(Be)longing, Culture & Home: Rediscovering my Duende

Chiaroscuro: Dancing in the Light of Living Memory

I studied my face in the mirror as my hand, as if controlled by some divine spirit, slowly applied “dancer,” a deep red lipstick I’ve used to mark the beginning of a ritual I’ve observed for 26 years.

A ritual that grew both from the discovery of my first love and my first heartache: flamenco.

As if kneeling before an altar, I put on my flamenco skirt, slipped into my flamenco shoes, and draped my shawl over my shoulders.

I danced in my living room with a reverence for the ever-expanding timelessness of duende. Dancing summoned in my soul a frenetic energy I can only describe as a combination of Frida’s rebellion and Dali’s manic melting clock.

I danced like I hadn’t in what felt like years.

My feet grew tired, but I continued barefoot, growing hungrier for each spiraling crescendo of castanets. My soul outstretched in response to Estrella’s Morente’s invitation to volver. My heart, strummed and plucked by Paco de Lucia. My eyes, intent and spellbound by the zapateado-spun dizziness.

I was suddenly transported back to my teen years...

When the dark backdrop of night would be punctuated by one solitary circle of stage light.

Behind the red velvet curtains, the frenzied backstage energy transformed into a dark silence. The distant echo of the crowd’s collective “shhhhs" faded along with the light into a quiet darkness.

Silence on the escenario.

My young and tentative self delicately yet deliberately stepped onto the stage, circling the edge of the light like the torrero of my own anticipatory abandon.

My adult heart, now wisened and widened by the breadth of life experience, is once again lit up by the reassuring heartbeats of palmas, re-powering the engine of my memory, longing, home, and…

my duende.

El Redescubrimiento de Duende

In Spanish, there is a word for passion and inspiration called duende. Poets and scholars have offered us multiple interpretations of duende throughout the ages. Over the last few months, I thought I had lost mine.

This is a story of el rediscovery of my duende, of my passion, inner power, and potential for self-healing.

This process of re-discovery will likely be rhythmically felt throughout my life, washing onto my shores periodically, reminding me to re-frame it or start anew.

This is also a story of inciting the return of my inner luchadora, the fighting spirit sparked in me years ago by the dance of my discontents, now abundant in my soul’s revival.

I see the last year as a material documentation of the re-discovery of my duende, of searching for self, identity, family, culture, and home.

I see this document as intentionally making space for the complexity of all that has visited me this year, and inviting these visitors to co-exist and interact with each other in the theater of love, loss, connection, displacement, estrangement, (be)longing, past and future.

Today I wonder, “what is the common thread through all of this? Where is it taking me?”

Alejamiento / Estrangement

Familial breakups are a different beast.

Family systems are solidified by emotion, blood, obligation, law, choice, and so many other bonds.

A lot of us grew up with this sense that your family is static. “Love them or hate them,” they’re there. Some of us have known the sting of abandonment and estrangement our whole lives.

Society doesn’t always show us healthy representations of estrangement. One aspect of my culture told me estrangement was taboo in the context of collectivism. The other praised it in the context of individualism.

Questions like: Why aren’t you respecting your elders? Why can’t you just get over it for the good of the family? OR Why does this hurt so much, even though I know it’s better for my mental health? How can I feel such loss and pain, when this is for my own individual good?

The American Psychological Association (APA) defines estrangement as a “significant decrease or discontinuation of contact with individuals with whom one formally had close relationships, such as a spouse or family member, due to antagonism.”

The closest Spanish translation of family estrangement is ‘Alejamiento familiar,’ which is defined as “cooling in the friendship or relationship between two or more people; or a cooling in the adherence of a person to certain ideas.”

As if it was a pot of hot soup that simply needed to be placed by a window to be ready to eat.

Growing up and into adulthood, my family was the center of my universe. Every event was celebrated with a big gathering, lots of food, yelling across the table in Spanglish, and dancing. It wasn’t a party if there wasn’t dancing.

This pattern of convening and the centrality of group experience continued to shape me and inform how I built connections with others. I often made decisions about friends, partners, and even career direction with deep consideration of my family’s perspectives.

I often saw myself in the light of the stories told about our familial past, present, and collectively imagined future.

The Break

About five years ago, I had a conversation with my parents that would forever alter my family life. In deep denial, they rejected my recollection of a traumatic event. What ensued was five years of slowly being pushed out of my family, being gaslit, and made to feel like what I experienced didn't happen.

These five years laid the groundwork for the estrangement. It wasn’t until December of last year that my parents made a final choice that pushed me to dis-engage from the relationship entirely to preserve my mental health.

It’s now been 9 months of...

• Re-parenting myself

• Dancing to transform my grief

• Honoring the body I had learned so long to deny

Months of therapy, dance and poetry have helped me to rebuild my life outside of the context of a family system rattled by pain and trauma. It has been a period of returning to myself, my body, and my art.

Roots

The five years of being excluded from family gatherings forced me to consider who I was outside of my family. I deeply felt the loss of those formative connections to my culture, language, rituals, and customs.

