Naturally, my appearance on the show sparked a steady stream of booking requests. Mom handled the business side of things, negotiating fees and making sure people paid up. Daddy drove me wherever I needed to go and set up the sound and video equipment when we got there. All I had to do was dance, and I was serious about it. I never had a boyfriend, played sports, or got involved in other extracurricular activities. During the school year, when I wasn’t in ballet class or belly dancing, I was studying. When school was out for holiday breaks, we’d go to Puerto Rico to visit our grandmothers.
Flying as unaccompanied minors, Jan and I would be dropped off at the gate, where an escort would help us board and sometimes bump us up to first class. Even though Jan was older, she was the one who tended to get nervous.
“What if the escort doesn’t show up? What if we get lost?”
I’d roll my eyes and say, “We won’t get lost. C’mon.”
I always took control, chatted up the escort, and headed for the Jetway.
On our arrival in Puerto Rico, we’d go to my maternal grandmother, Nelly—maternal in the sense that she is my mother’s mother, not in the sense that she’s at all maternal by nature. Grandma Nelly had a severe view of a woman’s place in the world and a sharp tongue to make sure there were no questions about it. I was grateful for the beautiful dresses she helped make for me, but I cringed, listening to her tear Mama down with verbal abuse about her weight, her hair, her makeup, her dancing, her life choices, and her daughters. The “good hair” that got us beat up at school was never good enough for Grandma Nelly, who subjected her own head to an endless stream of chemical straighteners and dark brown dye. She yelled at Mama for letting me dance, but then she’d turn around and brag to her friends that I’d been on TV.
We counted the hours, waiting for Daddy’s mother, Grandma Mercedes, to pick us up and take us to her house. Our grandmother Mercedes was warm and affectionate. She was a wonderful cook who could make magic from an empty refrigerator.
“We were poor when I was growing up,” Daddy told us. “That’s why having meat is such a big deal. Back then we had rice with beans or beans with rice.”
Everyone was welcome at Mercedes’s home, and whoever came to the table was fed, but Daddy and his brother noticed that sometimes their mother would sit with her coffee and cigarette, engaging in the laughter and conversation but not eating. They figured at the time that she wasn’t hungry, but realized later in their lives that there was not much food, and Mercedes chose to go hungry herself rather than turn someone away.
Mercedes didn’t have a living room like you’d expect to see in the States; she had a big open area with a tile floor and big gates. At night, the car was parked there and the gates were closed. First thing in the morning, she’d open it up, back the car out, and mop the floor where the car had dripped oil.
“Stay off this tile until it’s dry,” she’d warn, because this was my dance floor. While the sun baked the tiles dry, I’d stretch, warm up, and tape my feet to protect them from friction burn. When my grandmother finally gave me the go-ahead, I’d dance and dance. Hours would go by. I was happy, lost in my head and in the music.
Grandma Mercedes loved listening to Puerto Rican radio stations with news and classic boleros, so there was always a lot of that. Jan was into Depeche Mode, Eurythmics, and other artists. I myself was swooning over Puerto Rican teen singing sensation Luis Miguel, who was to Latina girls in the early 1980s everything that Justin Bieber would be to girls in the States thirty years later. With a father who was almost as big a stage mother as Mama, Luis Miguel scored his first hit record—Un Sol—launched his first world tour, and stole my heart, all by the time he was thirteen years old. I loved Menudo, that dreamy boy band from Puerto Rico, but even they could not compare to Luis Miguel.