When I started this newsletter in January, I intended to write about art, architecture, and design from a personal but professional perspective.
I had not planned to use this forum for writing about family matters. Today’s post, however, is very personal.
It’s about my family’s hidden history and my subsequent decision to change my name because of that history, written in the form of a letter to my 12-year-old daughter Edie, to whom it is dedicated.
If you’re uninterested in family histories, maybe skip today. I will be back this Friday with the last part of Design as an Extension of Art Practice.
As the sayings go, the personal is the professional, and all art is, ultimately, autobiographical. If I am lucky, one day, I will figure out how to weave this story into my work or at least a post about architecture and identity.
May 17, 2021
Dear Edie,
A few thing things for you to know.
One.
Your Great Grandfather’s birthday is coming up.
Two.
We had never talked in detail about Joaquín Martinez Herrera because so much was never related to me about his life before his marriage, or maybe because I only learned what I was supposed to know.
Our family left a lot out, let’s say.
Three.
Two months ago, I changed my name, legally, to Peter Joaquín Antonio Martinez Zellner from Peter Anthony Zellner.
People have asked me about the name change, and although you and I have talked about it, I’d like to write it down so that you can tell the story when it’s time, if you wish.
Peter Joaquín Antonio Martinez Zellner
It is a mouthful any way you say it, even if you speak Spanish, as you are learning to in school. The unchanged, bracketing “Peter” and “Zellner” are the prime lingual offenders, breaking the nice rhythm created by my two new middle names and new second last name.
Marty.
Your great grandfather Joaquín Martinez Herrera, or Marty (as he was called by the American airplane mechanics he worked with at Pan American World Airways’ hangars in Guatemala City, Havana, and Caracas), would be a nearly unattainable 123 years old this year.
We think that he was born in Managua, Nicaragua, on June 10, 1898.
He himself was never sure because he was an illegitimate child, born to an illiterate mother and cast into indentured servitude from the age of eight or nine until he was fourteen.
Because he was penniless and was something of an embarrassment to his married father— I believe his father held an important position in the Nicaraguan military— his birth was never recorded.
When he was a little boy, your great grandfather used to play along the water’s edge of Lake Managua, taunting crocodiles and bull sharks in the shallows by skipping stones. I think that is why he was always so nimble in life.
When he was older, he worked at his mother’s bar picking up bottles and cleaning up after the regulars, which is why he told me he was a teetotaler his entire life.
Ibero-Indio-Americanos
My mother said that my grandfather was mostly Hispanic and perhaps Indigenous for all of my life.
“Somos Ibero-Indio-Americanos,” your grandmother Yolanda always proudly crows.
We are Iberian, American-Indians.
The term Latino, let alone Latinx or Latine, was never used in our family.
Even when I was your age, I knew that it was always meant to be understood that it was the “clarifying” Ibero in the family equation that had “improved” the Indio.
As it goes the story about my mother’s family was simple and uncomplicated.
Your great-grandmother Lucilla Román Lobo, the youngest child of a formerly wealthy, well-known Managua business owner, married an ambitious young man who was an illegitimate son to a wealthy, well-known Nicaraguan.
Through hard work and a strong character, I was told that this illegitimate son, a legal non-person, somehow was able to single-handedly advance himself out of poverty and illiteracy and marry into a family of devout Catholics.
The truth is more complicated and more fraught but somehow so much more interesting, as we are discovering.
To begin with, as your Abuela Yolanda has admitted from time to time, your great grandparents on her mother's side were not always so Catholic. The Román family were, in reality, Sephardic Conversos, crypto-Jews who renounced their Judaism during or after the Inquisition’s "Tribunal de la Fe" (Tribunal of the Faith) in Mexico City. The Tribunal was established to crush heresy in the Viceroy of Nueva España, which, as I understand it, extended to Nicaragua.
It violently forced Jews, Natives, and non-Indian populations like Nicaragua's "Negros," and "Mulattos," to worship a white, European Jesucristo in colonial churches and to adopt Catholic first and last names. That is why your great-great grandmother’s name was Petronila Martinez. La Nila, as she was known, had very long hair which was braided and ran well past her bottom.
23andUs
As you know, last December, your 92-year old Abuelita took a DNA test.
To her great surprise or shock (it’s so hard to tell as she still seems in utter denial about it,) it turns out that her father’s grandparents, her great-grandparents, were from Angola, Congo, Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegambia.
To complicate matters, she discovered that some of her ancestors were Arabs and Persians, on her mother’s side, she thinks. And in the mix, there is that 0.1% Korean, from four or five generations ago, that is truly inexplicable.
Who were these people nobody ever talked about in our family?
