Get to Know Loida Maritza Perez
“Iliana would have traded her soul to have the long, straight hair and olive skin of her Spanish-speaking friends, or to wear her hair in cornrows and have no trace of a Spanish accent like the Johnson girls down the street. She used to hate the question “Where are you from?”
“…What you talking about girl?” they’d ask.” We don’t care where you come from! You be black just like us!”
“Nah, you speak Spanish. You one of us,” her Puerto Rican friends would say.
She used to feel like a rope in a game of tug-of-war…with her skin color identifying her as a member of one group and her accent and immigrant status placing her in another, she had fit comfortably in neither…”
From GEOGRAPHIES OF HOME. Copyright © 1999 by Loida Maritza Pérez. Published by Penguin and originally in hardcover by Viking. Reprinted by permission of Susan Bergholz Literary Services, New York, NY and Lamy, NM. All rights reserved. Author photograph by Marion Ettlinger.
Every now and then a book comes into my life of such extraordinary insight that it leaves me breathless. I’ll carry the book with me for weeks just so I can glance at its pages again and again. Such was the case with Geographies of Home by Loida Maritza Pérez.
Loida grew up in-between the borders of culture and language and possesses a unique voice from which to write. Born in the Dominican Republic and having grown up in the Bronx, Loida Maritza Pérez came to the United States with her family when she was 5 years old. She grabs you by the hand and takes you on a journey that is gut-wrenching and heart breaking; revealing along the way the many contradictions, joys and pains of those caught between cultures and their purpose of finding and defining home.
As Pérez summarizes, “What is home when the country you’ve left behind is no longer home-because you’ve changed and so has the country, is home a familial space? An emotional space? A physical space? It’s different things to different characters. I don’t even know what home is yet.”
I ask myself these questions often. I came to the US from Brazil as a child and grew up in that in-between. I experienced the look on the faces of others wondering where I was from especially because they couldn’t readily associate me to any group through language alone. My first years in school in New York City were brutal. There was no bilingual education offered in Portuguese at my school so I learned English by the seat of my pants. In second grade I had a wad of gum in my hair from a bully named Dawn who always thought I was “putting on airs”.
I was a little brown girl lost. In the school yard no one claimed me. I was left sitting on the sidelines during kick ball. I finally had a small break when my teacher Ms. Kelly (thank you for your kindness wherever you are), took out a map of South America in class and showed everyone where Brazil was and what language was spoken there. Ms. Kelly was the first teacher who took enough interest and time to get to know me and help guide me through those first years in school.
I would love to hear of your experiences in coming to the US and how you define home. Talk to me.
Learn more about Loida Maritza Pérez
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