Connecting with hyphenated heritage

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Monday, April 23, 2007 | 7:35 a.m.

Jessie Moorehead never knows what box to check off on applications.

Is it "African-American" or "Hispanic/Latino"?

The Las Vegas High School junior timidly raised his hand no higher than his chin when Cuban-born and U.S.-raised author Cristina Garcia asked a group of about 100 students Wednesday afternoon whether they or their parents were born elsewhere.

He was born in Puerto Rico but has lived in Las Vegas since before he could speak. Anyone seeing - or hearing - Moorehead would call him African-American, or black.

The thoughtful teen may have come a little closer to figuring himself out in recent weeks, as he read Garcia's "Dreaming in Cuban" in English class and then met the author , thanks to a program called Just Voices, put together by a nonprofit organization, the Nevada Partnership for Inclusive Education.

"It's always better to not be the only one," Moorehead said the day after listening to Garcia, summing up one of the take-home lessons from the experience.

The "multiple-hyphenated identities" of at least half the students in the room and many of the 400 or so Garcia spoke to at three other high schools was affirmed by her visit, not to mention the book.

With nearly 40 percent of the Clark County School District's 302,000 students identified as Latinos and many other students coming from immigrant families, the author's three-day stay offered a window into the reality of every other household in the Las Vegas Valley.

Garcia spoke of the two languages in her life, of divisions in her family created by leaving the place she was born, of stepping out from one culture in her apartment into another one on New York's streets when she was a child.

The next day, Asia Arteaga said she could relate.

Reading the book and hearing its author speak "made me realize who I am," the 17-year-old said.

Arteaga's pedigree made her the perfect audience for Garcia's story: She said she's the great-granddaughter of Fulgencio Batista, whose government Fidel Castro overthrew in 1959.

Her grandparents arrived in the United States 45 years ago. Her mother is Cuban and her father is Mexican and Apache.

"I was raised to be American but with a love for my people," she said, referring mostly to Cuba. A collection of necklaces hung over her T-shirt, including one with a tiny replica of the Caribbean island.

Arteaga said her mother's side of the family raised her to be in touch with her Cuban roots, but, like Moorehead, she thought her experience was unique.

Several chapters into the book, Arteaga realized, "This is amazing - I thought nobody understands the Cuban mind."

Moorehead's reading of the book brought back memories of his grandmother, who visits from Puerto Rico every few years and remains his strongest connection to a birthplace he doesn't recall.

He has her stories in his head - of working on a farm, of making medicine from herbs. Stray words come to his mind in Spanish - a soup called menudo he never wanted to taste, the way she adds "-ito" to everybody's name.

Garcia said that books such as hers have brought the immigrant experience to young readers in the past few decades and that today's students will break the next wave of stories.

"They will find themselves and their stories of dislocation and migration, upheaval," she said. "We'll be seeing more of this."