GONZÁLEZ: Hey everyone, this is Ana González, and you’re listening to Mosaic. There’s a word in Spanish: vaivén. It’s a combination of the words va, y, and ven, which mean to go and come back. It translates to sway or oscillate in English, but it loses some of its Spanish meaning. Especially when it comes to Puerto Ricans living off the island, in the diaspora. The word “vaivén” describes the migration of Puerto Rican people. As a colony of the United States, Puerto Ricans have a long history of traveling between island and mainland in a constant ebb and flow, like waves in the ocean. But also like the ocean, the vaivén can be strong and unpredictable and cause you to leave parts of yourself on separate shores.

ZENAIDA: Yo decía a mi mamá, “Mami, cuando tú te mueras dónde te entierro? Porque yo me quiero ir de aquí. Yo no quiero estar aquí toda mi vida.”

ENGLISH: I used to say to my mom, ‘Mami, when you die, where will I bury you? Because I want to leave this place. I don’t want to be here my whole life.”

GONZÁLEZ: That’s Zenaida García. She never wanted to leave Puerto Rico. She was forced into the choppy waters of the vaivén and almost lost herself entirely. But today on Mosaic, we hear how Zenaida reclaims her life.

It’s the week before Christmas, and Zenaida García’s apartment smells like pork, onion, and boiling rice. In the corner of the living room, there’s a shimmering white Christmas tree, all lit up and decorated in rose gold bows and pictures of her family. A fire is playing on the TV. Zenaida just painted the walls and bought new, white and pink furniture to brighten up her living room and help her stave off the depression she normally gets this time of year.

ZENAIDA: When my first winter came, girl! Oh my goodness. Aquí no hay parranda! Aquí no hay lechón! Aquí no hay luces de Christmas! [Gasps]

GONZÁLEZ: Here, there are no parades of friends and families singing and dancing on Nochebuena, or Christmas Eve. There is no fall-off-the-bone slow-roasted pork.

Puerto Rican Christmas is alive and warm and filled with music and food and outdoor parties from December 24th to January 6th, Three Kings Day. Here, in New England, the sun sets at 4pm, and you’re lucky if it’s above freezing.

ZENAIDA: Tienes que estar encerrado desde la oscuridad, del frío. No soporto el frío, todavía. Hoy 26 años. I can’t. I can’t.

Translation: You have to stay inside because it’s so dark and cold. I still can’t stand the cold. I’ve been here 26 years.

GONZÁLEZ: Like so many other Puerto Ricans, and really most immigrants living in the cold of New England instead of their warmer homelands, winter makes Zenaida long for the land of her childhood.

ZENAIDA: I miss my country, my family. I miss my people, the sun. I love the sun. I'm a beach girl. I used to go to the beach every weekend. My family is from the campo. So, I go in the river y climbing the tree pa' coger mango y corriendo las gallinas. So, I get goosebumps [cackles].

GONZÁLEZ: Zenaida grew up in San Juan in an apartment, the youngest of 10 siblings. Her father is an upholsterer with his own shop in the city. But on the weekends, her family makes the drive to her grandparent’s home on a plantation in the southeastern town of Maunabo. There, Zenaida spends every weekend of her childhood, chasing chickens and bunnies, and eating the most delicious food in the world. Sometimes, it’s the very chickens she just chased that her grandmother catches, kills and prepares for dinner. Most of the time, it’s rice and beans, aguacate y tomate and mango, plucked straight from the farm.

ZENAIDA: Y la letrina. We had to go to the letrina. Y la cucaracha, los sapitos! The shower was like three pieces of wood y una pluma que tu abrías allá arriba...y cállese chorro y miraba para afuera y era el campo...Era allí en la naturaleza, una cosa hermosa.

English: And the outhouse. With the bugs and little frogs. ...and a faucet you opened above you and shut off. And you would look out, and it would be wilderness. You were there in nature, a beautiful thing.

GONZÁLEZ: The García family farm in Maunabo is the place where all of Zenaida’s enormous family congregates, and it’s young Zeny’s playground. But it doesn’t last. Zenaida’s grandparents pass away when she’s around 10 years old. After that, she spends most of her time either in her family’s apartment or sneaking out of it.

