Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina

by Raquel Cepeda

In 2009, when Raquel Cepeda almost lost her estranged father to heart disease, she was terrified she’d never know the truth about her ancestry. Every time she looked in the mirror, Cepeda saw a mystery—a tapestry of races and ethnicities that came together in an ambiguous mix. With time running out, she decided to embark on an archaeological dig of sorts by using the science of ancestral DNA testing to excavate everything she could about her genetic history.


Digging through memories long buried, she embarks upon a journey not only into her ancestry but also into her own history. Born in Harlem to Dominican parents, she was sent to live with her maternal grandparents in the Paraíso (Paradise) district in Santo Domingo while still a baby. It proved to be an idyllic reprieve in her otherwise fraught childhood. Paraíso came to mean family, home, belonging. When Cepeda returned to the US, she discovered her family constellation had changed. Her mother had a new, abusive boyfriend, who relocated the family to San Francisco. When that relationship fell apart, Cepeda found herself back in New York City with her father and European attending tennis lessons and Catholic schools; fighting vicious battles with her father, who discouraged her from expressing the Dominican part of her hyphenated identity; and immersed in the ’80s hip-hop culture of uptown Manhattan. It was in these streets, through the prism of hip-hop and the sometimes loving embrace of her community, that Cepeda constructed her own identity.



Years later, when Cepeda had become a successful journalist and documentary filmmaker, the strands of her DNA would take her further, across the globe and into history. Who were her ancestors? How did they—and she—become Latina? Her journey, as the most unforgettable ones often do, would lead her to places she hadn’t expected to go. With a vibrant lyrical prose and fierce honesty, Cepeda parses concepts of race, identity, and ancestral DNA among Latinos by using her own Dominican-American story as one example, and in the process arrives at some sort of peace with her father.

Raquel Cepeda is an award-winning journalist, cultural activist, and documentary filmmaker. A former magazine editor, her byline has appeared in The Village Voice, CNN.com, the Associated Press, and many others. Cepeda directed and produced A Planet Rock, the critically acclaimed documentary about American hip-hop culture’s obsession with diamonds. She lives with her husband, a writer and TV producer, daughter, and son in her beloved New York City.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Latinx, Race, Biography Memoir, Latino, Biography

337 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 5, 2013

About the author

Born in Harlem to Dominican parents, award-winning journalist, podcaster, and documentary filmmaker Raquel Cepeda is the author of Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina. Equal parts memoir about Cepeda’s coming of age in New York City and Santo Domingo, and detective story chronicling her year-long journey to discover the truth about her ancestry, the book also looks at what it means to be Latina today. Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, released the book on March 5, 2013. The paperback was released on February 4, 2014: the companion curriculum, developed and written by Karen Robinson, a senior education officer at the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights’ Speak Truth to Power initiative, is now available for free download at www.djalirancher.com.

Cepeda is co-host of a Our National Conversations About Conversations About Race, or simply, ABOUT RACE, with authors Baratunde Thurston and Tanner Colby, and is distributed by Panoply/Slate. For more information, visit www.showaboutrace.com

Cepeda is currently in production on Some Girls, a documentary focusing on a group of troubled teenage girls in a suicide prevention program who are transformed through an exploration of their roots via the use of ancestral DNA testing.

Cepeda directed and produced the NAMIC (National Association for Multi-ethnicity In Communications) Vision nominated film Bling: A Planet Rock, a feature length documentary about American hip-hop culture’s obsession with diamonds and all of its social trappings, and how the infatuation with “blinging” became intertwined in Sierra Leone’s decade long conflict. The film was co-produced by VH1/MTV Networks and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

For almost two decades, Cepeda’s writings have been widely anthologized and her byline has been featured in media outlets including People, the Associated Press, The Village Voice, MTV News, CNN.com, and many others. She’s contributed to WNYC, CNN and CNN’s Inside the Middle East as a freelance reporter. Cepeda edited the critically acclaimed anthology And It Don’t Stop: The Best Hip-Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years, winner of the PEN/Beyond Margins and Latino Book Award. As the former editor in chief of Russell Simmons’ Oneworld, Cepeda was responsible for the magazine’s overhaul in September 2001, winning a Folio Award for best re-design and receiving accolades for her global take on urban culture.

Cepeda, named one of El Diario|La Prensa’s Distinguished Women of 2013, sits on the board of City Lore and the Style Wars Restoration Project. She’s appeared on Melissa Harris-Perry, Huffington Post Live, Al Jazeera English, CNN, and other outlets talking about genetic genealogy, Latino-American identity, immigration, hip-hop culture, and mental health issues amongst Latina-American teenagers.

She lives with her husband, a writer and television producer, daughter, and son, in her beloved New York City.

To read more, visit http://www.djalirancher.com/about

Reviews

[Raquel Cepeda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my book and I loved the entire ritual of writing and process reading each draft. More Latina-Americans have to document their stories!

