Jean Guerrero: My Black ancestors were erased from family's memory. But I found them

Two years ago, at my mother's house in San Diego, I asked my 86-year-old Puerto Rican grandmother, who lives there, if she could show me photos of her parents. We were spending a lot of time together during the pandemic in a COVID bubble.

Abuelita Coco, a pale, parenthesis-slim woman, is losing her short-term memory. But she enjoys recalling fragments of her far-away past. She went to her bedroom to rummage through her closet. She pulled out photo albums of her life in Puerto Rico and placed them on her bed. We wore masks and were vaccinated, but I gave her space while she looked.

Later, she brought me a photo of a wiry, white-passing man. "That was my father," she said in Spanish, peering at the photo with smiling eyes. "Y tu mamá?" I asked. She told me she had searched and searched for photos of her mother, and couldn't find any. Perhaps she never brought them from Puerto Rico, she said.

I was perplexed. There was no way she forgot photos of her mother when she moved in with us when I was a teenager in the early 2000s. It occurred to me that maybe she didn't want me to see her mother. I recalled a conversation I'd had with my father, from Mexico, when I was writing a book about his side of the family years before. He told me he thought my mother's mother had Black ancestry. He could see it in her face, in my mother's face. I objected that they look white. My father told me to look closer. But he said I shouldn't inquire. He'd asked Abuelita Coco once and it made her "real mad."

Without explaining myself, I asked Abuelita Coco for photos of her mother every time I visited. Each time, she thought I was asking for the first time. One evening, after weeks of gentle inquiries, she brought me a black-and-white photo. "That was my mom," she said quietly. In the photo, a woman with high cheekbones and," I said.