Barrelhouse Reviews: Dispatches from Puerto Nowhere by Robert Lopez

Reviewed by Guillermo Rebollo Gil

Two Dollar Radio / March 2023 / 280 pp

This is not your typical memoir about growing up Puerto Rican in New York. It’s not your typical memoir about growing up Puerto Rican, period. Plus, it’s not really a memoir. Robert Lopez keeps his promise to readers: these are dispatches, summations, anecdotes, and remembrances of an ornery, middle-aged man in Long Island, who, for the first time in his life, is preoccupied with what his being Puerto Rican, or “half-Rican,” might mean. Spoiler alert: He doesn’t know what it means. And the book does not go very far in answering that question. Lopez is content to rearticulate the query in short bursts of earnest, often biting, and at times moving prose. And the book is better for it.

If the author of Dispatches could be said to be experimenting an identity crisis, it is low-key.  And this, to be honest, is refreshing, at least as it pertains to the literature of having lost and/or trying to regain one’s cultural or ethnic or national identity. The author is as worried about his lack of cultural authenticity as he is worried about his backhand; Lopez, contrary to most Puerto Ricans anywhere in the world, is crazy about tennis. And contrary to most Puerto Ricans who live in, and write from, New York or Boston or Kissimmee or Hartford, he is not crazy about being Puerto Rican. He comes off as mostly curious, or, at his most vulnerable, as bothered about his lack of cultural selfhood. He writes: “…matters of identity and history and culture are all-the-time complex and can cripple a person, or in my case, cause a certain discomfort I can’t quite articulate.”

This curiosity stems from having grown up in a migrant Puerto Rican family that, contrary to most migrant Puerto Rican families represented in print, did not make of their home a safe space for cultural traditions, culinary treasures, beloved folktales, and family anecdotes from the homeland to be passed down the generations. The author, however, does not really seek to belong to, or reclaim, a lost heritage or identity. Rather, he riffs on a lost sense of being and belonging that was neither taken nor surrendered under coercion. The author’s family simply wasn’t big on who they were or were they were from. Lopez explains: “I never asked questions and no one in my family told these kinds of stories.”

So, in Dispatches, Lopez makes some up. Primarily about his paternal grandfather, of whom he writes:

I don’t know if Sixto Lopez was chased out of Puerto Rico and running for his life. Maybe there was a bounty on his head…

Maybe he dreamed of beating Roberto Clemente to the majors by some 30 years…

More than likely he wanted to find a decent job, marry an American woman and raise a family.

Lopez makes an endearing narrator. You, as a reader—and a Puerto Rican one at that—want him to find whatever it is that he’s looking for, even as he won’t go looking for it in the Puerto Rican Day Parade. No, wait: you want him to find the Puerto Rico he seeks precisely because he won’t go looking for it in the Puerto Rican Day Parade. “I’ve never felt a compulsion to parade around as a flag-waving member of the PR tribe because why would I. To be fair, I’ve never been ashamed of being Puerto Rican either.” Lopez is an endearing narrator because he is an awkward fit in the reading list for any Intro to Puerto Rican Studies seminar, generally filled with the beloved writers who have crafted poignant portraits of who we are or were or will continue to be as a people. He is bound neither by the traditions nor by the lack of traditions. He is bound to his curiosity, or his discomfort. Or his half-hearted desire to connect with a now-impossible Puerto Rican upbringing—an impossibility that, again, will not have a life-changing effect upon his present life.

In this precise sense, Dispatches is a trope-busting book. And a trip too. More Hunter S. Thompson* than Esmeralda Santiago, Lopez makes for a suspicious tour guide of all things Puerto Rican, past and present. He refers to the island as an island, even as we have all learned to call it an archipelago. He insists on the primacy of Spanish as a cultural marker, even as—at least in literary circles—we’re well past that. He writes of matters of ethnic and racial identity with a naïveté that is not only astounding, but steeped in a rather uncomplicated—and therefore, frustrating— relationship to privilege: “I grew up surrounded by white people and never thought of myself as other.”

