Dulces de Coco by Angely Mercado (grave mercy txt) 📕

I have always been told by many people that for a person who comes from a Caribbean Hispanic background, I’m not very tan. Being the darkest person in my household, I have always found that hard to believe. My Dominican grandmother has always given my complexion names such as “India”, “trigueña” and “caramelo”. And my Puerto Rican grandmother was just plain pale as were many of her children. As a child who noticed many comments of the adults around me, I felt strange. One minute my straight hair was praised, but then random comments about my nose being a bit wide and how dark I became during the summer slipped into my ears somehow. At first I didn’t care. So what if I was tan like my mother. It wasn’t even all that tan to begin with according to a lot of other Latinos.

            For a few years, I began to hate it. Mass media and advertising didn’t seem to have room for many different shades. And it came with stigmas. Such as what that one girl in middle school blatantly told me during homeroom. It was something about how Latinas became pregnant early in life and didn’t seem to want to graduate from high school at all. She had the audacity to wish me luck. I didn’t have a witty come back at the time, I was practically a mute. I don’t suppose I do now, but then again, I hope in an alternate universe, I kicked the crap out of her.

            But this isn’t about teenage pregnancy, or about how I did or didn’t like my tan. But it’s more about how I realized that although my mother didn’t pay any mind to anyone’s skin color, someone had paid mind to hers, and in turn mine. She told me the story while standing at the counter in the kitchen. I was sitting fact checking one of my articles that was due for publication in a few days. It wasn’t the first time she had told the story, but the first time I wasn’t paying attention. But I did this time, I don’t know why. I should have been fact checking.

            “I have always tried to reach out to your father’s family, anyways; I wish he would do the same sometimes.”

            “How did they react to you at first?” I asked.

            “Well, most of them were nice, but one of his uncles was rude.”

            “How?”

            Most of my dad’s uncles, at least the ones I had met in his hometown had been very sweet. The kind of old men whose hands trembled slightly when I handed them a glass of water or when they slipped me a few dollars.

            “For ice cream,” one of them had told me in English.

            He beamed brightly at me when I responded in Spanish. They were a group of sweet, old men, some white haired, some speckled, always dolling out hugs and blessings. I don’t remember ever meeting a rude uncle.

            My mother explained with saying that it was around the time when I was less than a year old. She and dad had gone to visit family in Puerto Rico. My brother was still being incubated inside my mother, I was a few months old and my sister was a bit over a year old. I was feeling sick and so my mother was tending to me in my aunt’s room while dad was watching Ively out on the porch.

            “I was there with you in the room and that uncle walked by, took a look at you in the crib, took a look at me and said ‘this one’s going to be trigueña like her mother’ and then walked away.”

            “That’s all he said?”

            “Yeah, no hello how are you, no offer to carry you. Nothing.”

            “Was he from grandma’s side of the family, all pale and with my type of hair?”

            “No. He was dark. He wasn’t even a good looking man. He probably thought I was one of those Dominican women who married a Puerto Rican for papers because the two islands are right next to each other.”

            I remember my mother complaining that during her first few years of marriage, some family friends or distant relatives had referred to her simply as "la dominicana", the Dominican. 

            “Why don’t I remember a rude uncle?”

            “He died a few months later,” she scoffed, “Cancer did it. Apparently it ate him from the inside out.”

            She paused.

            “He’s been dead for about as long as you’ve been alive, and I continue killing him by telling the story.”

            She laughed as she glanced out the kitchen window.

            “I kill him dead every time”.

            By then I had guessed that she didn’t mind that my dad’s uncle had was out of the picture. Mom scoffed, turned back to whatever it was she was doing at the counter. That scoff pounded the last nail in that uncle’s coffin. He probably didn’t like the coffin anyway, because coffins are usually made out of wood, wood is tan, and so am I. 

