Prose: Slouching Towards Ciales

It is the last week of August 2023, and I am 26, visiting Massachusetts from Texas to photograph the new “View Boston” observation deck at the top of the Prudential Building. I arrived early Saturday morning, two days before the shoot, to meet with my cousin, Hunter, at the Boston Commons. It was a sunny day, uncharacteristically warm for Boston, but a needed reprieve from the weeks of 100+ degree weather plaguing those of us living in Austin; the presence of a strong breeze was especially welcome. I had landed two hours earlier, dropped my gear off at my friend’s place, and almost immediately booked it to our meetup with only 2 hours of sleep in the last 24 under my belt. This would be my first of many visits on that same trip to the Boston Commons, but unfortunately, my camera was dead this time, and my phone was about to meet the same fate.

We linked up at a local pizza spot, each of us grabbing two vegetarian slices we took them across the street to the park.

“You’re a vegetarian, right?” Hunter asked — and I wasn’t, but I try to eat vegetarian at home — a vegetarian sympathizer with little discipline regarding fried chicken sandwiches and street tacos.

“Yeah,” I said. “Today.”

Unbeknownst to me, we had already walked into the park and were standing amongst the trees. Hunter’s head nodded in the direction of a large field of grass while his free hand gestured toward a section next to our feet. “Do you want to sit on the grass?” is an odd question for anyone based in Texas, especially coming from another individual who grew up in the Dallas area. Texas grass consists of barely passable, razor-sharp weeds that Southern Boomers convinced Gen X was a good idea to plant in their lawns. Sitting on the grass was avoided at all costs, and only as a last resort if nothing else was available. That isn’t even considering the ants that could attack our food: all of this, of course, didn’t pass through my brain. Out of instinct, I looked around for any benches within walking distance — noting at least three within a few dozen yards. But in that scan, I also documented dozens of people sitting on the grass, huddled into clusters of various sizes, while nearly all the benches sat empty. Even more surprising was the sheer number of people walking around. The air was still mild but warming up — and humid. It is the kind of weather to tease you outside but has you disgustingly sweaty by the end. I looked over at Hunter, who was still standing and waiting for my decision, patient with even my most egregious of tourist tendencies. Ultimately, and against my better judgment, I decided to sit in the grass.

I was struck immediately by the softness. Each individual blade was felt but wove together into a lush carpet between me and the dirt. This is the grass that I see people sit in in the movies, where they lounge around for hours and fall asleep while reading “The Riverside Shakespeare.” Where ladies from Cambridge sit with their colorful parasols and men with handlebar mustaches, photograph them under black veils attached to medium format cameras.

“Paul Revere is buried up the street,” Hunter offers between bites of pizza. “As are Ben Franklin’s parents. Actually, it might be Paul Revere’s parents and Ben Franklin’s grave...”

A tiny bee buzzed around for a moment before launching back into the branches of the tree that stood above and shaded us. Little pins of light escaped the many layers of leaves, leaving faint impressions of dancing shadows on the ground.

“I honestly can’t remember,” he concluded before leaning back, stretching his legs, and taking another bite.

This was not too dissimilar from my last visit, almost exactly a year prior. I was helping Jordan, an old high school friend, move after his girlfriend, India, got accepted into a neuroscience program in Boston. Jordan and I road-tripped in from Dallas over three days, landing in Dorchester mid-afternoon on the last day of August. I helped them move and, that evening, took the train downtown to meet Hunter for a couple of beers. Hunter and I hadn’t hung out in years by that point, as even on the rare occasions where the family got together, all the members of our generation hardly had moments alone among the full family activities (read: eating) and yearly retelling and reminiscing (read: arguing while eating).

Here, we can speak freely.

Hunter and I both were the “black sheep” of our respective sides of the family: I, the gay multihyphenate (film-school-drop-out-only-son) proudly dabbling in any facet of Gen-Z counterculture — Hunter, the begrudging multihyphenate (musician-turned-robotics-engineer) happily moonlighting as the in-house revolutionary and resident vegetarian. We had both been locked out of the family group chat at one point or another for various reasons, but mainly because we had no patience for our family’s continued musings on Christo-fascism.

“It’s hard to talk to my parents these days,” Hunter mentioned early in our conversation, “they’re so consumed in their own ideology, I can’t get a word in.”