ZENAIDA: I was a wild girl. So I think I still [laughs]...Creo que porque siempre crecí en la casa, trancada. Cuando salí afuera I was like a little bird. Que los soltaron de la jaula y hacía travesuras, maldades con las muchachas. Siempre estamos haciendo cosas funny, alegre. O si vemos a un muchacho guapo por la calle, "¡Oye papi! ¡Que bueno tú estás! [laughs]

English: I think because I was always raised in the house, locked up. WHen I left the house, I was like a little bird who jumped out of the cage to make mischief and do bad things with my girlfriends. We were always doing funny things. Or if we saw a handsome guy on the street, we’d yell “Oye, papi! Looking good!”

GONZÁLEZ: Zenaida loves going to the beach, which is really easy to do on a tropical island. She goes as often as she can after school and on weekends. One day she’s there with her sister, and one of her sister’s friends introduces her to a boy who would change her life.

ZENAIDA: So ese dia él trajo al primo, mi ex, y me lo presentó, so there we start to talk and talk hasta que we hook up. Y siempre nos encontrábamos en la playa. [So, that day, he brought his cousin, my ex, and introduced him to me….And we would always find ourselves at the beach.]

Music: fun, nostalgic

GONZÁLEZ: Zenaida takes the bus all around northern Puerto Rico to meet her new boyfriend at different beaches. Soon, they’re both sneaking out of their parents houses to meet each other at night. As soon as Zenaida graduates from high school, she gets married. They move in together, into the same apartment projects Zenaida grew up in. They have a baby girl. But within the first year, things change. MUSIC FADES OUT

ZENAIDA: Él bebía. He used to drink with his boss and his cousin. And he came drunk at home to the house and start to fight with me. And that’s how everything started….

GONZÁLEZ: He starts to hit her. It happens the same way every time. He comes home drunk, wakes Zenaida up, starts arguing with her, things escalate. Zenaida would defend herself. Her husband would get angrier. She would call the police or a neighbor, and he would get scared and apologize, vow to never do it again.

ZENAIDA: Pero la sí, otra vez.

GONZÁLEZ: But he always does it again. This cycle happens for years. They have two more kids, three all together. Zenaida is stuck. She doesn’t know how to handle this. She doesn’t know that she should or could leave him.

ZENAIDA: I didn't know the world. I didn't know the street. No tenía experiencia. Mi mamá era gente de campo so they don't talk because they didn't went through those things.

ENGLISH: I didn’t have experience. And my mom’s family comes from the country…

GONZÁLEZ: But things are getting worse. Her husband starts using drugs and disappears for days on end, only to come home and beat Zenaida. Zenaida reaches a breaking point.

ZENAIDA: Cuando yo me molestaba con él, yo era la que me alzaba. Ya yo no quería estar en esa relación. Ya se rompió la relación. I didn’t love him anymore because of everything he does to me. I put him on jail the last time he hit me.

ENGLISH: When I would argue with him, it was me who was raising my fist. I didn’t want to be in that relationship. It was already broken.

GONZÁLEZ: With her husband in jail, Zenaida gets a chance to catch her breath. One day, she’s talking to her mom, Serafina, on the phone. Zenaida’s father had recently passed away, and her widowed mother moved to Providence to live with some family there.

ZENAIDA: I was telling her "Mom, my marriage is like that. I'm going through this. So, I want to leave him. Ella me dijo, " Múdate pa' acá. Vente pa' acá conmigo."

GONZÁLEZ: Move here, come here with me. With that, Zenaida decides to leave Puerto Rico. But first, she tells her husband, who’s still in jail.

ZENAIDA: And I did like a contract with him. I told him “I'm leaving. I’m leaving you. I’m leaving. If you want me to drop the case, you're gonna do a letter letting me go with my kids to United States.” And he did. He wrote a letter. I still have the letter. He wrote it while he was on jail, letting me go…

Empecé a vender lo que pude vender.

GONZÁLEZ: Zenaida sells what she can and packs the rest. She doesn’t think much about the fact that she’s moving to a completely different place. Politically, the US is the same country as Puerto Rico, but it’s culturally and geographically foreign. But Zenaida doesn’t have any conception of that. She’s never been anywhere else but Puerto Rico.

ZENAIDA: I'm a scaredy girl. I was scared. I never travel in my life. So I don't know. Y yo hice con en un avión, se cae el avión y yo con mis nenes: Ay dios mio! [And there I’d be on the plane, and the plane would fall out of the sky with me and my kids. Oh my god!] That was my thinking at that time.

GONZÁLEZ: Despite her fears, she does it. She breaks free of her abusive husband, boards a plane with her three kids, and lands intact in Providence in the summer of 1996. She’s able to live with her mother in an apartment rented from her cousin. She and her kids are alive but traumatized. Her youngest, Anthony, is four.