I have a love hate relationship with taxi drivers. Most New Yorkers do. Probably anyone who lives in a major city around the world has that same relationship with taxi drivers. They get us from point A to point B when the buses and trains are delayed and when we have a few extra dollars in our pockets. But then again, they fly by in yellow (and now some in an eco friendly lime green), as we’re trying to cross from Union Square Park onto Broadway. They also try to get away with not giving you change sometimes. And every once in a while, you’re standing in the cold with your arm outstretched and they don’t bother to pick you up. We can’t live with them. And we can’t live without them.

Expect for the independent cabs that are all over Queens and Brooklyn. Many of them are organized by ethnic groups and have names like Cibao, where most of the taxi drivers there actually hail from that region of the Dominican Republic. Others sport country names like Peru, Mexico, Honduras, Italy and Poland to say a few. You can usually tell who is who by the music playing from inside the car, or what little flag hangs from the mirror.

Last weekend, I hailed a cab that was on the other side of the road and he did a U-turn and screeched to a halt on the curb. Bachata spilled out gently from the windows and I was certain that it was a Dominican cab driver. But he wasn’t. The moment I entered the cab and said “good evening” the sing song of his accent made it clear that he was not Dominican.

First, he was instructed to drop off my boyfriend at his house, since it was higher up in Queens and closer to the restaurant that we had been in. I said a quick goodbye; I always do when someone is watching. I gave instructions to my address and then sat back into the seat.

“Your night ended early, hun,” the driver began.

“Na, I’m a student so I don’t exactly get late nights very often,” I responded, “work and study usually holds me down.”

“That’s good actually; at least you had some fun today I take it.”

“Yeah,” I responded, “I really needed to get out today.”

He thought for a bit after he came across an intersection and tried to decide which way would be best.

“How long have you two been together?” he asked.

I flushed red in the backseat. He noticed the string of kisses that had been given when I thought he wasn’t looking. He had also seen the random forehead kisses, hugs and intertwined fingers. Damned mirror.

“A little bit over a year.”

“That’s real cute, have you known him for very long?”

“Since I was 14, we had a language class together in high school; we didn’t become friends until after he graduated high school though.”

The driver laughed.

“How did he convince you though?”

His phone rang, and so he stopped on a corner and answered. He kept driving after the call ended.

“Sorry about that, love. So how did he convince you? ”

“Well…he didn’t exactly convince me. For over a year before we dated, mutual friends kept pushing for the idea of us dating,” I laughed, remembering how mad I used to become, “I completely rejected the idea.”

“He must be a really nice guy then.”

“He really is, that and all the nagging did help plant the idea in my head. I didn’t know it at the time, but in the end we agreed to give it all a try,” I explained.

“But didn’t you try to get at him a little bit. Like no flirting or anything?”

I couldn’t help but laugh.

“In English there’s a phrase that says ‘friend zone’, I saw him mostly as a great friend meanwhile he’s trying to flirt and get me to notice him,” I responded.

The driver howled into the steering wheel.

“How did you not notice? That poor boy,” he said as he wheezed out another laugh.

“The things that he had to put up with the summer of 2012.”

I also explained to the driver that I felt like things seemed to be going in a decent direction. My overly strict parents liked my boyfriend, and if they liked him from the beginning, then that was one less thing to worry about.

“My mother is one of those overbearing Dominican moms, so if she likes him, then you know he’s a nice guy.”

The driver paused and peered at me though his mirror.

“You’re Dominican?”

“Half, I was born here but my dad is from Puerto Rico.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you look South American?”

It was my turn to laugh.

“I get that a lot,” I told him.

“I saw you and I thought you looked South American, you’re not that dark. And your boyfriend is obviously Mexican.”

“There are lighter Dominicans, I’m dark compared to some of them,” I explained.

“I guess I’m used to seeing Caribbean Hispanics as being really dark or having curly hair all the time.”

That’s when I had to give a quick lesson on how south Puerto Ricans are mixed with indigenous people and Europeans. And central Dominicans came in every variation possible.

“If I ever get married and have a child, I have no guarantees on what he or she will look like. It’ll be like some sort of roulette.”

The driver ended up laughing all over again. I prayed that the poor man wouldn’t accidentally lose control of the wheel because of his chuckling.

“What would really suck is if your kid looks really different from either of you and someone accuses you of