That observation is one that I’ve made on my end of the Abruña river. My stepdad is subscribed to the Epoch Times, and the most recent whole-family spat was over his so-called “right” to use racist expletives. An argument which I, after years of getting called faggot by strangers for committing the crime of wearing 6-inch inseams, all too gleefully (and all too publicly) egged on. Even my mom, the biggest champion in my continued education, meets my ever-increasing interest in political philosophy with a series of dismissive “mhm’s” and “ah’s.”

“Even here, the conversation is getting more and more polarized. Among college students, among grad students,” he said during my first visit, “it’s getting harder to talk about anything. Hair, even — everyone has opinions on braids, and it makes me think... Should we? Why is something as simple and individualized as hair so politically polarized?”

A year later, a lot has changed for us. Hunter had dropped out of his master’s program to seek a far more lucrative career at a world renowned robotics lab, exploring the esoteric ends of an already reasonably obscure field — I had, months before, left the abusive environment of a high-profile marketing firm to move out of Dallas and into Austin to engage in the arduous process of regaining my creative agency. In that time, it seems both of us had made a decent amount of self-discovery — a point exemplified by our far more leisurely attitude compared to the fatalist cover of depression that clouded our previous conversation. Then, neither of us was happy about where we were in our lives. There was a shared feeling of being “stuck” as both of us had felt the specter of arrested development for far too long. The last bit of conversation before we separated that time was how, miraculously, I’ve had the same friends for nearly a decade; a fact that he lovingly suggested was not necessarily a good thing. However, sitting in the lush grass under the Boston sun, our conversation never reached that level of nihilist detachment. We talked about modern politics and family dynamics, but mostly, we spoke about the question marks surrounding our shared family history — and how the three relate to each other.

“I just don’t understand how the previous generation landed where they did politically,” I offered at one point during our talk, “from what I understand, after we moved to the States, there’s this ideological gap from where they were to where we are today. Did you know my mom used to work for FEMA?”

This inspired a somewhat complicated chain of conversation, defined by what we know and don’t know about the family as a whole. There are generations worth of family history that have straight up disappeared, all but scrubbed out from the family mythos — the story of arrival to Puerto Rico generations ago, the history of the family life on the island, and the eventual schism that led to an irreparable fracture in the larger family dynamic — and our slow-burning but nearly all-encompassing exodus to the mainland.

“There’s an entire section of the family that we don’t speak to,” Hunter said during one of these many breakaway conversations, “I still don’t know what happened. We’re all doing Thanksgiving together one day, and the next day morphed into years of silence.”

Years of silence is not an overstatement — one of our Tias, who lived mere minutes from Hunter’s childhood home in Allen, cut communication with our parents for nearly a decade after some inheritance drama between our Abuelita and her brother, our Tia’s father. While that specific event is simply a symptom of a much larger disease within the familial core, every generation feels the split — irreparably changing how we relate to each other and redefining what we consider to be family and, more broadly, how we engage with the concept of “community” as a whole.

“I sometimes wonder what it would look like if all the cousins got together,” Hunter said, in a semi-joking tone, “like I don’t know anything about Gabo (our little cousin, a true Boricua native and current Florida resident) except that he’s like, alive and presumably doing well. But I couldn’t tell you his favorite color or how he met his partner.”

In an effort to keep some kind of shared family history alive, I asked Hunter how he met his fiancée —

“Tinder,” He said plainly. “No crazy story there; we met on Tinder and went out for a little bit. We were still in College Station, and when she got into Berklee, we moved out here.”

By then, we had finished our pizza and decided to walk around the park. It had either gotten considerably warmer since we had first sat, or the humidity had penetrated my protective layer of clothing — either way, I was suffering a bit. Even worse, my vape was dead.

“I can’t do nicotine anymore,” Hunter said.

“I need to quit,” I replied in a tone that conveyed, “but I don’t have any plans to.”

The last time I was in Boston, we walked around the streets of his neighborhood and stopped to smoke one of his joints at a local park. I had procured the joints this time in the spirit of family camaraderie.

“My friend sent me a TikTok the other day where some guy was talking about how he misses shitty weed,” I told Hunter. “I’m in a legal state, and suddenly joints are like, 40% THC. Where are the mids?”

“I know, I barely smoke anymore,” Hunter replied, “with edibles, there’s a lot more control. Smoking it... It’s hard on the lungs, too.”

Leading me, as any lung talk around smokers does, into a coughing fit. “I need to quit vaping.”

We spent the next hour joking about the contradictions within our sides of the family. We batted stories like old friends, talking about people we used to know and those the other might have forgotten.

