BIRD OF PARADISE: HOW I BECAME LATINA
By Raquel Cepeda
Reviewed by By Thelma T. Reyna
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Raquel Cepeda’s memoir, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina, is authentically reflective of her prominence in the various worlds she navigates: hip-hop and new media, journalism, advocacy of women worldwide, and her social activism regarding the disenfranchised, especially young Latinas on the verge of suicide. “Raquel Cepeda” may not be a household name, but it needs to be, because Cepeda speaks with a voice that captures all the grit of growing up oppressed by domestic violence and racial prejudice, but also the victory of breaking these bonds to fly like the proverbial bird of her book’s title.
In Bird of Paradise, Cepeda re-lives her life with razor-sharp attention to detail. The memoir is actually two books in one. Part I depicts the author’s childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood in New York City, warts and all. Part II depicts her journey to different parts of the world in discovering her true ethnic identity, which in turn helps her reconcile her family conflicts and bring closure to her lifelong struggle to understand her heritage.
The two parts read like different books, with the first half full of unapologetic defiance, jadedness, turbulence, and violence, depicted for readers without self-pity and with eyes wide open. The second half is reflective, academic, graced with historical accounts of Cepeda’s people in general and her ancestors specifically. In a context of science and the burgeoning accessibility of DNA testing, Cepeda nonetheless keeps both parts well-connected, primarily because of the salience of key players in Part I: her father, mother, and other relatives.
Part I: Surviving Domestic Abuse
Cepeda’s hardiness in the face of abuse is stunning. She is a warrior and survivor who made her own destiny. Cast from one parent to another, from one household to another, unloved and unwanted by both parents, and feeling perennially marginalized, Cepeda navigates her life the best way she can and somehow defies the odds.
We learn early on that her mother had been a high achiever in a privileged Dominican family, but that, as a teenager, she forsook a bright future to marry, against her parents’ wise protestations, an older, suave singer of questionable reputation who conned his way into her heart. Foolishly rebellious, Cepeda’s mother, Rocío , becomes a child bride to Eduardo and almost immediately starts living a life of hell.
In short order, she devolves from being the brainy, favorite child of an upper middle-class family in Santo Domingo, to living hand-to-mouth in a Bronx tenement, being little more than chattel to her cold, domineering, womanizing husband. When Raquel is born to this couple, she is a burden to two self-absorbed people incapable of loving. Cepeda writes: “My mother has trouble taking care of me. She can barely take care of herself.” (p. 22)
When Cepeda is six months old, her divorced mother packs her off to her family’s estate in Paraíso, Santo Domingo. For the next six years there, Cepeda has what is perhaps the only stretch of love and happiness in her childhood, nurtured by her maternal grandparents, uncles, and aunts while her absent mother “gets back on her feet.” But once Rocío fetches her daughter and takes her back to the States, Cepeda’s life is set on a path of turbulence and violence.
Rocío’s choices in men are detrimental not only to her but to Raquel as well. One after the other, the men Rocío brings into her life and sometimes marries are brutes who blithely brag that beating their women “to keep them in line” is necessary. Easy to control, Rocío is transformed into a pitiful shell by abusive husbands and lovers. She denies reality, struggles to survive, and has absolutely no love to spare for her daughter. After two years of utter hell at the hands of her second husband, Rocío flees with Raquel for their lives, and Rocío strikes out on her own.
She sends Raquel, now eight, to live with Eduardo in New York City. Her mother’s parting words to her are, “Go to hell. I hope you die and go to hell with your father. I never want to see you again.” (p. 22) Now it is Raquel Cepeda herself who is the victim of beatings. Her enigmatic, hard-hearted father has married a detached White woman named Alice who might as well be invisible. From the time Cepeda is an elementary school child, through her high school years, Alice witnesses Eduardo beating his daughter with wooden chairs, metal ball hoppers, his fists, and anything else he can marshal, yet Alice says nothing to stop the violence.
Eduardo despises Dominicans and wishes they were all killed. A Dominican himself, he denies his heritage and tries to present himself as a White man. He enrolls Raquel in a private Catholic school and demands that she learn how to play piano and tennis, as White people do. He rightly believes that his daughter’s achievement in school will afford her a better life, but he brutally demands perfection from her and is unforgiving of any shortcomings. He humiliates her publicly, strikes her forcefully on her neck or head if she makes errors, and continues “kicking, throwing, and punching me” (p. 69) once he and Cepeda get home. Cepeda “lives like a scared animal under his roof.” (p. 146) Finally, after high school, she stands up to her father and flees his domination by going to college in Pennsylvania.
The Saving Graces of Hip-Hop
Throughout her adolescence, Cepeda finds respite from domestic turmoil in Washington Square Park and other open areas where aspiring artists, singers, dancers, and other young people congregate and enjoy popular music trends that speak to their own alienation and generation. The ethnic diversity and camaraderie, the song lyrics that echo the hardships and disenchantment that Cepeda feels, are affirming and welcoming to her. She feels at home in the hip-hop culture she sees burgeoning around her, and she embraces it wholly, even though her father denigrates the “monkeys,” the Blacks he called “Matangas,” and tries to prevent his daughter from associating with ethnic-minority people, all of whom he deems inferior.