[Melinda Goodman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Raquel Cepeda was a student in one of my poetry workshops in the mid 1990’s at Hunter College. She was already an exceptional writer when she came into the workshop and one of the poems that she wrote during that semester has stuck in my mind ever since. I was finally able to contact her a few weeks ago hoping to get a copy of that poem to share with my current Hunter College students. It turned out that Raquel still has a copy of that poem and she also informed me of a new book that she has written. Raquel sent me a copy of the book, “Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina”, and I ended up reading it in one sitting. It’s great! This morning I wrote her the following letter:


Dear Raquel,


I just got a message from Apache Ramos (a mutual friend) saying that you were about to appear in an interview on MSNBC. I went crazy trying to find MSNBC on the internet (I don’t have cable) but I couldn’t find it. Anyway, congratulations! That’s good press and I hope I’ll be able to eventually see the segment with your interview with Melissa Harris-Perry online sometime.

I received your book in my office last Thursday and I read it on Friday and I thought it was exceptional. It beautifully captures the struggle of growing up under very difficult circumstances – it’s quite a journey. You are a survivor. This was already clear in the poem you wrote in my workshop in the 1990’s. That poem is a powerful window into what you experienced as a young girl— what you were feeling and going through. It’s amazing that you decided to be a writer no matter what. You somehow knew you had what it takes and had the courage to go for it — and we’re all lucky that you did. You trusted yourself. You trusted that voice you heard. You allowed yourself to be open to your spirit guides.

Using genetic research to find the Taino, African, Amazigh and other racial aspects of your Dominicana roots was a fascinating way to tell your story. Your ultimate message reminds me of Chrystos’s book, “Not Vanishing”. (Chrystos is a Native American Lesbian poet whose main point is that her people did not die out -- they survived and will continue to survive. A powerful message.)

Your writing voice is smart, wise, and it reads like butter. So many writers with a revolutionary message are writing in ways that alienate readers who do not have PhD’s. You are able to make your points in ways that everyone can understand. That’s what it means to be a writer. That’s what it means to be a communicator. You don’t dumb down but you don’t overwhelm us with a lot of academic rhetoric. You showed the struggle of coming to terms with family. (As did George Jackson in his letters to his father in "Soledad Brother".) That’s quite a balancing act and it takes a lot of courage and insight. It’s great that you were able to recognize the fears, limitations and narcissism of parents who were tragically unable to understand the real needs of their children. Mostly, I appreciated that you were able to use your personal journey to speak about larger issues of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism etc. Readers don’t feel what a writer is saying when it’s just a lot of abstractions and theoretical jabber. Your writing makes us feel your experience.

You covered a wide range of history and many growing up years in a relatively short narrative — an amazing feat. This is the kind of book that will makes readers want to reflect on our own experiences in a way that helps us view our lives within a historical and political context. It’s also important because it instructs us to value and pay attention to our emotional and spiritual selves. Thank you.

Love and Respect,

Melinda Goodman

Hunter College
English Department
New York City

[David Dacosta · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s impossible to not to be reminded of Junot Diaz while reading author Raquel Cepeda’s generational tale of family, culture and identity. The obvious comparisons reside in the fact that like Diaz, Cepeda is also a product of Dominican heritage. Her decision to intersperse the narrative with D.R. Spanish and doses of crude vernacular further supports this reasoning. Still, we cannot fairly assign the ownership of all things Dominican Republic to the now famous Pulitzer recipient. Nor can we deny other authors the right to express themselves in as blunt terms as they choose. Thankfully, the specifics of Cepeda’s personal journey allow her breathing room to touch on some previously explored D.R. themes without coming across a Diaz wannabe.

It always amazes me how authors can bare their souls in memoirs exposing all of the unpleasant details of their lives. In Cepeda’s case, the complicated nature of her childhood and teen years with her parents is not masked even in the slighted. I guess to a certain extent readers of autobiographies and memoirs anticipate drama in this genre. I can’t help but wonder though if in the midst of this described catharsis there’s ever a sense of nakedness or regret in not being able take back these intimate revelations.

Bird of Paradise starts off with a bang and then loses some of that potent momentum as Cepeda delves into her tween years. The occasionally choppy narrative style can be a bit off-putting at times. The redeeming quality of the book however, is Cepeda’s ability to transport the reader back in time linguistically. One gets that ‘fly on the wall’ sensation as the author recreates authentic scenarios and dialogue with family and friends. As a Latino child coming of age in 1980s New York City, Hip Hop culture is inescapable. The inner city manifested movement looms so large that it becomes a separate character in the story.

The task of writing about one’s life is a tricky undertaking. What may have been meaningful or even transformational to the writer, doesn’t always resonate with the reader. This memoir would have been better served minimizing or even omitting certain storylines. Cepeda’s time at college is a prime example. Sometimes the page-count considerations of a publisher forces authors to include unnecessary filler content in their books. There’s no way to confirm that this was the case here, but periodically I got that impression.

By the mid-point of the book, the storyline switches gears thematically into a travelogue for all intents and purposes, as Cepeda begins a quest to trace the genetic origins of her family. It makes for an interesting read, though it feels disjointed from the first half of the memoir. There are mountains of information contained here, some details that will impact you, and others not so much. But you’ll likely walk away feeling more informed about the Latino nation.

[Cynda · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had breakfast with some of my aunts and cousins today. I mentioned this book, saying that Cepeda had used DNA testing to understand some of her genealogy, saying that we should encourage my dad to do DNA testing for our family. I found out he did. On my dad's side: Southeastern European, Jewish, African, and a tiny bit Native American. I had one great-grandmother was was called "la india" (the Indian). So now I know what I have longoing suspected. Something I will talk more about in my What-Does-It-Mean-to-Be Hispanic Thread. (Ask me and I will send you a link.)

Raquel Cepeda had a terrible childhood, not as bad as it could be, but likely as bad as it could be when you lived with one or the other parent. While surviving her childhood, she found that she has shadow spirit, and spiritual guide. Others told her that they saw her guide, and she came to believe, came to have dreams and begin to follow her intuition to understand her dreams. She decided that the woman who shadowed her was a ancestor who had received a fuku, a curse. In her family the moms and their oldest daughters were at odds to the point that relationships and lives were damaged. Cepeda's mom Rocio had so utterly rejected Cepeda that the fuku/curse had an opportunity to break.
As Cepeda went in search of family members, she met her father'said people who had hurt (People who hurt, hurt others idea), but several they had worked hard overcome their personal stories and practice herbal medicines and tarot cards and whatever other forms of santeria that was what they felt called to do. The santeria brought some sanity to a seriously hurt child-now-a-woman. Now her children and the generations to co,email will be blessed by Cepeda'so spiritual work.

If ways of understanding alternative to mainstream Western cause you unhappiness, this book is not for you. You will be happier reading something else. May you find more happiness. If you are open to spirits and disembodied people inhabiting the Earth, working hard to help humans, then this book may be for you.

Health and Happiness

[Roger DeBlanck · Rating 4 out of 5]

The courage to unearth one’s personal trauma in a memoir has always been an ability that both impresses and baffles me. In Bird of Paradise, Cepeda utilizes the testimonial approach with great candor and honesty to excavate her painful youth in order to confront it. In her preface to the book she states, “Our identities are as fluid as our personal experiences are diverse.” That statement captures the essence of this emotionally-charged memoir.

Part one of the book mostly recounts the physical and mental abuse from her youth and the identity crisis that results from her adverse coming-of-age experiences. Having been born in New York City to parents with a Dominican heritage among a polyglot of other ethnicities, she overcomes her rugged upbringing by finding ways to address the central question of who she is. With a cultural phenomenon such as Hip Hop on the rise, Cepeda uses the music to fuel the search for herself, and while telling her story, she shares everything and exonerates no one, family included. By part two, she chronicles her mission to uncover her roots through DNA analysis. Her travels take her on a quest to answer the investigative question of where she came from.

Cepeda’s writing is fluid and confident, although not entirely rapturous. The narrative felt somewhat yearning in its attempt to continually want to astound. A bit of a hodgepodge collection, the memoir kept my interest and made an overall impact on me. This memoir qualifies as a concrete study of personal identity. For anyone interested in probing his/her ancestral origins, this memoir may certainly inspire curiosity to start researching one’s family background.

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Being a Dominican-American New Yorker and having had an insatiable hunger to learn more about my family's own ancestral past and Dominican history for as long as I can remember, so much of Bird of Paradise resonated with me. So much so that for much of Part 2, I felt like Cepeda was speaking directly to me. In all my research and personal investigation of both Dominican and my own family's histories, I felt like so many of the observations she made about Dominican culture, identity and perception were spot-on and were ones that I had experienced in my own life. I only have 2 real complaints about this book: 1.) I wish she had included a family tree somewhere in the book, since at times it was difficult to keep track of her extended family members, and 2.) I wish this book had existed (well, it probably did exist just wasn't printed yet) when I wrote my master's thesis.

This book truly felt like a personalized gift.

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

"I want to watch the sun rise in the Sahara, like somebody must have in my father's line. I want to lay eyes on my distant cousins, the Imazighen, living on the Atlas Mountains. I'd like to visit Fez, and drive up the Atlantic coast to Tangier. I want to look at the South of Spain from the tip of Africa," I say. "I want to bond with her rather than just walk all over her." (p. 175)

"You know, when God made us, He made forty different versions of every single being and then scattered them around the world," Adnane says. "This is how we are all connected." (p. 176)

"The fukú many people here and the world over shoulder is a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome for their colonial masters." (p. 212)

"I tell Dominicans, 'You're not Spanish - be proud! You've got the best of three races in you. The best of three roots makes for a very strong tree.' " (p. 234)

"We are all related on this island," he said. "Only the ignorant hate their neighbors." (p. 244)

"The Dominican Republic is my holy land, my Mecca. It's equal parts archaeological site and ancestral shrine...While America will always, I think, feel foreign to me, New York City is my home...my self is firmly rooted here." (p. 259)

"What this journey has driven home for me is that being Latino means being from everywhere, and that is exactly what America is supposed to be about." (p. 260)

"I don't have bad hair. It's just stronger than yours, unbreakable, like where I come from." (p. 275)

[Jose · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book found a way to integrate memoir writing with historical narrative in a way few books I've read concerning culture (specially Latino culture) know how to do. While some suffer from bad writing and others lean too much on personal experience, Cepeda's book lends itself to an understanding of Latinos as a whole through her personal journey in a way that demands the reader walk in her shoes. Her journey from a traumatized child to journalist / filmmaker is interwoven with the history of hip-hop journalism and New York City in its 80s and 90s old to new school hip-hop era. The vignettes pull the reader in and out of various memories from her life, all important to the general context, but good enough to stand alone as well. Her style, smooth and cutting at once, keeps the reader engaged at every page, even through the more academic explorations of her DNA, for instance.

Generally, I wouldn't just recommend it to Latinos, but anyone wondering why experiences feel familiar, why nothing feels like coincidence, or why we even develop narratives of our history to begin with.

[Janeen · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books of 2013.
A truly fantastic memoir that is rich in honesty, self-discovery and curiosity. Part One of the book, Cepeda expounds on her background, detailing how she lived in New York, Santo Domingo and San Francisco in her formative years. Her time as a youth wasn't easy--reading her interactions with her mother and father will give you a soul cry. As you read part one, her spirit seems palpable despite the circumstances. Understanding her life really sets up a beautiful background for Part 2--as she begins her journey to understand her DNA and how she became Latina. I must give the most props to Cepeda for controlling the narrative on DNA, research and identity. It wasn't overwhelmingly scientific fact loaded--she did an excellent job making that concept come to life and more relevant & relatable. One of the highlights of this book is the question she poses for race, identity and social constructs; her book makes you question and consider (or reconsider) these things. It also gave me more insight to relations between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. It was a wonderful book. Cepeda gets into the fragments of slavery, genocide and mixed race ancestry from centuries prior in an unapologetic fashion which I completely respected. Before I read the book, as a black American woman, I wondered how much I could relate to reading about the subject of becoming Latina. But I am glad I got overcame that self-objection, Cepeda's journey to discover her lineage and being guided by science, history, family and spirits was familiar. This book reminded me of the Marcus Garvey quote-- "A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots." In conclusion, part one and two expound on how Cepeda is a survivor, through her life and genealogy, and indeed how she became a Latina.

[Priscilla Zabala · Rating 1 out of 5]

In my opinion, this story was not for me. It contained a lot of inappropriate content, and was very depressing. I began reading this story and learned that some of the characters were very strange, based on their choices in life, and it was very sad. There were times when I was reading this story that I needed to cover my mouth due to the insanity taking place in this story. I also needed to splash my face with water to calm myself down and to prevent myself from crying.

The story was about a young girl who lived in a very abusive and uncaring home. The father was the abusive one in the family, who always hit Raquel (the main character) after making a small mistake, and the mother was the uncaring member in the "family". If she didn't hit the tennis ball with the racket, she would get beaten. The mother never tried to save her daughter from her husband, due to the fact that she, too, was afraid of him. As soon as Raquel got a little older and her mother, Rocio, finally divorced her husband, they moved into a new home who Rocio found attractive and charming, and decided to live there. After living with this strange new man for a short period of time, Rocio soon realizes that he is much more abusive than her previous husband, and was always forced to do terrible things to keep him from killing the two. Due to these two horrible events, I very much dislike this book.

[Regina Sheerin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Poorly written and half formed (and half-witted) opinions. Showy and vulgar writing. A pastiche of politically correct, juvenile and rabid impressions poorly interwoven. Que lastima, por que en un tema importante y fuerte.

[Selma · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly hated this book. I gave it a fair chance and followed through to the nasty bitter end. Raquel’s identity search is a train wreck and seems like a fractured, motherless hood rat’s desperate search for validation in the universe. Unfortunately this doesn’t work because the universe does not validate anyone. Not by history, DNA, lineage, or legacy. No amount of DNA testing or world traveling will complete a person who is fundamentally made incomplete by their choices and insistence on being wrong. All the time. About everything.

[Samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Sort of an interesting format for a memoir. The first half tells of Cepeda's adolescence, and the writing makes you feel like you're reading a novel, which feels a bit odd and uncommon, but serves her story well. The second half delves into Cepeda's ancestry research, with commentary on the Latin-American community and being mixed race as a whole, which is interesting, but makes the book lose steam a little bit. It could have helped if Cepeda kept the memoir writing going throughout the second half as well.

[Danielle · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I was younger, I’d imagine what would happen
If my parents had stayed in Puerto Rico
Who would I be if I had never seen Manhattan
If I lived in Puerto Rico with my people
My people!

I feel like all my life I’ve tried to find the answer
Working harder, learning Spanish, learning all I can
I thought I might find the answer out at Stanford
But I’d stare out at the sea
Thinking, where’m I supposed to be?

- Lin-Manuel Miranda, from the song "When You're Home" from In the Heights

As a Latina who's never really felt like she's fit into the mainstream definition of what a Latina is "supposed" to be or look like (I'm fair-skinned, red-haired and raised in a non-Spanish speaking household), I was intrigued by Raquel Cepeda's memoir. What do I have to do to "be" Latina? Although I'm trying to embrace my heritage, am I just a "box checker"--a white woman who's trying to be something she's not? Although Cepeda, doesn't struggle with precisely the same issues I do, her journey to accepting her identity was relatable and interesting.

The first part of the book details Cepeda's parents' meeting and her subsequent birth, childhood and young adulthood. Growing up with two parents who provided her with a less than stable existence, she ends up shuttled between parents and grandparents before eventually settling more or less permanently with her father in New York. Cepeda's father is overbearing and at times abusive, and their relationship is frayed (it seems) almost beyond repair by the time Cepeda is college-aged.

Cepeda finds herself often trapped between worlds--too "Spanish" for white kids, not Black enough for Black friends, too Black for Latinos--and her father does everything he can to deny his Latin and Black origins, going so far as to say that all Dominicans should be rounded up and deported. ("Aren't we Dominican, Papi?" a young Raquel asks, confused.) Her mother is a chameleon who changes her accent, clothing and appearance based on who she's dating at the time. It's no wonder that Cepeda grew up perplexed by her identity.

Although her growing up years are interesting, I found the second half of the book much more captivating. Raquel explores her origins through mitochondrial DNA testing through Family Tree DNA, a company founded in my own backyard. My sister and I have discussed buying a mtDNA testing kit for our mom, as she's expressed interest in it as well. Cepeda points out in her book that many Latino families can't trace their heritage back reliably past their parents or grandparents (true in my case), so DNA testing provides a look into generations that might have been previously unreachable. As Cepeda also discusses, many Latino families also intentionally try to obscure their "less desirable" origins of Amerindian or Black heritage as a survival mechanism to exist within a discriminatory society. DNA testing breaks down those walls.

As she asks her parents and older relatives for DNA samples, Cepeda also uncovers family secrets that had gone previously undisclosed. She begins to see patterns in her family relationships and circumstances that--if not excuse--explain why she grew up the way she did, and realizes that her spiritual connection to her ancestors is stronger than she thinks.

Cepeda makes a compelling case that knowing and embracing one's origins can bring peace and confidence. After reading Bird of Paradise, my resolve to do mtDNA testing has only strengthened. Although my appearance may not suggest it, I know the blood of my ancestors runs through my veins, and I'm looking forward to finding out just where they came from and who they were. 3 1/2 stars rounded up to 4.

[Aisha Francis-Samuels · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cepeda's book is part memoir, part travel journal, and part infomercial for Family Tree DNA. I'm not mad at her for it, but it's kind of a hustle that this company gave her free tests and perhaps even funded her trip around the world for a year while she traveled to the places that her DNA test showed her to be connected to.

Ultimately, the text is honest in its portrayal of the lengths some people of mixed race origin go to to deny any part of them that is African or Indigenous while playing up the White ancestry they have (or even imagine). Because of colonialism and the slave trade, we who are mixed race will always have a hard time tracing our generations. That loss is real and palpable. It's not fair that the oral history of the griots was ripped from our memory and tradition. Cepeda's message is strong. She rests on spiritual memory--what she calls trace memory-- spending a long time talking about various indigenous religions that combine logic and mysticism. She believes in condomble and fukus, and spirit guides and such.

Finally, she reconciles herself to the fact that even though she will never know the names and racial origins of family members beyond her great-grandparents generation, it's enough to give our ancestors acknowledgment, even if she cannot pinpoint exactly who they are. Cepeda believes the ancestors will know that we are craving and seeking their guidance and that they will, in turn, "walk with, behind, and for us when life makes us fall on our asses."

[Julene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bird of Paradise: How I became Latina, by Raquel Cepeda, is a memoir of triumph. She not only survives a brutal childhood but goes on to unearth the mysteries of her ethnicity. From a Dominican family, she is sent to live first with her grandparents then with her father in New York. He is brutal, she is resilient. She has an interest in rap music and winds up writing about music and becoming a documentary filmmaker traveling the world. She has worked with Russell Simmons one of her early influences.

Her family of origin lived in Santo Domingo, on the island Hispaniola, whose indigenous people were Taino. Deeply curious about her origins, with spiritual stirrings that came through her matriarchal line, she convinces her father to do a DNA test after he has a health crisis. She learns of their native roots to the Taino indigenous people (thought & taught to be extinct, but they are not) and African roots. Then her mother also does the test and she has European links. She writes about this in great detail in the second half of the book and it is fascinating to learn about the diversity of Latina people and how slavery impacted the Dominican culture. (This book was published in 2013 and I am using her word usage from the book.)

Some quotes from her book:
Henry Miller, in his book Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, wrote: "One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things."

"At the time of this writing, the Dominican government has passed a bill called the Dominican Republic Electoral Law Reform, eradicating the term indio on its citizens' ID cards. The categories mulatto, black, and white will be the only ones people will have to choose from. I find it troubling that if I wish to officially recognize the Indigenous fragment of myself, it won't be legal. Foisting an identiy on people rather than allowing them the freedom and space to create their own is shady."

“…discovering and connecting to my Indigenous and African roots is just one area in which ancestral DNA testing succeeds where genealogy cannot. Last names don’t mean much here because we inherit our names from our fathers (in theory), and because names were sometimes given to Indigenous and African slaves who were baptized by their captors, while others were not. Last names in that case won’t reveal ancestral origins, as I’ve seen with my own mitochondrial DNA results, Dad’s, and perhaps Casilda’s.”

"My own genetic and spiritual revelations have made me thing about what exactly makes a U.S. citizen American. What does that look like as opposed to the face of an "illegal"? I always thought the face of America looked like the original people who settled here. They came after crossing the Bering Land Bridge from Asia, and according to their own indigenous religious creation myths, they've been here since time immemorial. Whichever philosophy we subscribe to, it's clear that Indigenous-Americans and Mexicans were here first.
Latinos are prototypical New Americans, the products of European immigration, colonialism, and slavery. What this journey has driven home for me is that being Latino means being from everywhere, and that is exactly what America is supposed to be about."

Speaking of her mother, she writes: "I feel way more compassion for the casualties she's left in the wake of her failed relationships with men: her other children."

Talking with Jorge Estevez at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Manhattan:
“Then there are people who don’t find Amerindian or Indigenous DNA, which doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t connected, at least spiritually. For one, they may not have tested the right line yet. “Right, and it’s happening to a lot of people,: Jorge says. “I have always told them that the connection to the Taino is linguistic, spiritual, cultural, and biological. You could have all four , or you could only have one, but no matter who you are, if you’re from the Caribbean, you’re connected to the Taino.”
Jorge, eyeing the tattoos on my arms and wrist, turns the table on the interviewer and asks me a question: “Did you get that ink before or after your father’s mitochondrial results came in?”
“Way before,” I say, tracing the image of Atabey [Taino goddess] on my right inner wrist. “I’ve been told all my life that I walked with una india, and I’ve felt her physical presence all these years, so I see these tattoos as my spiritual armor.”
“Spiritual armor, spiritual armor,” he repeats, smiling. “It makes perfect sense.”

Talking with Ken Rodriquez, a New York City-born and Miami-based software trainer who found his Jewish ancestory:
"In my opinion the biggest misconception is that Hispanic is a race in the first place. Hispanic people are generally a mix of different racial backgrounds. You can be White,Black, Asian, Amerindian, Jewish, and still be Hispanic," he says, echoing a sentiment of many Latino-Americans. "What unites us is the Hispanic culture, not our race."

Talking with Rabbi Rav DovBer Pinson who "is like the Rakim of gilgul neshamot; he wrote the book on the subject." She asks him how gilgul neshamot works, his answer:
"The construct means every new life we live is a new manifestation of a new reality. A new spiritual constitution arises and a very particular genetic code. The body that we possess throughout life is a direct reflection of our soul, which means our spiritual type," the rabbi says. "And there is consistency between the spiritual self, our soul, and the physical self, which is our manifestation."
Part of the process of gilgul neshamot is that every single person has a specific soul purpose consistent with his or her body. The body is the vehicle, or the medium through which we achieve our perfection, our tikkun, Rabbi Pinson says, "that part of our soul leaves the body understanding that its next stage is to develop the other areas."

At the end of the book is a whole section on DNA testing and mitochondrial DNA haplogroups. She asks questions and answers them:
Don't we all go back to Africa?
Yes, all of our mitochondrial lineages trace back to a common ancestor who lived in Africa 100,000 to 150,000 years ago. Some lineages migrated out of Africa about 60,000 years ago, while others remained.

This is an important book for its education of the wide diversity in Latina people, and to better understand our DNA and in our world. Many would benefit from reading this book. The first half is hard to read, but knowing she survives makes it worth the journey.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book continued to provide well beyond what I ever expected it would. The first part is a intriguing memoir of the author's pre-conception and childhood years, written as smoothly and enticingly as fiction. The author consistently incorporates themes of Dominican culture, early hip hop and spirituality throughout. In the second part she shifts gears and delves into finding out the facts about her genetic makeup, telling the story of her research and DNA testing. All of the information, as it's revealed, is used as a backdrop for some in depth factual schooling about immigration, slavery, and culture.

One underlying message is that the past is never just the past and today's cultural and personal circumstances go way deeper than we are at first able to see. The book beautifully Incorporates all of the above and leaves me feeling obligated, compelled to appreciate, acknowledge, and further investigate my own past.

[Cath · Rating 5 out of 5]

I couldn't put this book down. What a life! What a journey and what words to accompany. The amount of racial violence this author faced through most of her childhood is shocking. In my mind, I think of NYC as a VERY culturally diverse city- one where I thought there would be more tolerance and acceptance- WRONG. While I have always been a minority as Latina, I haven't experienced the racial violence this author describes and MUCH of it from her own family.
I could relate to so much of what she wrote about not being X enough and not being Y enough. If I'm neither of those (which is my dna and my geographical home) then what/who am I?? I bookmarked loads of pages in here. Ms. Cepeda has further intensified my curiosity about my own background. She's an exquisite writer and I can't wait to rent her film "Some Girls" that is linked to this book.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great and eye-opening book! Raquel Cepeda writes with clarity, passion, sensitivity, and humor about her difficult childhood surrounded by very-human characters, and also of the conflicts and paradoxes in the lives of people of color. Her driving curiosity about her racial background and the history of her ancestors leads to the DNA search she describes in the second half of the book, and which is very interesting. I recommend this to anyone who is curious about life in NYC in modern days, or about the historical evolution and migrations of the human race. Cepeda's voice is powerful and somehow combines creativity, spiritualism, compassion, wit, and pragmatism.

