Day 13 – The hard work of positioning oneself
Day 13 - I believe that a critical consciousness, and critical pedagogy requires us to be critically self-reflective. How will my own positionality affect my writing now? In 2012, I was asked to participate in a panel about multicultural issues in music therapy. My presentation was on “Music therapy with Hispanic/Latino clients” as part of a day-long CMTE course entitled Multicultural Music Therapy Institute: The Intersections of Music, Wellness, Health & the Individual with Annette Whitehead-Pleaux and Xueli Tan, at the Annual Conference of the American Music Therapy Association: Changing Winds: Innovation in Music Therapy.
I was also asked to then turn this presentation into a chapter for a book edited by Annette Whitehead-Pleaux and Xueli Tan, entitled, Cultural intersections in music therapy: Music, health, and the person.
I began that chapter by presenting my own story. I have copied that piece below, because I believe I will need to find a way to position myself in this writing, and I want to do so without retelling this version of the story. I have been thinking about this. I will be thinking about that a lot over the next few weeks.
My story
My grandmother was born the daughter of sugar cane field hands. She lived in a shack on the outskirts of a city on a post-colonial island that still stands as a protectorate, a possession, of the United States – Puerto Rico, la isla verde, the green island. Several years ago, when I asked her about her childhood, her upbringing, her parents’ history, in Spanish she said, “What do you want to know that shit for?” “I’m writing about my family, abuela. I want to know where I came from…what it was like for you…” and thinking somehow that I could justify the intrusion, I said, “It’s for a school project.” But books, school, opportunities for advancement, self-reflection, pride, were not something she knew about as a girl. Why would you want to remember poverty, hunger, dirt, and hard backbreaking work? This was not a history one could read about; there was no written word, no oral tradition, no history. This was not a story meant to live on by the remembering. For my grandmother and the immigrants of her generation, there was only the hope of a better life for her children and her children’s children. There was the American Dream.
The family story is that she did not see a clock until she stepped foot off the boat that brought her to the New York Harbor at the age of 18, a passage bought by an older brother who hustled to bring his mother and sisters to a better life. They settled in Spanish Harlem, 1933, my grandmother and her sister and mother, eager to make a better life. At 18, by island standards, my grandmother was almost too old to marry. But as a young island girl with no English, no education, no money and only domestic skills, what else was she supposed to do? So she ended up with an older man, a man who had left his wife and sons (“uncles” I would never know more about) – an entrepreneur, perhaps a bookie, a gangster, let’s just say a businessman – “he owned a cigar store for a while.”[1]
You see - these were not stories I was supposed to know. I never really knew whether they happened this way. As Blacksher (2002) says, anyone can feel inadequacy, vulnerability, or shame, but for poor people these feelings are “chronic. Like barnacles, these feelings ‘attach,’ becoming a permanent part of their host” (p. 459). And so these stories of history, past, roots, are dripping with shame. They expose the lack of education and middle-class skills that my grandmother had. They expose the underclass and what my family had come to think of as our lack. There was always the desire to wash the old shit away. No one talked about what it was like. Instead, I was left to piece together the bits I remembered overhearing, to sew up the fragments in my narrative the way my grandmother had taken the old drapes, and made dresses out of them for me and my dolls.
She married and had five children - five children, a cold-water flat, violence, and more poverty and hunger. She worked sewing – lampshades, clothes, any piecework she could get. There were many nights that my father went to bed without food. I don’t mean to make it sound dramatic – it was just the way things were (and still are for many). But again, these are not the stories one is supposed to speak out loud.
My father was the oldest, so when his father died, there was no question but that he would quit school to work, to pick up any odd jobs he could get around the neighborhood. The fact that he was 12 or 14 didn’t matter. He was hardworking and he was smart. I’m told that an old Jewish man who sold women’s underwear on the Avenue hired him. I always wondered why it was important in this story that the man was Jewish? Was this the man who gave my father the ambition to leave the ghetto and “become somebody?” Were the hard-working values of education and entrepreneurialism something my dad learned from this man?
