E PLURIBUS UNUM

“Out of Many - One”

I always loved this phrase. Most of my life I’ve been blessed to be surrounded by a diverse group of people. Growing up in South Florida the mix of folks, immigrant and “native” (let’s be honest, we are quite liberal with that word) was the everyday of my environment. We bounced around a lot. By the time I was in the fifth grade I had attended seven different elementary schools and none within five miles of one another. It started before my parents divorced so I don’t really know why we moved so much. I went to Catholic schools, public schools, Christian schools, and back to public schools. We covered all of Broward County and a big chunk of Dade County in that time.

It didn’t hit me until well into my adulthood that my experience wasn’t the norm for most people in this country. It impacted my ability to make friendships that last. Spoiler alert: I struggle with that level of intimacy that builds lasting relationships. But it benefited me in other ways.

I didn’t grow up in a world where everyone looked like me all the time.

Let me say this another way: I didn’t know there were people who didn’t share the experienced diversity that was the normative experience of my life.

This experienced was amplified when my father remarried.

While I was cognitively aware of the differences between myself and those around me, it wasn’t something I thought about much. My very white father married my very Cuban stepmother when I was ten years old. I still remember how beautiful and funny she was that first night my dad introduced her to us. It didn’t take long for my brother and I to call her “Mami”. We pretty much loved her from day one. We just call her “Mom” now because we are adults and that is what adults do. She teases us sometimes about how we used to call her “Mami”.

The first words I ever learned in Spanish were “Da me un besito,” and I still say it to Mom every time I see her.

Her parents emigrated to Miami by boat with her and her siblings in the 50s when she was only 6 months old. Mom is a naturalized American citizen and has been for over fifty years. She served in the USAF. She went to college. She owned her own business and later sold it for a nice little sum, though it didn’t make her rich. She lived in Florida, Ohio, Maryland, and North Carolina. She was the best thing to happen to my father, for a lot of reasons.

After their wedding, I had in influx of new Cuban aunts, uncles, and cousins. I adore them all though I don’t get to see them often these days. Mom’s family welcomed my brother and I into their family with open arms. We never felt like outsiders.

Not long after the wedding, my sister was born. I was twelve. Then another brother, and then yet another brother. I’m the oldest of five.

Mom’s mother, Abuelita, dated a man from Haiti for a very long time. She owned a successful business manufacturing curtains and comforters. Hotels all over South Florida bought from her. She was warm and funny and barely spoke a word of English. Abuelita practiced Santeria. I still remember the plates of food on her altar with pictures of saints, candles, and the little ants crawling all over it. She had chickens in the back yard there in Little Havana just down the street from the old Orange Bowl that was pretty much a flea market by 1984.

I won’t tell you the story about the time she sent me into the back yard to grab a chicken. Pretty much every one of her grandkids has the same story. No, not for Santeria…it wasn’t like that.

Every other Sunday, every holiday, every baptism (I was raised Catholic), every First Communion, every wedding—hell, every Dolphins game—my brother and I were surrounded by a diverse crowd of Irish Scottish, Cuban, and Haitian people.

My entire life I was taught, not by words, but by environment, that “E Pluribus Unum” was real. All these people from different places with different skin colors, different beliefs, different backgrounds, mingled with the Irish Scottish family I already had. We blended. We adopted new traditions from each other. We melted together into one big giant family.

To this day my favorite food is Cuban food. Mom made black beans and rice, maduros, tostones, yucca, flan, arroz con pollo, ropa vieja, lechon asada, tres-leches, alongside the staples of Sheppard’s pie, Guiness stew, and corned beef with cabbage and potatoes. I ate more Cuban bread than any human has a right to eat. I’m shocked I didn’t turn into a giant loaf of it. I had my first Café Cubano when I was eleven. I still drink it like it’s water.

On my biological mother’s side of the family, I spent much of my time at her parent’s house. She didn’t remarry after the divorce from my father. Mom’s family was very close. But with three daughters, two infertile, and no son’s, my brother and I were the only grandkids in that side of the family. But even then, we were surrounded by diversity.

The Prentices lived next door. They were from South America, but I can’t for the life of me remember where. Mrs. Prentice loved how my brother and I knew tiny bits of Spanish thanks to Mami and that we never turned down a meal. Upon arrival at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, we bolted across the yard to knock on the Prentices door so we could play with our friends, their two sons, who were five years older than us but always willing to play a game of HORSE or throw a football around.

My mom’s parent’s neighborhood had a Synagogue, a Methodist church, and a Catholic church. My mother’s best friend was Jewish, and my aunt Bobi married a Jewish man. She later converted to Judaism.

Everywhere my brother and I went, we were surrounded by people different from us.

We lived in the Melting Pot.

I don’t want to disparage a parent but let me be forthright: while my brother and I were blessed with this experience, prior to my stepmother’s appearance into our father’s life, there were certain words thrown around in his home. It’s one of the reason’s my mom divorced my father, I think. Mom (biological mom) was never one for intolerance, even in the 80’s.

In the 70’s Dad wore belts that had “The South Will Rise Again”. He held onto certain misogynistic stereotypes too. There are pictures with a confederate flag on the wall in the trailer I was born in that I hide in a box, embarrassed to even look at, but afraid to throw away lest I forget where I started. For the record, I was born in a single-wide in a trailer park. Well, not “born in”. I was born in Broward General Hospital. My parents brought me home to the tornado transport that looked almost identical to Bud and Sissy’s trailer in Urban Cowboy.

My dad, thankfully, evolved into a much more enlightened human being. I believe a certain headstrong, feminist, intellectually superior, Cuban woman is to thank for that. Te quiero mucho, Mami!

My mother (biological one), thankfully, had a greater influence on my brother and I than my dad did prior to my dad’s new wife. Moreover, by the time dad married Mami his evolution was well underway.

I look around and I see all the anger and hate toward immigrants, and I don’t understand why we are still in this place. People scream about “criminals” entering our country and are willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater. This is the most insane part to me.

The “flip-switch” of the narrative doesn’t resonate with me. Immigrants have always been the backbone of our nation. School House Rock taught us that German, Irish, Italian, Scottish, British, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, African, Polish, Iranian, Palestinian, Israeli, etc. make us what we are. The list of countries that have influenced our society, economy, culture, is endless.

I will never understand the hatred that has grown so prevalent. I’ll never understand the outrage against people who aren’t white, or “native” born. This concept of “birth-right” is a fallacy. Indigenous people are the only true birth right citizens of the land. The rest of us are immigrants and descendants of immigrants.

Just like my stepmother and my siblings.