“You know Ken Paxton?” Hunter asked, “The Attorney General for Texas, who’s currently going through impeachment? He’s an old family friend. Dad used to donate to his political campaign, and they ended up getting really close. We played at his house when we were kids.”

“Wait, like all of us?” I asked, in utter disbelief that my kin (and especially my endlessly kind Uncle) would not only interact with such a blatantly corrupt individual but, at least at one point, consider him close to the family.

Hunter cocked his head to the side, “Maybe.”

These odd connections are inexplicable under my operating framework of the family and its evident lack of a monetary core. At least, my split of the Abruña quadrant did not have ready access to these types of connections. Lucas, Hunter’s older brother, is a Stanford grad and was listed as a Forbes “40 Under 40” after co-founding a moonshot real estate software company right at the tail end of the Silicon Valley boom. A famed recluse in our family who, in those rare moments when he’s not either working, working out, or reading, hangs out with tech moguls and millionaire millennials — the latter occasionally making an appearance at Christmas dinner. Hunter himself left one of the most prestigious research universities in the world to work for a global leader in robotics research and development. Michaela, their younger sister and unashamedly my favorite cousin (sorry, boys), is a bona fide artist waiting for an audience. (It feels necessary to say that while they came from a comfortable and moderately wealthy household, they were not legacies, nor was their success simply handed to them).

Even more confounding than the current status of my family is the fact that further back in the line, our Bisabuelo owned a coffee farm that was meant to help the family establish its roots for generations... only for that to be uprooted by family drama, its fields salted by infighting and its stocks burned up in lawyer fees. Our Abuelo also had, separate from his father-in-law, sustained periods of financial success: the point at which that happened, how it happened, and when that wealth disappeared is a mystery to much of my generation.

We know this: Abuelo moved the whole family from Puerto Rico to New York City to pursue a ? degree. After ? years (at minimum, the required time it would take for the NYC-specific pronunciation of “coffee” to be permanently etched within my mother’s vocabulary), they moved back to the island. The family house was constructed in 19??. Our youngest, Tia, Tata, was born — black screen.

“Mom won’t talk about it,” Hunter says. “Understandably, it seems like that portion of their lives is just better left untouched. Abuelo spent his whole life building that house, only to turn it into a concrete prison.”

I noted the same lack of “ito” when talking about Abuelo. There’s much love towards him, but all of it is surrounded by a razor edge of post-traumatic stress as if even the wrong intonation can be heard through the grave to bring back whatever terrors he wrought upon his house. He stands as the faceless patriarch of the Abruña line, and whatever decisions he made while alive have discernible echoes in how the family is organized and structured today. My mother’s parental style was derived almost exclusively from his silhouette — compulsively avoiding anything he would have done to her in an effort to show my sister and I the love that she did not receive, a fact she proudly states: as a single mom for much of our upbringing, she is both the father and mother she wishes she could have had. She was and continues to be, by all accounts, successful in that endeavor. However, our family drama cannot be placed solely on Abuelo. It is not lost on Hunter and me that the family story is forever tied to our conceptualization of community and the material conditions of our family as a whole at any given time.

“Do you ever wonder what our lives would have been like if we had stayed on the island?” I asked. “I feel like as the years go on, we’re slowly drifting apart, and I can’t help but think it wouldn’t have gone down this way otherwise.”

We reached the spot where we started, having walked nearly the entire perimeter of the park with a decent amount of meandering thrown in. I had sweat through my shirt and was dehydrated from the joint, and my brain was exhausted by the hours of deconstructing our family. Hunter offered to walk me to the platform as I had gotten lost the last time I was in Boston.

“You’ll take the green line North towards Boston University,” Hunter said. “I’m going the other way.”

We shared a quick hug and went our separate ways.

I would go back and visit Boston Commons every day I was there. Whenever the crew would break for lunch, I’d drag them out to those gardens just to abandon them to go take pictures while I spent the entire time thinking about every question mark I had regarding my family, facing the reality that I’ll likely never know the whole story.

A couple of days later, Hunter and I texted about the likelihood and repercussions of Puerto Rican statehood. I, leaning towards the liberation end of things, somewhat clumsily argued that its avenue for change is rooted solely in revolutionary action.

“Yeah, that’s about my read of it too,” Hunter replied, “Though I’m somewhat pessimistic that Puerto Rico will be further stripped of its existing cultural identity, even without statehood.”

A crime that, I fear, is already taking place.