Author Esmeralda Santiago spoke yesterday afternoon about the cultural conflicts she faced growing up in her native Puerto Rico and in Brooklyn, N.Y.
About 27 people heard Santiago talk informally and read from her book, "When I Was a Puerto Rican," in 2 Rockefeller Center.
Her book centers around her lifelong ethnic ambivalence. Santiago, who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard at 27, said in order to pursue her love of scholarship, she had to "buy into" American culture and sacrifice some of her Puerto Rican identity.
"It wasn't without a great deal of guilt and sadness that I realized that I had to do this," Santiago said.
"I had to leave the house, and the moment I left I got on the train - it was an hour and a half ride from the house to the high school every day - and once I left I was a different person," she said.
Santiago has written essays for The New York Times and The Boston Globe on similar issues.
Santiago lived in rural Puerto Rico until the age of 13, when her mother moved the family to Brooklyn so her children could go to high school and get regular jobs.
"I never had any sense as I grew up that I was going to be anything other than an office worker with a high school diploma," Santiago said.
But several years after high school, while working days and studying at a community college at night, Santiago decided she would "love to go to College the way American kids go to College." She was accepted as a transfer student to Harvard and completed her degree in two-and-a-half years.Santiago said she hesitated before agreeing to write an auto-biographical book because it would upset her family.
"When I kept saying to myself that no one was writing the things I want to read, I said, 'Maybe I should write the things I want to read,' " she said.
Santiago spoke as part of the ongoing 6-week program, "Voices of Diversity: Latino Perspectives," which runs through May 21.
