My mother is Blue Blood White and my father natural born Puerto Rican. I grew up with a conscious realization of my Latin heritage, but with my father and the culture not at all present I was never able to understand or embrace my ethnicity. Honestly, I was embarrassed about being Hispanic for most of my younger years and thus had lost what little of the culture I had learned altogether before high school.
The 70s and 80s East Coast were quite segregated culturally where I lived. In predominantly white Wellesley, Mass., I was considered brown and called “wetback”, “spic” and “Chico” at any given time. Later, my family moved to predominantly Black South Philadelphia. There, I was considered White and called Honky, Cracker, white boy,” etc.
I discovered Ultimate in high school. Of course, it was a white-dominated sport, but my core of friends were playing and I loved the game. Because I excelled, I went on to play in college and ultimately at club level. I was honored to be invited to play for the original Affirmative Action (now Downtown Brown) team in 1997.
DTB allowed me to transcend the sport that I had loved and cherished for so many years as a vehicle to understand my Latin culture I had lost as a child. We challenged ourselves in the Circle to take the time to reach out to our families and learn more about our lost ancestries. Talk to your grandparents, take Spanish lessons, visit the country your parents are from, etc. We would bring our experiences of what we had learned back into the larger group and share our experiences.
I will cherish those intense moments when DTB sat in a circle and opened our hearts, minds, and history with each other, all while competing together as a team in a beautiful sport.
