DR Comics Presents: The Secret Origin of the DominicAnomaly

When I was twelve, my family and I migrated south from New York to a state whose climate was more in keeping with our tropical heritage. I am talking of course about the one and only Sunshine State: Florida. Now you might assume my Caribbean Hispanic family might have picked Miami as their new place to call home. I mean why not? My mom used to love Miami Vice, and as a kid about to explode into full on horny Latin puberty I loved girls in bikinis.

Sadly, however, I never lived in Miami.

No we ended up moving to Tampa. Way before I even knew the Buccaneers were a football team. Before their cool new uniforms. Before they won the Super Bowl. We moved to Tampa before they even had a baseball team. Did I mention I’m Dominican? A few years after Tampa finally got the Devil Rays we would move to Orlando, as if we were trying to avoid anything at all that might associate us with Dominicanness. I was forced to leave the Yankees, all my New York Latino friends and the comfortable cultural nest I called home at the ripe age when I could have finally begun to capitalize on my many years of shared experiences with the girls of my Catholic school. All for a place too far south of the Mason-Dixon line for a young native Dominican Yorker but too far north of South Beach for people not to ask constantly:

What are you?

Whatchu mixed wit?

Is you Haitian?

Are you Christian?

I didn’t know then what I can never forget now.

I am a DominicAnomaly.

Not White enough. Not Black enough. Not even Dominican enough. How could I be? After all, my mysteriously isolationist nomadic family ran away from the most significant Dominican population in the United States to live among a bunch of racially polarized unhyphenated “Americans.” I couldn’t play baseball. I couldn’t dance. I never had a Dominican girlfriend. I couldn’t even self-identify with the racial slur spic. An old racist Italian man informed me that that term was reserved specifically for New York Puerto Ricans.

Are you Christian?

I’m Catholic. Isn’t that the same? C’mon. My Tia’s name is Cruz, and my Grandmother and Legal Guardian’s name is Altagracia. I was baptized, had First Communion, Confirmation, and made several irrationally guilty confessions. If I’m not saved yet it just isn’t gonna happen.

Is you Haitian?

No. I isn’t. I’m Dominican. Same island, different culture. You can thank Europe for that, and for the genocidal culture war we inherited from them.

Whatchu mixed wit?

Everything! Plus mangu.

What are you?

The Future?

But of course that wasn’t enough. They needed proof.

Soy Dominicano.

You Spanish? Full Spanish?

(Sigh)

And then of course I was in Advanced Placement and IB classes in high school along with more Whites, Indians and Asians than I ever knew. Of course. They’re all safe bets. Yeah sure there were Hispanics and Blacks that year too, but once we started failing out of the program one by one sure as statistics would show, a lot of the rest of us just kinda felt like there were countdown timers over our heads, justifying more procrastination, laziness, and depression.

Oh and don’t be fooled by my grammatically correct spell-checked blog. Trust me. I just scraped by without falling through a crack. And I was the only Dominican in our program that year.

And so, somewhere between mastering proper English and proper Spanish in order to better express and define my cultural identity while trying to graduate high school in Tampa, and later digging through the Bible to make conservative Christians in Orlando look like hypocrites and to make me feel like I could still belong anywhere at all, I became a DominicAnomaly.