Needles without a North
[With many thanks to Gaiutra Bahadur for gently nudging me towards my own reflection and the interview with my mother.]
My abuela Lilian rarely got angry, but when she did she froze the room. A saint, we still say, una santa. That honor is usually reserved in my family for the very few who are too good.
She was also taciturn. The threads of her story, before I can remember her, never amounted to a dress, not even a rag. I can only patch it together from the other women in her life, and it fails the Bechdel test: She had a Dutch father. She came to New York pregnant with my mom in 1952, escaping the Trujillo regime, not long after his goons murdered her first cousin. She married a Boricua named Fuentes. She never told my mom, Myrna Fuentes, that the man my mother knew as her father, the first Fuentes, was not her father. She showed up at the bigamous Fuentes’ house with a baseball bat—before Beyoncé made it a thing. She married the Cuban named Fuentes—another disappointing grandson of some fountain in Europe. She learned to sew for a living in New York. That living was hers—mechanical needles pointing to the ground.
No surprise that stories of abuela, and who we are by her side, can follow different patterns, depending on the teller. I prefer the almost symmetrical return to her for my mother and I. That story usually starts with my mother growing up on 110th between Broadway and Amsterdam, in her apartment, barely a few blocks from Columbia University, where I work now. My mom left her and New York City for the Dominican Republic when she finished high school. That’s where I was born and raised. She did not use her jus sanguinis rights, and my brother and I were born Dominican citizens… because we were boys. If she had girls, she says, no problem, but she wasn’t about to let her boys grow up to die in an American war.
Abuela inherited a small fortune from an uncle, el “Tío Rico McPato,” and moved back to Dominican Republic when my brother and I were kids—long after Trujillo and the 1965 American invasion. She had a beautiful house in Naco, where the rich people lived. I remember her there first. I was her favorite, we still say. She left us to return to the United States after second Fuentes had an idiotic red scare in honor of Antonio Guzman, shedding a good chunk of that small fortune in the process. She returned to the Dominican Republic—again—when I was a teenager in the 1980s, to be close to us. That didn’t last either, and her needle eventually settled in Miami.
When I graduated high school, my mom gave me the option to become a US citizen, right before I’d lose my chance forever on my 18th birthday. I chose casually and moved to Miami to live with my abuela. Her small house in Cutler Ridge was full of mirrors and pictures of me. I lived there many years, learning the United States, but not much about her—greedily receiving the love given to the favorite, and cautiously avoiding other secrets. She passed without proper goodbyes.
Many cities later, I ended up where my mom played as a kid, running around Butler Library, while my abuela sewed nearby. My needle spins less to the North, than it does to them—still, a mi abuela, a mi mama; and now, a mi gringa latina, la Laurell, and my two mijos, Emil and Henry, mi familia, mis amigXs and our torn apart strangers. The North is… just an accident.
When we started doing Torn Apart/Separados, I kept returning to abuela and her enigmas: The visas, her green card, the early life as an immigrant in New York, when it was harder to leave the Dominican Republic than to enter the United States, her many returns. The North American imagination I have come to know so well only sees needles pointing North—dangerous, narcissistic fantasies of barbarians at the southern gates. Expecting better of needles, I asked my mom to sit down with me and help me add a few stitches to abuela’s story. I am glad I can share this bit of recorded oral history with you in TA/S Volume 2. Against the mechanics of incarceration and separation, against the wedges that tear us apart and the greed that hammers them, we offer you our needles without a North.
Alex Gil is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at Columbia University Libraries and Affiliate Faculty of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is a founder and current moderator of Columbia’s Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities.
Myrna Milagros Fuentes Boom is the owner and operator of two restaurants, La Locananda and Sushi-Ya, in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic.