Javier Morillo - Bienvenidos a Deutschland 

 

My family's last Christmas in Germany in 1976 is etched in my memory as full of magic. We were a Puerto Rican family living on a US Army base in Germany. So, I had not just Santa Claus and Christmas Day, but we also celebrated the German holiday of Day of St. Nicholas on December 5th, where we did that by putting our boots out on the front door of our second-floor apartment and waited overnight to see if St. Nicholas would fill it with candy if we'd been good or lumps of coal if we'd been bad. It's very German. [audience laughter] It make kids very anxious to celebrate the birth of our Lord. [audience laughter] 

 

That year, my parents’ friend Mr. Garza also introduced me to Three Kings Day, the epiphany. And so, that year, for the first time, I did what all Puerto Rican kids do. I put under my bed a glass of water for the Three Kings to drink and a shoebox filled with grass for the camels. A week before, Santa had gotten a much better deal with milk and cookies. [audience laughter] 

 

That year, was our family's turn to host the big Puerto Rican Christmas party. What you should know about Puerto Ricans, is that when we leave the island, wherever we are, we find each other. [audience laughter] Every Boricua in Deutschland was in our second-floor apartment. [audience laughter] Mommy had prepared this great big feast of Puerto Rican food after arguing with German grocers over the right ingredients to make the food. She made pasteles, their quintessential Christmas meal. Pasteles, they look like tamales, but they taste very different. They're not made of corn. They are made from green bananas and tubers. 

 

Traditionally, they are wrapped in banana leaves. But our pasteles were wrapped in aluminum foil, [audience laughter] because when you're a Puerto Rican mother in Germany, you make do. I didn't think this at the time, but this party must have been expensive for my parents. We were not at all wealthy by any stretch. My dad was enlisted in the army. He had just a few short years before come back from his second tour of duty in Vietnam, where he had experienced the horrors of that war on the front lines. My parents had escaped poverty in Puerto Rico when he joined the army. But although I know now that we did not have a lot, it never felt that way, because mommy made it her goal and task always to ensure that we felt not just that we had enough, but that we had a lot. 

 

And not just at Christmas time, it was all year round she did this. This fell on her largely because dad, because he was in the infantry, he was away for weeks at a time doing military field exercises, so it was mommy who enrolled us for school, mommy who bought our school clothes. It was mommy who was called in for parent-teacher conferences. I remember when I started school, mommy putting me on a school bus in Mainz, Germany, in a little denim suit she bought. I may have been five years old, but I knew that my bell bottom jeans and matching jeans jacket were cool. [audience laughter] And I rocked that look. [audience laughter] 

 

Mommy had sewn a patch over the left breast pocket that said, “Me siento orgulloso de ser puertorriqueño.” Proud to be Puerto Rican with our flag right in the middle of it. [audience laughter] Puerto Ricans, we love our flag. [audience laughter] I had no way of knowing that my kindergarten teacher, Ms. Robinson's only cultural reference for Puerto Ricans was most likely west side story. [audience laughter] I must have looked to her like this little Latin tough, like in her head she's thinking, “Boy. Boy. Crazy boy.” [audience laughter] I got in a lot of trouble in kindergarten, which sounds weird because who gets in trouble in kindergarten. But Ms. Robinson called mommy in for a parent-teacher conference early in the school year to let her know that her son was willful, disobedient and did not know how to pronounce his own name. Mommy was alarmed. Ms. Robinson says, “I call him. I say, Javier, listen to me. Javier, come here, and he just ignores me now.” 

 

Now, I had been fighting with her for a while. So, when my mother explained to Ms. Robinson that she had just lost an epic battle with a five-year-old, my worldview changed. [audience laughter] Mommy and I laughed all the way home. I learned a very important lesson that day, adults are stupid. [audience laughter] 

 

[cheers and applause] 

 

I think now of all the times I got in trouble in kindergarten, I wonder if Ms. Robinson was a little bit racist. [audience laughter] But after that parent-teacher conference, I was nobody's victim. She might scold me and I would just look at her with pity. I was thinking, yeah. Well, we already established that you are dumb. [audience laughter] 

 

Later that same school year, Ms. Robinson pulled out a big map. We're all army brats, and she helped us point out where everyone was from originally in their home states. And on that particular map, Puerto Rico was this tiny little speck. And so, all the other kids made fun of me for being from such a small place. When I told mommy later, she was dismissive. “No le hagas caso,” Don't pay attention to those kids. You know more than they do. You speak two languages. You have two cultures. They have one. 

 

It was that lesson that really stayed with me forever. I think maybe why I have such vivid memories of this period of my childhood, because my mother always did everything she could to ensure that I felt not just like that we had enough, but we had a sense-- It was a sense of abundance. Whether it was arguing with grocers to have all the right ingredients to prepare a feast or ensuring that, I never felt that just because I was different from my classmates that I was less than, in fact, that I was more than. It was that sense of abundance, not Santa or the Three Kings, that added magic to my childhood. Thank you.