Perhaps the best, and certainly funniest, personal account of American assimilation and cultural erasure I've ever read, this book is about losing one's language but finding meaning behind it. Throughout this book author Robert Lopez ruminates on his grandfather's immigration to the United States in the 1920s. Lopez makes some connections but finds little shared commonality between his and his grandfather's lives because there are no familial memories to speak of. This is such an inventive memoir full of deep thoughts and incredibly hilarious lines.
— From Kalani"That I was born Puerto Rican was happenstance, but that I have no connection to what it means is no accident. My grandparents made conscious decisions and so did my father as part of the first generation born here in the States. And none of it bothered me until recently, which is probably why I can't quite put my finger on any of this. I'm still grappling with what I've lost and how I can miss something I've never had."
Robert Lopez's grandfather Sixto was born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, in 1904, immigrating to the United States in the 1920s, where he lived in a racially proportioned apartment complex in East New York, Brooklyn, until his death in 1987. The family's efforts to assimilate within their new homeland led to the near complete erasure of their heritage, culture, and language within two generations.
Little is known of Sixto--he may have been a longshoreman, a painter, or a boxer, but was most likely a longshoreman--or why he originally decided to leave Puerto Rico, other than that he was a meticulously slow eater who played the standup keyboard and guitar, and enjoyed watching baseball. Through family recollection, the constant banter volleyed across nets within Brooklyn's diverse tennis community, as well as an imagined fabulist history drawn from Sixto's remembered traits, in Dispatches From Puerto Nowhere: An American Story of Assimilation and Erasure, Robert Lopez paints a compassionate portrait of family that attempts to bridge the past to the present, and re-claim a heritage threatened by assimilation and erasure.
