Angela M. Ortega Iannelli
Prof. Cynthia Pittman
INGL 3135-002
5 April 2018
About “Home”
For my whole life, I have had issues with the concept of “home”. It is not because I
am unhappy with where I live, but because other people from the island have trouble
accepting that their home is indeed my home as well. This is because I neither look nor sound
anything like them. Peter Roberts says in The Roots of Caribbean Identity: Language, Race
and Ecology, that “While behavior may in some objective way be the best criterion for
judging sameness, it is the senses of sight (color/race) and sound (language) that provided the
initial and usually most deep-seated conclusions about sameness and difference in identity.”
(p. 5) However, due to my particular circumstance, I agree with the perspective, also from
Roberts’ book, that “...home embodies a psychological factor of attachment, which probably
issues from the basic animal instinct of territoriality, but is more an emotional bond created
through experience of a place.”(p. 1) So, to me, even though I have not physically lived on
every part of the island, this whole island feels like “home”.
I have lived in Puerto Rico my entire life, but every time I meet someone new, I get
the question “So, where are you from?” and when I reply with the statement that I am from
here, it is always met with either “Oh, but you were raised out there (referring to the states),
right?” or “Oh, but you have an accent!” at which point it is necessary to explain how I was
raised, an explanation I repeat so much it comes to me almost automatically, adding more or
less details depending on who I am talking to, but the entire story is the following: My
mother is from the United States, and taught me English first. She homeschooled me until
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seventh grade, so I was never obligated to actually speak Spanish, (even though I could read,
write, and understand most spoken Spanish) and in seventh grade I was enrolled in a bilingual
school, where I made sure to make friends with English speaking children, and avoided
speaking Spanish to my teachers as much as I could. I only really started speaking Spanish
regularly in university, resulting in my accent. Here is where my concept of “home” becomes
problematic. Roberts, in the aforementioned work of his, explained how people tend to feel
that their home is where they feel comfortable, and feel accompanied by people who are “like
them”. Besides my accent in Spanish, and my unusually natural sounding English, I also look
quite foreign to other Puerto Ricans, because my father is from Peru, so I have inherited a
face structure, and skin tone that look pretty South American. So, I sometimes even receive
the “Where are you from?” from strangers before I have even uttered a single word. Even
though Puerto Ricans have a varied ethnic mash-up just from the nature of our twice
colonized history, somehow they seem to all have some sort of trait in common that allows
them to all feel the same, and feel at home with each other. “The perception of sameness
logically implies the perception of difference, which in turn implies that those who are
perceived as different are treated differently”. (Roberts, p. 3) Meaning that I, who somehow
look and sound different from this vague idea of Puerto Rican “sameness”, often get treated
different. Also, many people have tried to insist upon me, once they learn that my parents are
not from here, that I am not Puerto Rican; this always causes a somewhat heated discussion.
You see, if I were to go to Peru, I might be mistaken for a local, until I start to speak my
strangely accented, and relatively slow Spanish that is filled with Puerto Rican
colloquialisms. On the other hand, if I were to go to my mother’s birth-city of Philadelphia, it
wouldn’t matter how well my English is, even possibly having an accent similar to theirs,
they could take one look at me, and assume I am Mexican or of some other ethnicity of
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stereotypically tanned skin. In either of these places that some people might consider I am
“from”, I would be singled out, and maybe even excluded; I certainly would not feel “at
home”. Then again, here, on my beautiful island that I am so emotionally attached to, and
consider my home, I am also singled out, and sometimes to a certain extent excluded. I am
constantly facing situations, and people who do not make me feel “at home” at all. I love
Puerto Rico, it is beautiful, it is unique ecologically, historically, and politically, and it is the
only place I have ever lived. I feel an attachment to the whole island in general, because my
family has always moved around from apartment to apartment so I have not ever felt one
building, or house, as being more homely than any other.
As I mentioned before, I feel “home” has a lot to do, as described by Roberts, with
psychological and emotional attachment, and I am certainly very attached to Puerto Rico.
There is a famous poem written by a Nuyorican writer, Juan Antonio Corretjer, called
Boricua en la luna. The last line, which is the most famous part, says: “Y así le grito al
villano: / yo sería borincano / aunque naciera en la luna.” Which translates to “And this is
how I scream to the villain: / I would be ‘borincano’ / even if I was born on the moon.”
(“Borincano” meaning Puerto Rican; Borikén was the name of the island pre-colonization).
Although I was not born off the island like Corretjer was, this line has always had a lot of
meaning to me. When people from my island intentionally, or unknowingly make me feel
excluded, and less at home, I remind myself of that phrase. I often think that, no matter where
I end up living in the future, even if I end up living off of the planet, my heart is “borincano”;
Puerto Rico will always be “home”.
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Works Cited
Corretjer, Juan Antonio. Boricua en la luna. Luis Lopez Nieves. Ciudad Seva.
http://ciudadseva.com/texto/boricua-en-la-luna/
Roberts, Peter. The Roots of Caribbean Identity: Language, Race and Ecology. New York:
Cambridge U.P., 2008. 1-5.
http://nicenet.org/ICA/class/document_show.cfm?document_id=2183541
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