[Rasheem Johnson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm too much of a pessimist to have patience for a memoir with magical/spiritual elements. I don't believe a word of this crap. The hip hop stuff and personal stories are cool - save for the excessive tales of torture and abuse. Those personal stories and vivid descriptions of New York life in the late 80s/early 90s was what really kept me engaged. Unfortunately, part 2 of this memoir takes a drastic turn for the worst, trading in everything that made part 1 work and most of what made this a "memoir" for long drawn out history lessons and yeah-right spiritual tales that we're supposed to believe really happened.

[Delphia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bird of Paradise was amazing. This really resonated with me as I am mixed race, the book hit very close to home in many ways. Raquel Cepeda weaves a fantastically good story detailing her experiences growing up, trying to fit in at school, and even with her family. Her father's health becomes a jumping off point to have her DNA analyzed and find out who she is and how she will define herself. This is probably my favorite first book I have won yet. The books is smart, witty, heartbreaking, and lyrical.

[Melody Moezzi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written. I enjoyed every minute...so much so that I wrote a review for Ms. Magazine about it. I posted it once before I believe, and I think including the link prevented my review from posting, so instead of linking to it, I'll just say--google my name and Raquel Cepeda and Ms. Magazine, and you should find it easily! If you're not willing to do that, just know that the book is fantastic.

[Carmen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can't decide if this really was an ad for a DNA company or if it just felt like one. Kudos to anyone who chooses to tell their family history, but this one was a little bit of a chore to read. The author has a right to be pissed at some of her family, but she can be downright petty in her treatment of a lot of people in the story - deserved or not. Also, she lost me on the spiritual side of things, since that's not an experience I can relate to.

[Jameil · Rating 3 out of 5]

I generally don’t like when people review books based on what they weren’t versus what they were. That said... the description of this book was misleading to me. This was more about her life, with a heavy emphasis on her fraught childhood, with a relatively short section at the end about the ancestral research. I would’ve liked the ratio flipped. If you’re looking more for a memoir, you may enjoy this.

[Lauryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow wow wow such a perfect read for my time in Costa Rica, but also just incredibly written overall. After reading Cepeda’s story I’m compelled to take my own lineage more seriously. I really loved this one.

[Margaret Farrell · Rating 3 out of 5]

First half of the book with Raquel's autobiography was incredible. Very raw and sad and eye-opening.
Second half was where she looked into her ancestry using DNA. I was much less interested in that.

[Leanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most original memoirs I have ever read. Because it was so unique, it reminded me of "Why Fish Don’t Exist." Only in the sense that I was dazzled and surprised. The author graciously visited a masterclass I am taking on writing with the writer and artist Shawna Kenney. Raquel really showed up. It was really exciting to talk with her about her process and about DNA testing.

I suggested that her book is really two books. The first half is her younger life, the story of her childhood. In this part, I felt genuinely in awe of her sentences— lively and incredibly musical. At times she is visionary.

What a first sentence!
MY STORY BEGINS BEFORE I WAS BORN, SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN my parents’ memories of when they met and how, with the quickness, they fell in and out of love.

Reading aloud, I thought the first part of her story reads like a novel. She was so brilliant to bring in magical realism elements to telling her story, since the literary flavor is part of of the culture that she is writing about.

So it came out of nowhere, like a lightning bolt on a sunny day . This is what I was told years later. Not even the barrio’s most prolific santera could have divined how Rocío came completely undone at fifteen. It happened on the day Eduardo Cepeda dropped into town from Nueva York and into her life like Chango himself, with a drum in one hand and his dick in the other.”

This sentence sang!!!!!
What I learned so far is that beautiful writing really matters. Period. I wondered was she listening to music as she writes? I asked her and she gave us a long list of music to check out.

The second half is written in a classical expository style. Witty and wise. This is about the rich matrix of cultural influences on DR culture. I found it to be intellectually stimulating to move from her lived experience being the child of immigrants and of mixed heritage (in the sense of the complex situation in DR). Then after feeling it to have a more analytical style with this wonderful quest with ancestry.