In reading about class identity for my dissertation, I read that often working-class boys struggled to find a “real and presentable self” that could be reflected back in the eyes of their friends at school (Wexler, 1992). For my father and his brothers this arena was “the streets.” For these boys, their main activity was attempting to establish an image of an identity. According to Wexler (1992), “‘Becoming somebody’ is action in the public sphere, and this is what life in high school is about” (p. 155). The public sphere for my father was the Avenue. And the rule of becoming was chutzpah and hustle.
He and his brothers hustled. They used every scrap. There were no extra clothes, shoes, there were certainly no toys or birthday parties. They struggled to pay for food, water, housing, and basic necessities in post-war New York. At 17, my father joined the Army, leaving behind a pregnant girl and a history-less past.
My father always spoke of his time in the Army as his “college years.” As a “white” man with green eyes, he could pass for Italian – “You look just like Frankie” they said, and who wouldn’t want to be compared to Sinatra, the idol of swing. It was 1955 and my father was a GI in Germany. In those black and white photos, with his Harris Tweed jacket and cigarette dangling from his mouth, he looks like any other young American from Connecticut or Chicago or Kentucky. He was doing it, living the American Dream – from rags to riches. With three squares, money to send home, and an opportunity to use the mind he’d never had a chance to exercise in “school,” he became a computer analyst. Those were the days a computer took up three rooms, and a program was made with flow charts and a truckload of punch cards. But most importantly, working with computers was not manual labor – this was a profession. This was a real job, and he was riding the high life!
When he returned in 1959, he knew he would never go back to the neighborhood. He married the girl he had met at the street dance four years earlier, signed up as a Career Army man, moved into the enlisted men’s housing on Governors Island, and prepared to get to know his four year old son and newborn baby daughter. When the opportunity to move his mother, sister, and brother into new public housing in the South Bronx came along in 1960, he jumped at the chance. With three sons in the armed service, my grandmother felt entitled to public assistance. Who could have predicted then that those rows of new high-rise modern apartments would become the notoriously segregated concrete jungle of violence, drugs, hopelessness, and despair that they became by 1970?
But that reality was a world away for my family and me. With the Army under his belt, money to send home to mom, and his own All-American family, my dad eagerly accepted the chance to move to Hawaii for his next tour of duty.
Honolulu, 1963. Who ever could have guessed that a girl who had been taken away from her mother by the state to live in a “home” for 6 years would have ended up on the set of Elvis’ Blue Hawaii? For my mom, this was heaven – banana cream pie, fried baloney sandwiches on Wonder bread, ring molds of Jell-O with canned fruit cocktail – it was the 60s, on an Army base in the middle of Paradise, with Don Ho crooning in the background, and two scabby-kneed kids riding around on their bikes on the street in the sun.
My mother was also a child of Spanish Harlem, a Nuyorican, a product of the post-agricultural bust of Puerto Rico, her mother and father also fleeing the island as teens in hopes of opportunity and promise. My mother’s parents were preachers, traveling holy-rollers, speaking-in-tongues that began in Spanish and ended in singing and rapture. When money didn’t stretch, they did yard work and elder care. They traveled to California, staying with families who fed them and clothed them in exchange for inspired divination. But within only a few years, my grandfather would run off leaving my grandmother with four children and no real means of support. My grandmother returned to Spanish Harlem, to her brothers, father and stepmother. She began working odd jobs, at one time caring for rich older women on Park Avenue. But under the pressure she cracked, and her children were sent off to live in a “home” for children in need of care. A horrible place that left my mother forever wounded. My mother’s schooling, self-esteem, and health were as fractured and fragmented as her mother’s English.
Pregnant and alone at 17, my mother mustered the courage to write the Army, to have them track down my father. She wanted him to pay child support for the son he had not yet known. When he returned and offered her a life of travel and financial stability, how could she not say yes?
So I grew up in a military family with two Puerto Rican parents who were trying to adapt to middle-class, mainstream culture. Although both parents had grown up in Spanish Harlem, very poor, speaking Spanish as their first language, and dropping out of school quite young, by the time I was born into our family, we were regular Americans. My brother and I were second-generation kids, trying to live the vestiges of the Leave-It-to-Beaver life of the 1950’s. We did not speak Spanish at home. We did not live with other Puerto Ricans. We were White. Sure, we ate rice and beans, and my grandmother came for 3-month visits, and my brother’s tan left him darker than your average kid, but life on an Army base is first and foremost American.