Who they were, how they lived, and where they came from is not known. And how would we know? Your tataroabuelo’s origins were just not discussed, especially not by him.
So, the story of how his grandparents met, how their parents left Africa and got to Nicaragua was lost— out of shame, out of the thinly disguised racism that thrives in racially mixed Latin American families, and certainly, out of the illiteracy that he carried with him well into midlife.
As I told you, your great grandfather learned to read and write in English first, not Spanish, with slow coaching from the American airplane mechanics he managed across Pan Am’s entire Latin American fleet. Joaquín got that far in life, retiring as one of the first Nicaraguans to own a car and the first to manage his own automotive garages and, eventually, his own airfield.
As soon as he had money, your great grandfather imported cars and planes to sell in Central America. He purchased and drove a Model T Ford all the way from the United States to Managua to establish a limo service. Augusto Sandino, the great Nicaraguan patriot and revolutionary against the Yankee occupation, was one of his first clients. Somewhere we have an odd picture of him with Charles Lindbergh, the aviator and America First fascist, on his way through Central America to presumably some point south.
Anyway, we can talk about Joaquín in more detail later, but because that $99.00, 23andMe test was such a revelation, something so out of the blue, I did some research.
Where to start?
Almost forty years before President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, colonial slavery in Nicaragua was abolished by the decree of the Constituent Assembly of April 17, 1824, following the establishment of Nicaragua’s independence from Spain in 1821.
It seems that Afro-Nicaraguans made up almost 20% of the Nicaraguan population in the 19th century. They were forcibly brought to Nicaragua and Honduras through Spanish and Portuguese slavery. Some were enslaved by the English, particularly the population on Nicaragua’s upper, Caribbean east coast. That’s the so-called Mosquito Coast of Honduras; there’s a film we can watch with that title. It’s named after the Miskito Kingdom, named after the local Miskito Amerindians.
Many slaves who washed ashore, when the slave ships they were forced onto ran aground or sank, made families with the Miskitos. Over time, Afro-Caribbeans formed new families with Nicaragua’s other indigenous peoples: the Chorotega, the Cacaopera or Matagalpa, the Ocanxiu or Sutiaba, the Nahoa or Náhuatl, Sumu or Mayangna, and Rama. Their families were called Creole (or Kriol) by Europeans. Your great grandfather descended from one of those families.
The patron saint of lost things
Like people, things and histories get lost. But lost things, lost histories, and lost names can be retrieved and given new meanings.
Often families lose their culture and, in doing so, lose their connection to their histories.
Or, their histories were repressed, like in our family.
These processes could be described as forms of deracination, an uprooting, and a displacement. While it is very sad, but it’s not so surprising. Given Nicaragua’s history of colonization, revolution, and oppression both from within and without how could it be otherwise? In our family, the narrative of being Ibero-Americano was privileged and foregrounded, while the stories of Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean origin were erased or marginalized and then forgotten.
I legally changed my name because I want to embrace our lost history, to recover, accept, and, if you wish, to remake as part of our family story, our name, even if that name is a Spanish, Catholic name.
I incorporated your Abuela, Yolanda Martinez Roman’s maiden name, and added a new extra middle name in honor of your great grandfather Joaquín Martinez Herrera. I also changed my middle name from Anthony back to Antonio, after my namesake, San Antonio, your great grandmother’s favorite saint, the patron saint of lost things.
This act of recovering what was lost has taken me a long time to do. But when you get something back that was lost, it is like it was never gone. It is like it was just partially forgotten or unseen, it is as if it was always there, right in front of you.
Like people, things and histories get lost. But lost things, lost histories, and lost names can be retrieved and given new meanings.
“Dude, why is your maid driving a Mercedes?”
I grew up in Southern California at a time when my white peers were comfortable enough with their shitty racism (and since I pass, the presumption of my shitty complicity) to ask me why my brown-skinned maid, in fact, your grandmother, was picking me up from school in a Mercedes.
When I told them, with indignation, that she was my mother, they concluded the interaction with, “So your mom is a beaner?”
I’ll never forget or forgive that; it still makes me angry because they were so awful and I was so ashamed because I wasn’t brown enough to be recognized as my mother’s son.
A few things to remember here:
If my mother was indeed a house cleaner, so what?
If you don’t look like your mother or your father, so what?
Also, we never had enough money for new cars since your grandparents claimed they were the real arty deal, bohemians.
Your grandfather Peter was not only a talented designer and artist, he was resourceful, inventive, and loved to fix up old cars. He always told people that our crappy, always breaking down, metallic green, repainted and reupholstered 1965 190D MBZ was vintage, a collector’s item. I never fell for it. Truthfully, the way it spewed out smoke in big curly plumes all the way up the hill to junior high was embarrassing.
