It started in Sunday school.
I was born into a Hispanic Catholic family in New Jersey. Mom is Puerto Rican, and two generations before that her grandmother was a full-blooded Taino native. Dad is Cuban, and his father came to Cuba from Galicia in Spain, if I remember the story. Dispersed among the other near ancestors are all of the essential bits of the Caribbean Hispanic’s famously heterogeneous facial structure: Celtic, Roman, Taino, Arab, African. Dad was born in December as Fidel Castro’s Communists were gaining control of Cuba, and his story is of escaping a Communist country back when it was officially hostile to any religious expression. My grandfather escaped some time later, after spending some time in prison for his role in the Bay of Pigs disaster. Mom came to the mainland for a better life; Dad came to the United States for any life at all.
