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Review: Richard Blanco's memoir 'Prince of Los Cocuyos' a dance between two cultures

 
President Barack Obama greets poet Richard Blanco, left, after Blanco’s reading of the poem One Today at the U.S. presidential inauguration in January 2013.
President Barack Obama greets poet Richard Blanco, left, after Blanco’s reading of the poem One Today at the U.S. presidential inauguration in January 2013.
Published March 18, 2015

Poet Richard Blanco has never lived in Cuba, but his family's roots there shaped his life in countless ways as he grew up in a Florida suburb in the 1970s and '80s. He tells the story of that American boyhood in his engaging memoir, The Prince of Los Cocuyos.

Blanco, who was conceived in Cuba just before his family fled the island, born in Spain during their brief stay there en route to the United States and raised in Miami, grew up to be a civil engineer and an accomplished poet. In January 2013, Blanco became the fifth poet to read his work at a U.S. presidential inauguration. He was also the first Latino poet to do so, and the first immigrant poet, and the first openly gay poet — and, at age 44, the youngest.

The poem that he read at President Barack Obama's inauguration, One Today, was an optimistic, inclusive picture of America, rich in quotidian details, and his memoir has many of the same qualities. Its language is poetic and often lovely, but Blanco also has a gift for storytelling and a keen sense of humor that bring his lively family to life on the page.

The book takes its title from the Miami bodega owned by one of Blanco's uncles and called Los Cocuyitos, "the Little Fireflies." Most members of the extended family, including Riqui, as he's called, work there at some point, including Blanco's parents.

He lives with them, his older brother, Carlos, and his paternal grandparents in a house in a suburb called Westchester but "pronounced Guecheste by the working-class exiles like us who had begun to settle there once they got on their feet." The household is ruled with an iron hand by his grandmother. Abuela, a resourceful businesswoman, gave his parents the down payment for the house — and never lets them forget it, especially Riqui's mother, who is pretty fierce herself.

As a youngster, Riqui spends a lot of time with his grandmother. She's fanatically frugal, which leads to a funny tale about her machinations to buy cheap chickens at Winn-Dixie, involving Riqui being sent to buy them and ferry them home on the handlebars of his bike — an effort for which Abuela pays him with money to buy his favorite American foodstuff, Easy Cheese in a can.

It's a hilarious tale, which grows into an even funnier one about his efforts to get his family to cook a real "American" Thanksgiving dinner. But it's also a sophisticated look at how the children of immigrants negotiate the complex territory between their parents' original language and culture and the new one they've moved into. Translation, for Riqui, isn't just a matter of toggling between Spanish and English, it's a constant dance between two worlds.

That dance becomes even more complex during the slow process of understanding his own sexuality. Abuela, in particular, does not make it easy, telling him while he's still in grade school and does something she considers effeminate, " 'It's better to be it and not look like it, than to look like it even if you are not it.' At that age, I only understood that it meant watching telenovelas; it was my paint-by-number sets, it was my cousin's Easy-Bake Oven I wanted for my own — all the things I enjoyed for which she constantly humiliated me."

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But what always shines through in The Prince of Los Cocuyos is the warmth and love Blanco's family offers all of its members in the end. In chapters like "El Ratoncito Miguel," about the family's first trip to Disney World; "Losing the Farm," about Riqui helping his grandfather re-create the farmyard full of animals the old man remembers from his youth in their Miami back yard; or "Listening to Mermaids," about Riqui's first girlfriend and his first crushes as a teen, he moves us at the same time he is making us laugh. The book's humor comes from the heart and crosses cultural lines as deftly as Blanco himself.

Contact Colette Bancroft at cbancroft@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8435. Follow @colettemb.