Carmen was born in the late nineteen forties in a typical small sugar cane town in the South East Coast of Puerto Rico; its plaza and streets divided by the economic classes and phenotypes, the "pigmentocracy" that characterized much of life in the island at the time. When she was around ten years of age, her single mother moved with her and siblings to the Lower East Side neighborhood in New York City. Roots were once more planted in a place and she never left it, making Loisaida (the Puerto Rican name for the “notorious” politically and culturally charged community) her permanent home.
Growing up in such neighborhood marked Carmen; her ideas and view of the world, gradually modified by age and education, but with strong foundations on the urban culture that was formed and transformed by the kinds of immigrants, artists and diverse characters on the fringes of society who also made that community their home. In time she graduated from college, obtaining two masters degrees in education and social work. She was also a trained actress.
Carmen was a member of diverse cultural, political and community activism groups, including the very dynamic Niuyorican poet’s movement (a lover of one of them), Teatro Pobre de América (this is how I first met her) and the leftist pro-Puerto Rican independence movement organization known as MPI -a dangerous membership, making her a target for harassment by the police and other more sinister security forces. When she had her own children, and they became adolescents, they were also harassed by the police; one of her children ended moving out of the USA.
Her mother had been a maid for one of the “blanquito” families in the town where she was born and spent part of her childhood. As it was quite common in Puerto Rico, the service or lower class peoples were not allowed to go into the blanquito houses thru the elegant and elaborate front porches, with their “balaustres” holding the rails and its “sillones de caoba y pajilla” swinging their status on the losetas that served as floors, from where the ruling and colonial administrative classes looked down on the “jíbaros, negros, jabaos, pobres” and other groups that were considered lower castes. This was not the “En mi Viejo San Juan” environment ideally dreamed by the very popular tear jerker old Puerto Rican song. Carmen knew this and had no romantic notion or nostalgia for the life she left back in the island.
Loisaida was her country. In that NYC neighborhood she had very powerful experiences and reflections that enabled her to tell stories about her childhood, with little sadness in her soul, but with the clarity of someone who is separated enough from what once was a mark in the conscience, a milestone in learning about humanity and society. As a child, walking home one day, she decided to stop by the house where her mother was working. She could not go into the house unless it was an emergency and if she had to, it had to be through the backyard. She just wanted to see where her mother worked and decided to look through the balcony’s “balaustres”; and there was her mother, in the living room full of “muebles isabelinos de medallón”, playing with, and holding and caressing a girl around her age.
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