Cuban-American poet Richard Blanco is a bridge between the generation of Cuban exiles for whom there is no poet but José Martí and their grandchildren grooving on Pitbull's rap.
Blanco, whose memoir The Prince of Los Coyuyos was recently released to critical and popular acclaim, has become the voice of a generation of Latinos who remember with exasperation and abiding affection the ways of parents to whom America meant something completely different than to their English-dominant and U.S.-raised offspring.
For the past week, on his Facebook page, Blanco has posted excerpts from the chapter "The first real San Giving Day" in The Prince of los Cocuyos:
"Over the years I had heard the stories they always told in low voices and with teary eyes, reliving the plane lifting above the streets, the palm trees, the rooftops of their homes and country they might never see again, flying to some part of the world they’d never seen before. One suitcase, packed mostly with photographs and keepsakes; no more than a few dollars in their pocket; and a whole lot of esperanza. That’s what the Pilgrims must have felt like, more or less, I imagined. They had left England in search of a new life too, full of hope and courage, a scary journey ahead of them. Maybe my family didn’t know anything about turkey or yams or pumpkin pie, but they were a lot more like the Pilgrims than I had realized."
Blanco's work speaks to more than just his generation of Cuban-Americans, of course. The magic of his words is that they speak equally to the U.S. citizen children of undocumented parents who this Thanksgiving think, with hope and gratitude, that perhaps Obama's executive action will mean the possibility of three years of Thanksgivings with no threat of deportation hanging over their family's heads.
I haven't read Blanco's The Prince of los Cocuyos yet, I'm looking forward to it. But his way of illuminating an experience that reaches across intra-Latino cultural divides was already familiar to me from his poetry. In his poem, América, he writes:
"There was always pork though,
for every birthday and wedding,
whole ones on Christmas and New Year’s Eve,
even on Thanksgiving day—pork,
fried, broiled, or crispy skin roasted—
as well as cauldrons of black beans,
fried plantain chips, and yuca con mojito."
In my family it was not pork but refried mashed black beans — what my mother referred to as "caviar guatemalteco" — that made its way onto every festive table. My mother wasn't the best cook, and in those days there was no such thing as an ethnic foods aisle in any of the supermarkets within hailing distance of us, so she refried undiluted Campell's canned black bean soup. I still remember how gleeful she was when she discovered that this cheat resulted in a more or less passable facsimile of the real thing. My father, for his part, reminisced about the arepas of his youth, but my mother never found a handy ready-made to be able to put that bit of memory on the table for him, or us.
I was reminded of all this when Samantha Madera wrote her story
Who said turkey? In it, Iraqi, Puerto Rican, Italian, Indian and Vietnamese families talk about honoring shared memories and keeping cultural legacy alive through food.
Naturally, even to a foodie like me, Thanksgiving is about more than just food. I'm wistfully calling up celebrations of Thanksgivings past this morning as I start the prep for our dinner tonight. It will be just the three of us this time around (one brother's family is in Rome, my other brother's family is celebrating in New York City, because as a news editor he's got to work whether it's a holiday or not) and because of the reduced number of us around the table it will feel incomplete.
But for me, a place is reserved for memories at every celebration centered around giving thanks for family, nuclear and extended, and for the way the countries we've loved have shaped us, and continue to shape us.
It is an especially poignant turn of phrase when Blanco writes about San Giving, rather than Thanksgiving. Yes, I know he is replicating the way some Spanish-dominant folk facing an entirely new holiday tradition would pronounce it, but for me it conjures more than that. The way San (which means saint in Spanish) accords it equivalence to all those other saints' feast days we Latinos like to celebrate. The way it adds metaphysical comfort to the physical comfort innate in being here, together, and about to share a meal prepared with love and attention. The way the blessing of giving transcends the hard moment we may be living personally — and are living as a nation in the aftermath of the wounding Ferguson decision — and stretches back in time, and forward too.
In the face of the first step taken this year to allow some undocumented immigrants to sit around the Thanksgiving table without fear; in the face of the massive work we must do to make sure African-American families don't live in fear for the lives of their children every single day; in the face of an out-of-control economic disparity that is making a lie of our shared belief that hard work is rewarded ... let's agree to be thankful for the grit, the vision, commitment and determination we will need to ensure that our future is more just and grace-filled for everyone in our nation.
My mother was devoted to Our Lady of Guadalupe and Saint Jude. My father looked to the more Eastern Holy Theodokos. I'm thinking that since I'm one of those mixes that finds home nowhere and everywhere, I can make this imagined San Giving a patron for my native-born father, my immigrant mother and the blended Americans my siblings' families and mine represent (Bengali, African American, Welsh, Irish, Greek, Guatemalan, Mexican) and for the community and nation we also represent.
May all of our futures be blessed, may all of our futures hold what we have long longed to be thankful for.
I'd love to see the comments on this column filled with the Thanksgiving poems and remembrances of our readers. We may not all write with the assurance and skill of Richard Blanco, but our words can find resonance across cultures, generations and Thanksgivings.
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