THE RESULTS ARE TRICKLING IN. Dad, Bennett says, is of Semitic descent on his father’s dad’s side: haplogroup J2. “Doesn’t that mean my father descends from Sephardic Jews on his direct paternal line?” “There was a chance, because many Arabs and Jews fall into the J2 haplogroup, but ultimately, no,” says Bennett. “That was the very first thing I checked for. We reviewed his entire Y-37 DNA sequence and compared his results with the massive Jewish database we sit on, and there were no matches.” “It’s interesting how so many Arabs and Jews share ancestral origins, and yet there’s so much beef between them,” I respond. I pace back and forth in my kitchen, speculating which of many ways this branch of my family may have washed ashore in the Dominican Republic. I can only surmise how this man arrived in Hispaniola. He may have entered the country as a crypto-Muslim or a Moor, after Spain’s reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula in 1492. There’s really no way to quantify exactly how many crypto-Muslims immigrated to Hispaniola or the rest of the Indies because they weren’t supposed to be there in the first place. The more Bennett breaks it down, the more questions and scenarios whirl through my mind. “There’s absolutely no doubt it’s North African. Perhaps at some point his ancestors had Jewish cousins,” Bennett says. “It’s likely that your dad’s direct paternal line descends from either North Africans or maybe Neolithic farmers who migrated west to Northern Africa from Iraq until they reached Spain. It’s looking like he may most likely be of Berber or, rather, Amazigh, descent. Either way, it’s very rare, because nobody in my entire database matches him.” I had no clue what to expect on either side of Dad’s family, especially his father’s side of the tracks. I still don’t know what my paternal grandfather looks like. Every time I tried to talk Dad into taking the ancestral DNA
An older voice. She is on a mission… I loved the meditation on how concepts of race/language in America are not the same as they are in most of the rest of the world. I appreciated her approach vis-a-vis economic class.
My big take away from her book—I should say of falling in love with her book— is how important voice is and how a highly literary style works so well in all art, not just fiction. That was the main thing I was struck by.

[Natalie Salagean · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s a word my mother uses with such frequency, such habit, with complete and total love behind every little muscle that makes the movements sound aloud, that I’ve never, ever thought to write down. Mami. Because to put that word down, to make the conscious decision to place it, italicize it, and highlight its flow and distinction in contrast to everyday English dialogue, would be a doorway into a world I am not fully yet comfortable in rendering.

It’s one thing to talk about the American dream. To describe my ascent to first-generation college graduate, the sacrifices my mother and father made along the way, how they stared down unjust racism and ostracization, as a culmination of their superhuman effort. I have to point out the unjust part, the part that negates every negative stereotype I’ve ever heard about Mexicans, immigrants, foreigners in general. I have to say it’s unjust because of the fear, deep down, that maybe a part of it isn’t.

Raquel Cepeda conquers these obstacles head on. Her memoir details her life as a first generation “dominiyorkian”, a native born Nueva Yorker whose life jettisons from the boroughs to the Dominican Republic, back and forth, both in her physical presence and in her spiritual journey through the generations to find a rhyme or reason in the chaos of her upbringing. The text is littered with Spanish, with slang, with dialogue that mirrors the culture of those around her. We hear the voices of the unapologetically Dominican, and of those whose Spanglish transforms and mutates based on the surroundings, and in the latter half, our narrator digs deeper into her roots through a series of genetic tests that send her around the world. Cepeda confronts the identity crises that she encounters in other members of her culture, both near and far from her own life in Nueva York, and through her observations, she attempts to grapple with her own.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was recommended to me and I'm glad it was because I don't know that I would have found it otherwise. This is a memoir as vehicle to explain and understand the racial and colonial history of the Dominican Republic.

The first part of the memoir is focused on the author's life and what she knows of her ancestry. Content warning for sensitive readers, there is a lot of violence against women and children described. Throughout her childhood Cepeda intuitively feels called to certain people and places and as an adult armed with a DNA kit and her journalistic skills, she sets out to confirm what she has felt. The second part is more "academic" in nature in that it goes into colonial history and migration patterns, as well as some personal antidotes.

Overall, I found the book to be validating, it encouraged me to look into my own roots (although I am much more hesitant about using DNA testing out of privacy concerns) but at times the writing felt a little sloppy and inconsistent. Definitely something I would recommend to others who are interested in Latinx racial histories.

[Ruth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm half Dominican, a history nerd and a genealogy nerd. If not for those three things this book would have gotten a two-star rating. I did feel like I walked away knowing more about Caribbean and Dominican history and will be forever grateful for the author for bringing Dr. Frank Moya Pons and Chief Jorge Estevez to my attention. I will definitely be reading their work to educate myself more on the topics of history, race and ethnicity in the Dominican Republic. As a reader, though, I felt that many times Cepeda veered into the projection of 20th/21st feminist and racial ideas into colonial history. She beat the reader over the head with her opinions and even as someone who agreed with her I find this off-putting in an author. As for the memoir part of her book I felt it was well written and compelling, until she reached her senior year in high school and then the book lost focus. In the end I felt that much of the first half of the book, especially the details about her abusive parents, did not support her genealogy and family history search. This book could have been so much better but the editing left a lot to be desired.

[Maya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina is a memoir written by Raquel Cepeda depicting the relationship between the distance between a girl and her parents and how that shapes her as a person. In the first half of the book, Cepeda grew up in an eerie atmosphere with both of her parents hating her existence and each other. At age eight, Cepeda moves in with her father who is living in New York, to leave behind her mother and her abusive stepfather. Moving in with her abusive and tennis obsessed dad, makes Cepeda feel unwanted. With her mother always pretending to be the equivalent of her new man, and her father pretending to be white, Cepeda grows up not knowing where she truly belongs. In the second half of the book, Cepeda goes back to her roots to try to discover who she truly is. Cepeda does a perfect job of illustrating an atmosphere that seems relatable. With her vivid vocabulary, Cepeda sweeps you off your feet and into her life growing up on the streets of New York. In the end, like Cepeda, everyone wants to know where they belong.