¿Por qué tienes los ojos tan claros?
As you have noted a few times, my fluency sometimes makes some native speakers uncomfortable or just curious about why I speak Spanish to you.
After awkward introductions, we’re inevitably asked, “¿De donde eres? Argentinos? Cubanos? Seguro debes ser Argentino, o Alemán, eres tan rubio!” Strangers have called me a gringo or a gabacho (Yankee and whitey, more or less, in Spanish). Not nice.
This sense of discomfort didn’t stop at our front door.
In our extended family, my status as a “guerito” (a fair-skinned child) and “bien, bien rubio” (very, very blond) always made me feel somehow less special than weird. All I heard out of my grandmother’s mouth was, “Ay, mi muchachito, rubio como un angelito de dios mismo.”
I felt unaccepted by my own relatives, an outsider, or a thing to marvel at because race, like religion, was a crucible in our family.
We were Catholics, but somehow someone had forgotten to mention that, by the way, we were Jews. We were Ibero-Indio-Americanos, but somehow someone had forgotten to mention that, by the way, we were Angolan-Congolese-Ghanaian-Nigerians-Senegambians.
There has always been an obsession with appearance and religion in our family.
Even if your great grandfather Joaquín’s stoicism, in the face of a lifetime of discrimination, speaks to his strength and indomitable spirit, there was also a shameful system of naming and categorization based on skin tone in our family. He was “un negrito” as a child and “un Negro” and “bocudo,” or big-lipped, as an adult. My mother still refers to herself as “una morena clara” (a light-skinned person of color).
At the same time, her relatives obsessively dyed their hair blonde or powdered themselves to lighten their skin tone so they could identify themselves as “Hispánicas” and not “Indígenas,” or even more uncomfortably, “Judías.”
I am ashamed to tell you, since you’re Jewish, that there was a thinly veiled anti-Semitism in some members of our family, long dead, that only fear of one’s true identity, of being discovered as an imposter, can conjure.
When I’ve taken issue with these biases, I’ve been told with a chuckle (by my mother, who loves me, no less!) “Pero Peter, tú eres un gringo.” As in, “how could you ever understand us? You’re not even one of us.”
Indeed, how could I? I was an outsider in my own family, an alien intruder in a family made up of people who didn’t even know who they were, or if they knew, wouldn’t say.
So, for a long time, I was just fine being misunderstood or misidentified. So much so that when I graduated from high school in La Jolla and I won the Latino scholarship award, the boos and name-calling from both my La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club white and Barrio Logan Chicano classmates alike didn’t surprise me at all; the “mistake” made in giving me the award made perfect sense to both groups, I was a traitor to one group and an imposter to another.
Truthfully, none of this ever felt good to me. It hurt. A lot.
And that’s why I am taking back what’s mine and what is yours now to claim if you wish to do so. And I am rejecting whatever slurs and nicknames others have used to name us.
Embracing our discomforts
I want you to know that I think it’s important to embrace the difficult reasons families sometimes make painful choices, even if I could not disagree more with those choices.
I want to tell you that sometimes families accept difficult predicaments or make terrible decisions because they are forced by circumstances outside of their control to actively erase who they were, forget where they came from, lose what languages they spoke, and bury the gods they worshiped.
I want you to know that maybe this explains why there was such discomfort, so much silence, in our family around skin tone and skin color, religion, and our lost origins.
I want to tell you that this tragic story has its root causes not just in our family’s personas but in the legacies of colonization, slavery, emancipation, and subsequent discrimination that live within many families, not just Nicaraguans.
I want you to know that your legacy, your inheritance, is a beautiful one, a story of a mixed heritage that extends back generations, connecting the African, the Sephardic, the Native American, and the European in you today.
So please don’t blame your long-dead relatives for their ignorance.
Accept them, love them and understand that these are not only our own stories. We are not unique. These are shared stories; these are stories of overcoming adversity and discrimination, they are stories of family members who deeply loved each other even though they were taught to distrust and belittle others based on how they looked.
Acceptance is an ability that all people have: to embrace and love otherness, to make a family out of otherness— and that is something to be very hopeful about indeed.
Thank you Peter. A wonderfully heartfelt story. My mother’s side is from North Africa, a mixture of Libyan Arab, Turkish, Italian and safardic Jewish. Father side is Black Sea, Pontus, my paternal grandmother is from the Balkans. Go figure. Soldiers, olive oil makers, rich, poor.
I don’t have kids to tell the stories I know. Enjoying your stories.
Super