Locked In, Locked Out: Gated Communities in a Puerto Rican City

Prologue. The Native Outsider

P r o l o g u e The Native Outsider It is as if, then, the beauty—the beauty of the sea, the land, the air, the trees, the market, the people, the sounds they make—were a prison, and as if everything and everybody inside it were locked out. —Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place Roy Lichtenstein’s painting Interior with African Mask (1991) caught my attention from the first time I saw it, as a college freshman at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum. It depicted a modern living room in the front plane, a dining room in the background, with firm geometric lines, symmetric patterns and prints, and bright colors. But the furnishings seemed incongruous with “Africa .” And then I saw it—on a shelf was a West African mask. In an art class later, I learned about Picasso’s adoption of African masks, the beginning of modernist art, and Orientalism and the Western artists’ use of the “Other” to define their own art. The mask in the painting seemed to be the only live object in Lichtenstein’s living room: It stared back at the viewer. I saw myself in it. Born and raised in Ponce, Puerto Rico, the daughter of Dominican immigrants, and proudly identified as negrita (black), I grew up in between boundaries, along social fault lines that drew me inside but that seemed to leave me, always, outside, staring back, like the mask.1 I was incongruous, uncomfortable, a counter piece to be admired, or not. I was and am a native outsider. My father, a civil engineer who built big concrete buildings in Puerto Rico, has experienced many worlds. He grew up in an English-speaking sugar-mill town on the outskirts of San Pedro de Macorís in the Dominican Republic (famous for world-class baseball players), and he mopped floors briefly in 2 Prologue New York City at the Empire State Building’s Fanny Farmer candy store and at the Port Authority Bus Terminal before constructing buildings and housing projects in New York and Puerto Rico. Because he was an offspring of migrations from St. Kitts, Nevis, St. Thomas, he also lived between boundaries . My mother, a tried-and-true capitaleña (a citizen of Santo Domingo, the capital city of the Dominican Republic) and daughter of a self-made rich builder, made the best of her marriage-work exile in Ponce and dedicated her life to building a family and making sense of her position in the unmalleable Ponce society through crafts: sewing, baking, and interior decorating. With three children (I am the middle child) and with occasional visits by an older sibling on my father’s side, my parents bought a home in a solidly middle-class subdivision in the northern part of Ponce and sent their children to a local private college-preparatory school. The Caribbean School was established in 1954 by Americans of Ponce’s petrochemical plant. It was the first layer of my native outsider status. Through my elementary school years in the 1970s, the school seemed to be a multicultural haven—Americans, Puerto Ricans, a smattering of global children from, among other places, Japan, Israel, Germany, and the Dominican Republic. It was a model of the growing industrial and racially and class-integrated society Puerto Rico could become—the very society that architects of the New Deal and Operation Bootstrap had envisioned and planned, four decades before I was born. Language and ethnicity were, to me, the first evident lines of my demarcation . At the Caribbean School, we moved, sometimes abruptly, sometimes smoothly, from an English classroom with American teachers to a Spanish playground with Puerto Rican students, to a Spanish home; mothers were “Mom,” “Ima,” “Mama,” or “Mami.” As I got older, everything grew or seemed more delimited. A new school policy (soon abandoned) prohibited the use of Spanish outside of the classroom; Spanish retreated to subversive spots in secretive whispers. Important and discrete class, race, and gender markings revealed themselves in many clues: I was told that I looked like a boy because of my short cropped afro; I was asked by classmates how it felt to be “negra”; I was assigned to play the only credible role for a negra in the elementary school Christmas play (a Raggedy Ann). Race had been drawn for me at six, in school, as a dividing line. Class now emerged as an identifying mark, and, much later for me, sexuality, too, became perceptible, fixed, with gender...