No Man Is An Island

Finding my father amid the wreckage of Hurricane Maria .

- AJ Vicens

IDEOLOGICALLY, Nimia Vicens and her brother José Juan Vicens Huertas, my grandfather, were polar opposites. In a family of 12 children, they represented extremes in the spectrum of Puerto Rican identity: Nimia was a noted poet and an active member of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, known for its fervent calls for Puerto Rican independence from the island’s colonial rulers and, to the party’s enemies, occasional terrorist bombings. José Juan, a politically conservative World War II veteran who served in Europe and retired from the National Guard as a one-star general, had no interest in Puerto Rican autonomy. Instead he hoped his country would become the 51 st state, with its residents enjoying the same rights as other US citizens.

My father, José Javier Vicens Morales — who died in 2016, and whom everyone knew as Jay Vicens—and his brother grew up with this contradictory tension between assimilating as mainland Americans and maintaining a distinct Puerto Rican identity. My father left the island in 10th grade and finished his education in California and Florida, where his white classmates sometimes teased him for being a “spic.” More than 2,700 miles separated my childhood home in Colorado from the island, and my father had his own, unspoken reasons for not bridging the divide between our two worlds. His ambivalence about his identity was passed down to his children. It wasn’t until a graduate school trip in 2012 that I visited his birthplace. Growing up, I had only a vague sense we had family there. I never even knew my father’s first name was José until a few years before he died.