In Washington Heights

In Washington Heights Luis Guzmán Valerio (bio) The Washington Heights neighborhood has always held a certain symbolic value in my life. As a child, my mother would bring me and my little brother to visit relatives in the neighborhood. None of them stayed. Tía Albertina and her family moved to Kissimmee and tío Toño and his family moved back to the Dominican Republic. As an adult, my father committed suicide in his apartment on 181st Street. I was in Puerto Rico at the time. Washington Heights is a place that has beckoned me, pushed me away, drawn me in, and made me want to get the fuck away. My earliest memories are of visiting my great-grandfather in the neighborhood. I might have been three years old. That's how old I was when I was first brought over from the DR. I remember my great-grandfather lived in a huge apartment with a separate living room, dining room, and kitchen. The rooms seemed endless to me as a three-year-old. A set of French double doors with divided glass panes separated the living room from the dining room. The first time I saw those double doors open up made an awesome impression on me. I had never seen anything like it. I remember looking out a window from that apartment and seeing sailboats on the Hudson. The apartment could have been on Riverside Drive. On a visit to Santiago de los Caballeros in my twenties, I found out from my great-grandfather that he had started coming to New York in the 1950s, during the Trujillo dictatorship. How he was one of the lucky ones able to get a visa at that time, I do not know. What I do know is that the right to migrate to the United States was passed on from one relative to another, like an inheritance. My great-grandfather lived with several great-aunts and second cousins in that huge Washington Heights apartment. On one occasion, when I was very young, my mother left me overnight with my cousins, aunts, and uncles so that they could babysit me. My cousins introduced me to eating Frosted Flakes [End Page 206] with Coca-Cola. We watched a movie on TV where some monster grew in a person's stomach. The stomach exploded and the monster came out. After eating the Frosted Flakes with the Coca-Cola, I thought the bubbles and the gas in my stomach were going to make it explode. I had nightmares that night of a monster exploding out of my stomach. When I visited, I appreciated all the attention I received from my extended family. My mother didn't recall those days fondly though. Later on in life, she told me she only had one pair of jeans when she first came to New York y que en el invierno se moría de frío. That first winter in New York she wore those jeans until they wore out. You see, coming to New York for my mother was not a luxury. My grandfather kicked my mother out of the house when she was sixteen because she was pregnant. The nuns also kicked her out of Catholic school. She went to live with her tía Masa and got a job en la Zona Franca sewing brand-name American clothing for slave wages. There was quite a narrow future for a seventeen-year-old mother in the Dominican Republic. Tía Masa arranged for my mother to marry her cousin Julito so that she could get a visa ASAP and come to Nueva York, where opportunities abound. My mother had to get away from the stigma of being a teenage mother, getting kicked out her home, and kicked out of Catholic school. If only it were that easy. In New York, her aunts and cousins were harsh and unforgiving, passive aggressive. How dare she not protect her most prized possession like they had. My father didn't have it easy either. The story goes that my grandfather chased him around town with a gun and wanted to kill him. You see, that's the way...

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