As a general rule, I don’t consider folks who grew up in the ‘state’ (as opposed to the city) as Nuyorican. Life in NYC is very different from the ‘burbs and even Long Island.

There’s so much to unpack in your piece. I’m working on getting my first poemario published this summer (con Editorial Pulpo) and one of my poems that tackles this very topic is ‘When I was Nuyorican’ - ya lo sabes, named after Esmeralda Santiago’s When I was Puerto Rican, a piece of work that impacted me wayyy back in the day).

To read that your mother said “ellos no son como nosotros” took me back to a memory of something my mother said many times about gringos blancos - “They’re not like us.”

I have gone through (still going through it) my identity issues with even a time when I stopped calling myself Nuyorican. Le decía a la gente, “soy puertorriqueña de la ciudad de Nueva York.”). For me, I started to feel that by identifying as Nuyorican (especially after learning more about our twice colonial [his, really HER] story), I was showing an allegiance to gringolandia. Over the past few months, I started to re-own it and reclaim it with a sense of identity because it helped shaped me, but not placing the u.s.of KKK as a priority). It gets tricky to explain and I will add this - moving here continues to give me different perspectives.

I have another poem called ‘Boricua Soy’ wherein I have a conversation with an elderly man who refuses to accept me as being Boricua.

Then there are Nuyoricans who’ve never visited la matria and it saddens me because it makes me wonder el por qué. Of course, I know we are not a monolith - no lo somos las, les y los Nuyoricans, ni tampoco people like my family who have spent their entire lives en Borikén.

I could write much more on this subject. Gracias un montón for sharing this piece. The dialog continues. I’ll end with one of my favorite sayings: we be fabulous with a capital F 💪🏽🇵🇷💥 (and yes, the incorrect grammar is intentional- really what I say is we be f**g FABULOUS, pero I wanted to keep it PG for Medium). 😉