Feeling that nobody in her life understands her affinity for hip-hop, Cepeda fully embraces it in her high school years, replacing “the played-out textbooks I barely cracked as a high school senior” (p. 297) with music-focused periodicals, such as The Village Voice. She is learning about life, herself, her values, her direction from top writers for The Village Voice and other such media, and from the lyrics of her favorite hip-hop artists.
By the end of Part I, Cepeda has secured jobs with hip-hop media and is making a name for herself. Her eventual husband, Sacha Jenkins, offers Cepeda her “first big break,” a celebrity interview for his magazine, Beat Down. She returns the favor years later by inviting him to submit an article for a hip-hop anthology she is editing. They fall in love, marry, and Cepeda’s life journey becomes ever clearer. She writes: “My participation in the [hip-hop] culture as a magazine editor, critic, and documentary filmmaker has been the proverbial key that’s opened the door for me to roam this breathtaking planet.” (p. 154)
Part II: Cepeda’s Journey to Find Her Ancestry
All her life, Raquel Cepeda has been an enigma to anyone wondering about her ethnic heritage: she is variously identified as Black, Mexican, Spanish, Arab, Egyptian, Jewish, Indian, biracial White, and other configurations that bemuse and baffle her. Almost never is she correctly pegged as a Dominican-American. To muddle the matter further, Cepeda’s father is tight-lipped about his heritage, in particular refusing to discuss his father. Because Cepeda has been “unable to stand him for most of my life” (p. 147), she cares little about Eduardo’s heritage and is mostly embarrassed by his extreme racism against Blacks and Latinos.
But after Cepeda gives birth to her daughter and gains greater success in her journalistic career, she begins a reconciliation with her past and with her father that starts her journey of self-discovery. Eduardo has a heart attack that leaves him more vulnerable than previous ones have, and she fears that, once he dies, she’ll never be able to learn the full truth about their heritage. “A part of me would die with him,” she writes. “I needed Dad to help me uncover an important part of our family’s history. By using the science of ancestral DNA testing, I’d be able to start piecing together the puzzle of our…ancestral origins.” (p. 148)
So Cepeda embarks on a journey that eventually answers her questions but creates others. By convincing her father and other key family members, most of them in other countries, to submit cheek swabs for a specialized mitochondrial DNA testing, Cepeda learns piecemeal information about her forebears, increasing the specificity of her origins as additional relatives are tested. To help her better understand these roots, she travels to the places of the world once inhabited by her predecessors, visiting different continents, interviewing experts, scholars, other relatives, and slowly filling in gaps.
In the process, she learns history like it was never taught in school, history of other peoples and cultures stripped of their Eurocentric focus that is the trademark of the teaching of history in the United States. The reader’s eyes are opened wide for perhaps the first time regarding what vaunted historical “heroes” (e.g., Christopher Columbus) actually did toward the people they “conquered.”
Cepeda writes: “What would…the Birthers and…conservative Republicans say if they learned that many Latinos (me included) are mixed with European blood because of the thing they fear…illegal immigration?” (p. 260) The author ultimately states: “My own genetic and spiritual revelations have made me think about what exactly makes a U.S. citizen American. What does that look like as opposed to the face of an ‘illegal’? I always thought the face of America looked like the original people who settled here….Indigenous Americans and Mexicans were here first….Latinos are prototypical New Americans, the products of European immigration, colonialism, and slavery.” (p. 260)
Cepeda’s Importance in Latino Literature
Raquel Cepeda, a Dominican-American, is best known as an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker, especially the critically-lauded film, Bling: A Planet Rock, which depicts hip-hop’s love affair with diamonds. She directed and produced this, and also edited the anthology, And It Don’t Stop: The Best American Hip-Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years (2004, Faber & Faber, Inc.). Cepeda also served as editor-in-chief of One World Magazine. Her career as an author has centered on journalism and the hip-hop culture.
With DNA testing becoming more familiar to people via movies, television, school classes, and the popular media, Raquel Cepeda’s memoir fills a niche that may arguably increase in relevance: the juncture of science and its effect on people’s everyday lives and interests. Because of its role in solving crimes, DNA testing has often been seen as a technical, esoteric tool for helping catch killers, rapists, and other wrongdoers. Because of Raquel Cepeda, however, DNA testing may help many of us truly understand our roots and appreciate better the one message that is strongly implied in her book.
Listen carefully. The message is: There is only one race on Earth, the human race. We are all connected.
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This review was previously published in Somosenescrito.blogspot.com and is posted on Latinopia by permission.
Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D., is author of The Heavens Weep for Us and Other Stories (2009, Outskirts Press), which has won four national awards. Her short stories, poems, essays, book reviews, and other non-fiction have been published in literary and academic journals, literature textbooks, anthologies, blogs, and regional media off and on since the 1970’s. Her first poetry chapbook, Breath & Bone, (Finishing Line Press, 2011) was a semi-finalist in a national poetry chapbook competition. Dr. Reyna is an adjunct professor at California State University, Los Angeles. Her website is www.ThelmaReyna.com.