As a result, there is no trauma in these pages. Or, if there is, it comes off as, I don’t know, quaint? What is more, there’s no concern with the future. The author has no children. His family name dies with him, like his backhand will die with him. Though Puerto Rico, both the real and its Puerto Nowhere stand-in, are central concerns of the book, Puerto Rican people are not featured here in any important way. There is no “we” in this book. Not because Lopez or his work are bereft of a sense of the other, but because his is a solitary—if not lonely—endeavor. He is not looking to represent anybody. Nor is he looking for island readers to discover and claim one of their long-lost brothers. I would venture to say that Lopez would be fine if they only read this book in Long Island.

This makes the author and his work free of the demands of political urgency: Is Lopez for or against statehood? For or against Yankee investment? For or against a radical redistribution of wealth among island inhabitants? What he is clearly for is tennis. Thus, one could argue that the strongest link Lopez has to the island is by way of his referencing Olympic gold medalist Mónica Puig, who is, hands down, the least Puerto Rican of our sporting stars. Puig is blond, from a well-to-do family; though she captured the attention of the population in 2016, and though she was able to broker that success into neat endorsements, what she represents is excellence and determination only lightly connected to cultural identity. Not a sense of belonging, nor a rags to riches story filled with sacrifices. In this there is a certain level of correspondence with Lopez’s own story. Consider the following passage:

I was the first person on either side of my family to attend a college or university, let alone graduate. This could’ve been quite the victory for certain members of my family, but there weren’t any celebrations. Almost everyone from my public high school on Long Island went to college. In my little white world, it was routine. I didn’t put any effort into high school and that nonexistent work ethic continued as an undergraduate so none of it seemed like an accomplishment to me.

Still, an argument could be made that Dispatches from Puerto Nowhere is today’s “Puerto Rican Obituary.” Contrary to Pedro Pietri’s landmark 1973 poem, Dispatches is not a literary representation of the life and death conditions of a people. But it does, however slantly, foreground the mess that being Puerto Rican is in this contemporary moment, with more Puerto Ricans living outside the archipelago than within. With the population getting older and the young having fewer babies. With Yankee investors buying up the land., pushing people out. Not that Lopez looks too closely at any of this. But his central question—what does being Puerto Rican mean to me now, given that it has meant nothing through most of my life? —lands eerily close to those that likely form in the minds of so many of us here. I’ll start: Why do I insist on raising my children on the island if there is no discernable future for us here? What is it that they’ll tap into here in their development that they will lack anywhere else in the world? Why is it so important to stay now, considering the place has mostly held us back or held us down?

Dispatches, of course, is not where you go to help answer these questions. It’s not even the reading you would turn to find some comfort or solace from them. It simply echoes this sentiment in a manner I can’t quite articulate. That makes the book relevant and urgent.

Personally, I don’t care much for tennis. And, like Lopez, I am not one to parade. But I have been curious about what’s next or new in Puerto Rican literature, here on the island or anywhere else in the world, and this book hits terribly close to it.

*Thompson famously based his novel The Rum Diary upon his experiences as a fledging reporter in Puerto Rico.

Guillermo Rebollo Gil (San Juan, 1979) is a writer, sociologist, translator, and attorney. His publications include poetry in BOMB, Fence, Poetry Northwest, The Hopkins Review and Whale Road Review; literary criticism in Cleveland Review of Books, Tripwire, The Smart Set and Annulet. He serves as an editor at The Autoethnographer and associate CNF editor at JMWW.  In 2020, the Spanish publisher Ediciones Liliputienses published a selection of his poetry under the title Informe de Logros: poemas 2000-2019. He is the author of Writing Puerto Rico: Our Decolonial Moment (2018) and Whiteness in Puerto Rico: Translation at a Loss (2023). Es el papá de Lucas Imar y Elián Iré.