then gave me directions to the nearest exit, even though I hadn\u2019t asked for them. He couldn\u2019t have been more than sixteen.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know my way around,\u201d I said. \u201cI used to live here.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou do not belong here,\u201d he said, then pedaled away, disappearing around the corner…<\/p>\n

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

My whole life people have tried to tell me who I am or who I\u2019m supposed to be. My whole life people have tried to measure my proximity to whiteness, always asking, WHAT ARE YOU?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,14646,8,26,23674,20],"tags":[27990,14207,27991,2654],"class_list":["post-55648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-latino","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-social-justice","category-usa","tag-jaquira-diaz","tag-kenyon-review","tag-kr-online","tag-puerto-rico"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55648","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=55648"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55648\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55649,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55648\/revisions\/55649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}