SOURCE: "Black behind the Ears," in Essence, Vol. 23, No. 10, February, 1993, pp. 42, 129, 132.

[In the following essay, Alvarez discusses issues of color in relationship to the Dominican immigrant experience.]

When [How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents] came out last year, invitations streamed in to speak at gatherings as one of a new wave of Latina writers, "a woman of color" who had made a splash on the mainstream shore. I didn't know if anyone had seen my picture on the back cover, or even read my book, but I was worried that I'd get to the gathering and disappoint everyone by turning out to be the wrong kind of Latina, a sorry white one.

One invitation I accepted was to a public school in New York City with a large population of Dominican kids. I would be a role model of what one of their own could achieve in this country. After my talk, my agent told me about a conversation she had overheard. Two sugar-cane-brown Dominican girls had been waiting eagerly for me to enter the classroom. When I did, one turned to the other and said, "What she got to say to us? She's a white girl."

"But by the time you were through talking," my agent assured me, "they were laughing with you."

Later, at a conference on Dominicans in the United States, I confided to my friend Sergio what had happened. "The thing is," I argued, as if the girls might hear me, "I've got family their color. My own abuelita [grandmother] looks pretty dark in her photos."

"And I've got cousins who could make you look tanned!" Sergio smiled. His own rich brown skin belied the New York winter outside and glowed with tropical warmth. My olive color had waned into a white blah.

"Dominicans learn that kind of talk here," Sergio continued. "That idea of us, the Blacks, and them, the whites, isn't a Dominican discourse in the D.R." He reminded me that ours is a racially mixed society: Black, white, mulatto, with whatever diluted bit is left of the Taino Indians. Almost every family has a variety of shades. "You know how the saying goes?"

We laughed and then, in unison in Spanish, we repeated it, "We all have a little black behind the ears."

Perhaps because of what that saying affirmed, I had never thought of myself as the wrong color Latina. I was just one of a rainbow coalition of colors in my large extended family.

Or so I had convinced myself, wanting to submerge completely the issue of race in ethnicity. But incidents such as the one in the public school got me thinking. Had I been unconscious of racism until we came to the United States? If we were a rainbow-coalition family of different shades, why was the black shade relegated to behind the ears, like dirt that wasn't supposed to show? Wasn't it clear that the pot of gold was clearly toward the lighter end of that rainbow?

Growing up in the Dominican Republic, my cousins and I were always encouraged to stay out of the sun so we wouldn't "look like Haitians." At family gatherings, when features were declined down to which great-aunt gave us our noses or pairs of eyes, dark coloring was ascribed to someone's "not thinking ahead." As we girls grew up, we had endless bedroom comparison sessions of your good hair versus my bad hair, my fine nose versus your flared one, your light shade of café con leche versus a potential boyfriend's heavy-duty, full-strength cafecito color.

All of us aspired to be on the lighter side of the spectrum. Don't get me wrong. None of us wanted to be white-white like those pale, limphaired gringos, whites who looked as if they'd been soaked in a bucket of bleach. The whiter ones of us sat out in the sun to get a little color indio, while others stayed indoors rubbing Nivea on their darker skin to lighten it up!

During one of my summer visits, I fell in mad, passionate love with a dark-skinned cousin; my primo was far enough removed that our kids wouldn't come out funny. "Just dark," an aunt teased, but there was no real prohibition in the remark. Albertico, or Tico as I nicknamed him, came from una familia muy buena, a family with money and prestige. Color cut across class lines. As another Dominican saying goes: A rich Black is a mulatto; a rich mulatto is a white man. I would be making good match.

And so would he, I learned. Besides my dowry of coming from a good family myself, I had white genes to bring into Tico's family pool. His mother courted me, sending over desserts: poufy macaroons, a flan swimming in sugar syrup, a white frosted production that looked like a trial run on a wedding cake. "Why?" I asked.

"She likes you." Tico smiled, his nostrils flaring.

"She doesn't even know me," I argued. I had talked to Doña Mercedes maybe twice.

"She likes what she sees."

That was long ago, but during a recent trip "home," I witnessed an instance of racism I didn't like seeing. The incident gave me some insight into the roots of the Dominican racism I had grown up with.

I was visiting La Romana where Haitian sugarcane workers flood the market on Saturdays to shop. Two equally Black men were arguing in loud voices over some mistake in an exchange of pesos. One insulted the other, "Negro maldito!" Cursed Black!

"Aren't they both Black?" I asked the Dominican friend who was with me.

"Oh no," he explained. "The Haitian one is Black, the other one is Dominican."

A week after my return from my trip, I finally reached my friend Sergio on the phone. "Ven acá!"—Come here!—I confronted him. "You told me that racism is a discourse Dominicans learn in the States." I related my recent thoughts about growing up thinking light is right, as well as the incident I had witnessed on the street.

"I didn't say we didn't have racism," Sergio responded. "I said we didn't think of ourselves as Blacks and whites, them and us. See, Dominicans see the real Blacks as the Haitians, the real whites as the Americans. It's the old house-slave mentality, a little above the dark field hands but below the white masters."

"What's going to change that kind of attitude?" I asked him.

"What they call here 'role models,'" Sergio answered.

"Black ones?" I asked in a small voice, fearing I'd be canceled out.

"And white ones with all that black behind the ears getting onto the piece of paper," he said, laughing that bubbly Creole laughter I would have identified as Dominican anywhere. I was laughing, too, thinking of my olive-skinned Papi and my dark abuelita and my white prima and my india niece—claiming them all.