Yonkers: My Story

Thursday, 02 December 2010 17:54 |

I grew up in a working class neighborhood of New York city, Yonkers to be exact. You have probably heard of Yonkers, and everything you have heard is probably true. The New York city mafia did live there at one point. Its home to large St. Patty Day parade. And it was rough around the edges. Okay, maybe not everything is true, but I didI met the actor from Yonkers Joe, who was also in Godfellas on my block, no joke. Yonkers is a place hard to describe in few words, but it was home. A part of me will always be at home there. Our classmates were Italian and Irish, the old school kind who ate dinners on Sunday with their extended families, like six course meals. Working hard was what life was all about. And hard work, well, that meant respect.

Those lawyer and doctor types had their fancy degrees and Yonkers had its character. We were proud of being from working class families. My mother and father worked such long hours that we were raised by our grandparents. We lived in my grandparents house until we were five. At six years old, we moved to our parent's house. It is strange to me looking back, that we lived with my grandparents. My mother told me before she died that she regretted all the moments she missed. I never held a grudge because I knew she did it for my father, to help the business.

My parents owed a butcher shop and a liquor store. The meat market was the old school type and the liquor store was a corner store in Washington Heights. We worked with my parents basically since the age we could reach the counter. The neighborhood was considered bad, but we were never scared of going there. Owning a liquor store, we had our share of stories, my sister got mugged once closing the store, we got held up twice at home. However, we never felt scared because we were part of the community, My parents worked most of the time, so the little time they spent at home was spent sleeping. This also meant that we, us kids, had to be very independant because we spent a quite amount of time on our own.

I have good memories of living with my grandparents. I felt safe there, and they did everything to make us happy. We had Cuban grandparents. They came here during the Cuban revolution and held on to every inch of their culture that they could, and they instilled it in us too. We drank black coffee for breakfast, yes expresso when we were three, yes three years old. We liked it too, my great grandma Mima taught us to mash up Ritz crackers with expresso, that was one of my favorite desserts growing up. And we ate guava con queso and arroz con friojles. Yes, not habichulas, which if we said that we would stand corrected, no no no, we do not eat habichuelas, we eat frijoles. OKAY there is no difference!

Well to them apparently all the small things mattered. Like Cubans kept the plastic on their sofas, even though Americans thought this was wierd. We wanted to be more American, so we'd ask questions like "Porque haces eso abuela?(Why don't we USE our sofas?)" Well, because the muebles(furniture) will get ruined and we can't afford to get a new ones! We were never allowed to sit on those sofas either, they were for guests, that came like once a year to have Cuban coffee. So I kid you not, I remember fifteen years later we threw away the seventies style, orange and white coaches with brown flowers with the plastic STILL ON them.

We grew up listening to Iris Chacon and Sabado Gigante. We had the flavor of Cuba in our living room and the island lived on in us, and we never really knew it, we were living Cuban memories. The memory of Cuba is all my grandparents had. Many people don't understand what it is like to have to leave your country with one suitcase or nothing at all. In my grandparents case, the guards took that suitcase and threw it in the water. They couldnt bring anything with them to remind them, so the memories had to stay up there in the mind, or deep down in the heart. It almost made a heavier load to carry at times. They had nothing material, so they held on to all their costumbres, their ways of life. They passed the ways on to us like the sweet smell of mango trees. We ate mangos straight making a huge mess with the pit and they reveled and laughed. I can still smell the mangos when I think of abuela.

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