While my grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins lived on the streets and in the “projects,” continuing to suffer the consequences of poverty and racism, and unable to cross the color line, we moved around the country and lived, by my parents’ standards, a rich life. Sure, most of my relatives lived on welfare, but not us. I had all the things my parents had never had and my cousins would barely have, even as adults – food on the table, a roof over my head, birthday parties, and bicycles. Heck, we even had a car! My mom was a stay-at-home housewife with a 250 bowling average, and my dad was a sought-after programmer, at his prime on the cusp of the Silicon Valley boom – only he wasn’t healthy enough to stay working. He had been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis at the age of 25, and after many severe bouts of illness, his dreams of being a career Army man were over. He was forced to retire from the Army when I was 11. By then we were living in San Francisco.
San Francisco Bay Area, the 1970’s, home of the Jefferson Airplane, Tower of Power, and Patty Hearst. I was truly a city kid. I would ride the bus all over town, I would take myself to many interesting places, places my parents knew nothing about – museums, libraries, the ballet, the symphony. I was an artist. I played flute seriously throughout junior high and high school, performing in chamber groups, the school orchestra and band. I wanted to be a classical musician. And in spite of my parents’ divorce, my brother’s drug addiction, and my family’s struggle with domestic violence and perpetual crises, I was going to make it. I was going to go to college. My father’s entrée into computer programming had convinced him that an education was critical for advancement and his brother’s tours in Vietnam had convinced him that the military was not necessarily the best path there. So he pushed me to go to college.
My brother was not as lucky as I – as a boy, as a more visibly Hispanic person, as the victim of years of child abuse, he was unable to break the cycle of violence, poverty or racism. He dropped out of high school and quickly his life descended into drug abuse and homelessness. There is a complicated web of circumstances and forces that allowed me to escape what my brother did not. Certainly gender, skin color, birth order, and family dynamics played their role in framing my life chances and choices.
There is a name for the black sheep of the family, but what is the name of the sheep that wanders into greener pastures and leaves the darker sheep behind? It would be an interesting metaphor, as I later struggled with folks assuming that I was “white,” and as I struggled to hold on to my “brown” identity. But for now, in 1977, I was the one on my way to San Francisco State University, and within a year to the Music Therapy program at the University of the Pacific.
As an undergraduate I studied music therapy. Pursuing a masters degree in expressive arts therapy (a field which uses an interdisciplinary approach to the arts in therapy), I discovered a path to develop myself as an artist and satisfy my desire to be of service to others. In 1996, I decided to pursue a doctorate in clinical psychology in response to a strong desire to provide further depth to and precision in my teaching, supervision, and clinical work. Initially I struggled with my identity as a border-crosser. Not only did I feel I struggled with my identity as a “white” person with a “brown” background, but also as a working-class person in a now solidly middle-class position. I’ve wrestled under the discomfort of “fitting in” to the largely upper-middle class, White, Boston suburb where I live as an adult, struggling mostly feeling a sense of embarrassment - embarrassment at living in such contrast to my own family of origin, embarrassment at being a doctoral graduate, embarrassment at having so much when I know so many who don’t have enough - and of feeling dislocated. Despite my personal struggles, for 30 years as a mental health counselor, music therapist, and expressive arts therapist, I have provided clients the opportunity to make meaning of and find dignity in their lives through art and music making, psychotherapy, and therapeutic community, and my work in community mental health has allowed me to continue to experience a sense of “home.”
Estrella, K. (2017). Music therapy with Hispanic/Latino clients. In A. Whitehead-Pleaux & X. Tan (Eds.), Cultural intersections in music therapy: Music, health, and the person (pp. 35-50). Dallas, TX: Barcelona Publishers.
[1] Reprinted with permission by Sage Publications. These two paragraphs were previously published in Estrella, K. & Forinash, M. (2007). Narrative inquiry and arts-based inquiry: Multinarrative perspectives. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 47(3), 376-383.
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