Dispatches From Puerto Nowhere: An American Story of Assimilation and Erasure

Robert Lopez's grandfather Sixto was born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, in 1904, immigrating to the United States in the 1920s, where he lived in a racially proportioned apartment complex in East New York, Brooklyn, until his death in 1987. The family's efforts to assimilate within their new homeland led to the near complete erasure of their heritage, culture, and language within two generations.



Little is known of Sixto-he may have been a longshoreman, a painter, or a boxer, but was most likely...