The estrangement ripped me apart from the family experiences that allowed me to feel close to, a part of, and an active participant in my home, family, and the practice of our culture, our love, our movement.

This year, I found myself asking “Is my culture still my culture without connection to the language and rituals that I had access to when I was a part of, rather than peripheral to, my family system?

While I am still connected to two Spanish-speaking family members, it is such a small part of my life now as it was five years ago.

Now that my grandmother is nearing the end of her life, I anticipate another huge disconnection from my culture. She is our family historian and storyteller, and without her in my life, the disconnect will widen.

How do I begin again, paving a new path for myself and my new chosen family, without losing those parts of my history that made me into the person I am today? As family purveyors of story & culture fade into the darkness, what steps into the light?

Shortly after the estrangement, one solace was reframing my historical role as “family fixer” or “mediator” instead as generational cycle -breaker.

What will the inheritance of pain, trauma, healing, culture, and belonging/displacement look like in the generations ahead? What is my role in disrupting these cycles?

Family Futurism

During this tumultuous time of being uprooted from my family of origin, I’ve also built a beautiful chosen family and queer community.

As the year careened towards fall, the process of finding a sperm donor was well underway. We had finally selected a sperm donor after months of searching. We worked all year on making new friends and deepening our bonds with our chosen family.

These experiences have bonded us in the search of who we are as partners, parents, and who we will become in the context of our chosen family.

My wife and I are so excited about imagining and building our future family. We were, and still are, co-creating and nurturing our own loving community.

I found myself asking questions like “What do I want future generations to know about this period of our lives? What will our community of support look like? How will we parent? What will we teach them? What stories will we tell about this time?”

Estrangement forced new questions surrounding parenthood, community, and culture into the light.

The Unrooted Self: Healing the Island of my Body

My queerness always felt like my body was an island, my desires and motivations cast across the sea, to a distant land I could not yet name.

The beauty of queerness is that it does not seek to stake a claim. It does not seek to own or possess. It is dynamic, fluid, and defined by each person.

Amidst these reflections about where I belong in the context of estrangement, my queerness felt like singularly my own.

In some ways, queerness was one of the first lenses through which I understood how I was separate from the world / my family / etc.

It began to feel like a powerful pillar to steady myself as I felt the connection to my ancestral home, family, and culture slowly weakening.

What is it like to recreate yourself without these references? What is it like to create your own rituals and customs? What is it like to create your own connections to culture apart from the lens of the family system in which you grew up?

It felt like my queerness became a portal through which I could reclaim / rediscover myself and start to lay down my own roots. Starting to dance flamenco again made this portal even more spiritually and emotionally accessible to me.

Development doesn’t happen without Loss

Six months into the estrangement, I visited my grandmother at her new nursing home. The injury she sustained a couple months before had plunged her into the advanced stages of dementia. When I walked into her room, she did not recognize me.

While holding her frail hands, I searched her soft hazel eyes for the woman that raised me. Mortality, legacy, diaspora, memory – all came into sharp relief.

My grandmother’s dementia had taken a turn amidst the estrangement.

I was lucky enough to have seen her one last time before she forgot who I was. We sang and laughed together. I clumsily played her mandolin serenading her with my made-up song “yo te quiero Mamá”…

Tectonic shifts

Weeks later, a close family member would come out to me. Another close family member let me know that they would be moving back to the area after years of being away.

My family seemed in flux through stark polarities - death/ life, memory / remembering, geographic closeness / distance, identity / belonging.

The date we selected for our first fertility treatment was fast approaching. The breaking open in my family seemed to be breaking me open in different ways.

New mountains: Generational cycle breaker

I've begun to grapple with new feelings like longing to let go through forgiveness. I've noticed a new longing to push beyond the limits of pain and betrayal and reach across the months-long divide of estrangement.

A couple weeks ago, I acted on this longing and messaged my mother for the first time in months. I asked if she would be willing to go to therapy with me. To my surprise, she accepted my invitation.

I now find myself looking up at a new mountain that has seemed to have sprouted from this valley of grief over night. There seems to be a clear path, but I know it will be steep. I know the pressure will change. I know my feet will become weary.

This is the luchadora spirit that comes with the accidental vocation of generational cycle breaker. I reach inside of myself for my deepest compassion, allowing it to co-exist with and be nurtured by, rather than destroyed by, the growth that comes from loss.

I don’t know where any of this will go, but I am documenting this moment to remind my future self of all that I’ve been through, all that I will go through, of what it took to become who I am becoming, and to create the family we are loving into existence.

Duende: Arrivals & Departures

I will close this blog as one closes a door only to turn toward the open air of a nearby window. Federico Garcia Lorca said it best:

"We have said that the duende loves the edge, the wound, and draws close to places where forms fuse in a yearning beyond visible expression. Where is the duende? Through the empty archway a wind of the spirit enters, blowing insistently over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents: announcing the endless baptism of freshly created things."

I walk back onto the escenario, flinging myself into the unknown. I give birth to myself.