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School's out for the summer, and I'm back slingin' fish at Red Lobster — but without Maude. She and her family went to visit relatives in Ireland for three weeks. She didn't want to go, but I just got a postcard from her telling me about all the cute Irish guys who want to give her rides on their old-fashioned motorcycles. She also mentioned the lower drinking age in Ireland — twice. I miss Maude, but it's actually been kind of fun to be on my own for a while. I've been hanging out with old friends from my neighborhood, going to house parties, and I even went out on a couple of dates (Maude-less, single dates: see my last column) with someone I've known since fourth grade, but who I haven't seen since I switched schools back then.
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By
Tyler Valdez
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Summertime in my neighborhood means two things: sidewalk barbecues and festivals every weekend. My parents get kind of annoyed about the festivals sometimes. You can never park in front of our house, and you can hear the bass thumping through gigantic speakers from all the way across Franklin Park, and a lot of people who've driven over from some other neighborhood start partying on our street. The barbecues are cool, even though I don't eat meat, because I get to be with people of all ages, and we have fun together. When it starts to get dark, and it's finally cool enough to go outside, I go out and sit on the stoop and smell the food, listen to the salsa and merengue coming from the double-parked cars, hang with everybody, and drink Snapple.
My high school is a city-wide exam school, which I like, because I get to meet all kinds of other kids from all over the city, but it also means that I don't spend too much time with some of my childhood friends from my own neighborhood. When I was in elementary school, I couldn't wait to get home every day because I had lots of friends on my street, and we'd play hide-and-go-seek and kickball and TV tag until it got dark. I still see all those people, coming and going, but we just say "Hi" and never hang out. So it's been fun to spend a little more time with some of them since school got out.
Last weekend, I was at a big Dominican festival up in the park, with my friend Dahlia. It was fun. I ate some arroz con pollo (I threw away the pollo), and danced a little with my father, who is always at these things. Dahlia and I were just leaving the park to go back to my house when we passed a group of guys who thought they were the Latin Kings or something. One of them was this other guy I knew from my neighborhood, but I hadn't really talked to him since we were both seven years old, so I just smiled at him a little bit as we passed. His friends started saying stupid stuff to him like, "Damn! She wants you bad!" I know that he just wanted to be a big man in front of his boys, but it still hurt my feelings when he turned around and said to me in a loud voice, "Yo, Tyler! You a gringa now? You bringin' all your gringa friends around? Don't you want to hang with us?" That bothered me, especially because they were insulting Dahlia, who didn't even know them. I started to say something to him about how I was going to tell his older sisters on him, but then he started grabbing at himself and being a fool, so we just left. Who needs that?
I thought I'd put this little incident behind me, but a couple of days later I found myself thinking about it, and I got a weird feeling in my stomach. I was already in kind of a bad mood. That morning, I'd had a conversation with my father that had kind of confused me. He always wants to know a lot of information about my boyfriends, and he loves to tease me about my social life, so I'm used to that. This time, though, he came into the kitchen and said something about this guy I'd gone on a few dates with, the one I knew from fourth grade. What he said was, "Tyler, you know I just want you to be happy, but I have to say I'm glad to see you going out with a guy — an intelligent guy, a nice guy, a guy with a future ahead of him — who's Puerto Rican."
I didn't know what to say to him. I haven't brought that many guys home to meet my parents, and I guess none of the ones I did bring home were Puerto Rican. I know that my dad's ethnicity is really important to him, and I'm proud of him for always working so hard to fight racism, both in his work and in this city. His comment struck me as being a little questionable, though. I didn't say this to him, but I thought, "Why does the color of your skin, or the place your parents were born, have anything to do with who you date?" I mean, I'm Puerto Rican and proud, but I don't make a big deal about it all the time. When I was a kid, and people would wear those big leather medallions with the Puerto Rican flags around their necks, it just looked dumb to me. Why isn't it enough that my father is Puerto Rican? Why am I supposed to dress a certain way, or talk a certain way, to prove that I'm Puerto Rican, too? Why do I have to prove anything? If I don't hang out with certain people, and act a certain way, all of a sudden I'm not good enough? Doesn't the fact that you have to do all this extra stuff prove that your ethnicity is at least partly something you choose, and not entirely something you're just born into? It seems to me that my father is kind of hypocritical, since he didn't choose to marry someone Puerto Rican. What's his problem? He's just taking out his own guilt feelings on me, and I resent that.
I thought about all this for another day or two, and I decided that my father didn't really mean what he said. He tells me all the time how he just wants me to be happy, and how people shouldn't be forced to do anything in life just because of the color of their skin or because they have a certain kind of accent. So what did he mean? While I was thinking about this I kept remembering what that guy in the park had said to me and Dahlia. All of a sudden (actually it was while I was at work, right in the middle of serving this old man a bowl of chowder) it hit me. None of this has anything to do with being Puerto Rican, or too much of a gringa, or anything like that. What it's about is the fact that I'm a woman, and they are men. That's right: This is about keeping women from making their own choices and having fun. I'd like to see how that guy in the park would act if his mother told him he couldn't go out with some all-American blonde. He'd just ignore her; he wouldn't even think about it. That's because guys still think they have more rights than girls do when it comes to dating.
I'd like to really work up some righteous fury about this, but it's too hot (95 degrees) today to go there. This is the summer before my senior year, and I'm just going to relax and enjoy myself. My life is pretty good. I'm making decent money at Red Lobster, plus as long as I get to keep writing this column for Tripod, I really have nothing to complain about. My favorite thing is all the e-mail I get for spilling my guts, so next column I'll answer some of your letters again. Until then, try to stay cool.
—Tyler V.
Tyler Valdez will date whoever the hell she wants to, thank you.
This was the thirteenth edition of her Mad Crib. Catch up on what you've missed in Tyler's archive.
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