(EDIT: Well, this is embarrassing. I have been informed by my mom that the mother in the family was from the Dominican Republic, and the father was Mexican. I suspect that, because child me didn't know what the Dominican Republic was, and because I knew she was from one of the islands, and the only islands I knew were Cuba and Puerto Rico, but I knew it wasn't Cuba, I just filled in the blank with the only other option child-me knew at the time. I assumed the mother and father were from the same place, so... Well. Since this blog is partly about how perception and memory and categorization are all squishy, but work together to create something which appears concrete and unalterable, I'm going to leave it as written, but now with this caveat that I was wrong. Imagine that! /EDIT)
In most States, "Latin American" usually is just another way to say "Mexican," which I'm sure is irksome to anyone from... well, from anywhere else in South America or the Caribbean. You might get some white Americans who know the word "Latino" without much change in definition, while scratching their heads at why there are people pushing for Latinx instead. My spellcheck sure doesn't recognize Latinx, I tell you what. It's a term also complicated by the fact that there are many Black Latinx of African descent, as well, so how those people approach the census asking their ethnicity must bring at least a pause for consideration.
Where I grew up, in a mostly white suburb outside of Houston, TX, if you saw any Latinx, you saw guys working construction, or mostly women working janitorial and cleaning staff. I just happened to live right across the street from a family of Puerto Ricans, however, and having something of a glimpse into a rather different lifestyle than is commonly found in suburbia. Their mother cooked basically all day, and their house always smelled delicious. Their father I hardly ever saw, as he worked incredibly hard and usually came home after us kids left for dinner. As a kid, I knew they shopped at Fiesta rather than HEB, which is one of those weirdly specific details children sometimes pick up on. All in all, a nice family, but in my mind they were "just" neighbors and I had no inkling of their past or the culture they left behind when coming to the States.
One day, however, I did get a brief glimpse. I forget exactly the occasion, a birthday or something, but my family was invited over to their house for a party. They had a number of extended family visiting, and it was one of the few times I ever saw the father of the house. I think it's my child-mind's sense of scale, but I remember him being rather tall, and he was very stern and didn't talk much. Not knowing much about him, I had assumed the guy was a total square. Then they turned on the music.
Holy cats, could this guy dance. Like, absurdly good dancer. His wife. His family. Her family. They all could cut a rug. Oddly enough, the kids couldn't. Looking back, though, the reason is clear. Suburban American does many things, but dancing is not one of them. I mean, sure, there were school dances and things like that, but those were the awkward exception to the unspoken rule - thou shalt not bust a move. The only exception was if you did ball room dancing... but only for exercise. Anyways, there was a clear generational split. Those who grew up in Puerto Rico could dance. Those who grew up in the States couldn't, because dancing never happens.
Nowadays I wonder what exactly brought that family here. I mean, I have guesses. Puerto Rico comes up in the news sometimes, and the news is generally not great. Like anything involving the media, I have to wonder how much is perspective, but it's a small island that keeps getting hit by hurricanes and keeps not receiving emergency funding from Congress, so... I imagine the outlook is grim. At this point, I highly doubt I'd have the opportunity to ask them. Wherever they are now, I hope they are well.
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Speaking of dancing the composer I will introduce today is Manuel Gregorio Tavárez (1843-1883). He was a classically trained pianist, learning first from Gonzalo de J. Núñez then travelling to Paris and studying at the Music Conservatory of Paris with the help of a scholarship from "The Economic Society of Friends of Puerto Rico." Tavárez wrote a number of piano works, somewhat echoing the style of Chopin, and wrote a number of danza, a genre of dance that had been the national dance of Puerto Rico for a time. There's not a lot to the biography on Wikipedia, and I can't find much beyond that. He is referenced as "The Father of the Danza," but the links which are attached to those attributions are dead, so who knows? Maybe you do. It sounds reasonable, so why not. Here's one of those piano works titled "La Ausencia," or "The Absence."
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