It was Christmas of 1966 and it was cold, my first winter and snow, but I was so happy to spend my holidays in New York City, my cousins born and raised in Brooklyn were taking me around, and Jimmy Castor’s “Leroy” was the hit. Guayama was hot, picturesque, stuck in time. New York was not, and I was so excited, to experience a new world. Of course, there was racism. I had seen it before in Puerto Rico in a different form; so what, anyway, I was having a good time. Jimmy Castor’s timbales, cencerros, drums and the beat were familiar, yet different. My cousins were also familiar, yet different. I was so happy to go around with them and dance to Jimmy Castors and the Ronettes’ “Be my Baby”. I learned so many new dancing steps, could not wait to go back to Guayama, to show my friends how ahead of them I was. At the time, Jimmy Castor’s Leroy was part of a culture and language to be kept in dance halls, and not to be included in proper and polite USA society, much less, in the political arena; until this week, when one of those stuffy white men who thinks they still rule the country and discourse styles used horrible words to describe Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and she answered him, “You mad bro”.
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