an introduction

I wasn't always like this.

As a child I kept to myself, lugging books everywhere -- to the bathroom, to the classroom, to my Tia's house, the car and up my favorite tree. Reading avidly, I was usually quiet, words swallowed and revered, my eyes my most revealing feature. Writing fervently even then, I eloquently entangled myself in verbose emotion, lost in an endless stream of fact and fiction. Already enmeshed in the exile mentality, in the Cuba of the mind my generation calls home, these stories compounded those that make up my family's history, their strong work ethic, their moral code. With time I appropriated fragments of their memories, internalizing them, making them my own, the unavoidable by-product of instilling an ethereal allegiance based on intangibles and the mother tongue.

But growing up a mujercita in Miami was undeniably different than it would have been in Santa Clara, and my mother understood that. Maybe she came to understand it as she manicured hands in a Coral Gables beauty salon, cleaning the whole place for an extra $30 on her day off... Maybe she came to understand it when she found herself a single mother when I was but a nickel old, or as we drove around in the car she paid $75 for, missing floorboards withholding protection as puddles joined fearful tears to stain the freshly pressed homemade bata I wore as we searched amid "No Pets. No Blacks. No Cubans." signs for a one-bedroom apartment in 1978 Miami.

Whatever spawned her epiphany, I know she shared it with thousands of other mothers that pushed their daughters to succeed, to educate themselves and dream of careers that their grandfathers would have argued stripped them of their femenina. It was the first time that making good espumita meant more than ya poderte casar -- in exile that translated into a minimum wage job that could pay for the Catholic school uniform your niñita wore to the transplanted, translated version of your own alma mater, memories and tuition both luxuries they could not afford to have or to lose.

Growing up in a matriarchy presided by Abuela, I tuned everything out save for my mother's subliminal mantra: Succeed, not just for yourself, but for me.

Few things were as clear to me as these two: you must be the best at whatever you do, and your career defines you. As a child, what I wanted to be/do fluctuated with the tides. I would take it upon myself to study up on whatever I wanted to be that week; if interior design was the future career of choice, swatches would be created out of Abuela's retazos, interviews would be conducted with people in the industry (i.e. mom's friends) and a detailed dossier would be assembled with the help of my payment plan World Book Encyclopedia and the public library. There was no question I couldn't tackle with books, no identity I could not prepare for with outlines, accessories and information. Data on each in a long series of possible careers -- astronaut, teacher, interior designer, C.I.A. agent, social worker, journalist -- was carefully compiled and catalogued in my special cabinet.

Other lessons were more difficult to prepare for. Teaching myself English as I sat on my silloncito in front of our rabbit-eared living room TV, I also learned that Americano kids moved out at eighteen, that they got an allowance and that they went away to college. Americano kids played Spin the Bottle and Seven Minutes in Heaven at chaperona-free parties. They had heard nothing of quinces, nor did they slip in and out of Spanish over a dinner of bistec empanizado, arroz, frijolesmaduros cooked by your live-in abuelita. I learned how to be a woman from watching my mother, Wonder Woman, Charlie's Angels and Iris Chacon, from Abuela's stories of her courtship with my grandfather, by laughing as I learned to dance the bus stop on an orange shag carpet with my prima Betty and Mari (her fellow disco queen), and stealing glances at rated R movies and Judy Blume (“Forever” and “Wifey”, not “Margaret”). I learned what to look for in a man by watching novelas over dinner, understanding why Joanie loved Chachi, taking in my dad's face when my mom picked him up at the airport, listening to Abuelo Mario's handsome gaze from the black-and-white portrait on the living room shelf, swooning to Beny More’s boleros and letting my heart race as I watched John Travolta in "Saturday Night Fever." My Cubanita defined my sexuality, but my Americanizada put me in touch with it, encouraged me to take charge. and

I learned that the lessons this niña needed could not be avidly researched, nor gleaned from my mother's constant flow of loving (but not-always-applicable) wisdom. They would come later, amid tears and laughter, at late-night drunken pseudo-intellectual discussions of religion and feminism in a dimly lit Ivy dorm room, adorned with blankets and kisses and sex-scented declarations of love. They would come when I looked in the mirror and accepted three of the things that most defined my being:

I am Big. I am Cuban. I am a Girl.