ZENAIDA: They were crying every night asking for his dad. When his dad is coming. And that was breaking my heart. Si no hubiera sido por mis primos que vivían aquí y mi mamá y el soporte que tenía aquí, I don't know how those cómo iba a crecer.

English: If it hadn’t been for my cousin that lived here and my mom and the support that I had here, I don’t know how I could have raised those kids.

GONZÁLEZ: At the same time, Zenaida knows she needs to get a job to support her family in this new place. But there’s one catch: she doesn’t speak any English.

ZENAIDA: You learn English in Puerto Rico, but you don't practice. You don’t talk English in Puerto Rico. That is like a basic subject that you have to learn.

GONZÁLEZ: Puerto Ricans are US citizens, but it’s not a given that Puerto Ricans speak English in addition to Spanish. Zenaida wants to learn, though, so she goes to the Genesis Center in South Providence. The Genesis Center is a nonprofit educational center that was founded by a Catholic nun and priest in the 1970s to help the influx of SE Asian refugees from the Vietnam War and the Khmer Rouge. Today, it offers a whole bevvy of services for immigrants and refugees, including adult English classes for speakers of other languages. Zenaida goes religiously for two years while receiving government benefits.

ZENAIDA: And after 2 years, welfare, they don't want me to keep studying. They want me to work. They say, "Zenaida, you are studying too much. You need to go to work."

GONZÁLEZ: It’s 1998, and Zenaida leaves her English classes and gets a job as a cashier at Walmart in Cranston. She’s really social and loves helping people while being able to provide for her family. But her English is still really limited.

ZENAIDA: I try to manage with “Have a nice day.” “Thank you for shopping at Walmart.” Because I don’t wanna get fired.

GONZÁLEZ: She does her job well. But some customers can’t handle the fact that Zenaida is learning English. They insult her to her face.

ZENAIDA: “You don't speak English. Go back to your country. What are you doing here if you don't know how to speak English?” And things like that. They were rude. Some of them, they were Italians. And some of them was Spanish, Puerto Rican! And that hurt a lot when it's coming from your own race.

GONZÁLEZ: She puts up with it because she needs the money. She’s supporting three kids and her mother by herself. And her English skills aren’t good enough for her to get a higher-paying job. She receives income assistance and lives in section 8 housing, but those require her to work, or at least look for work. In 2002, she transfers to another Walmart location, but then, her life changes.

ZENAIDA: And then I left after a year because my mother was sick.

GONZÁLEZ: It’s cancer, sarcoma. After her mother is diagnosed, not one, but two of her sisters are diagnosed with colon cancer. Her mother’s health declines quickly. Out of work, Zenaida declares bankruptcy and goes back on welfare full-time. The whole time, she’s scared of what will happen to her in Rhode Island if her mother, her main support, leaves her.

ZENAIDA: Yo decía a mi mamá, “Mami, cuando tú te mueras dónde te entierro? Porque yo me quiero ir de aquí. Yo no quiero estar aquí toda mi vida.” Mami murió y sigo aquí because my kids!

English: I used to say to my mom, “Mami, when you die, where will I bury you? Because I want to leave here. I don’t want to stay here my whole life.” Mami died, and I stayed here.

GONZÁLEZ: It’s January 2008. A snowstorm is coating Providence when Zenaida’s mother passes away. Zenaida brings her mother’s body back to Puerto Rico to bury her.

ZENAIDA: And I came back, I had to move my apartment because the landlord lost the house. And the boyfriend that I think was my boyfriend at that time, he left me for another one.

GONZÁLEZ: The hits keep coming. Within the same year, Zenaida’s two sisters both lose their battle with colon cancer within months of each other.

ZENAIDA: So, I went through a lot. I went through a lot. I was in a deep depression for about – wow– I guess four years? But I didn't know that I had depression.

GONZÁLEZ: Zenaida is grieving so many things – the loss of her mother, her home, her sisters, her relationship – all while being an unemployed, single mom. She bottles up her emotions and spends days in her room, locked away. Somehow, she manages to attend a job training program and find a job at CVS in East Providence. At first it’s a full-time cashier position but then she gets bumped to part-time. After a year or so, she’s working the night shifts only. It’s hellish.

ZENAIDA: Customers were kind of rude. I was getting sick more because they was coughing in front of you. They was cleaning their nose and they had the mocos, and they’re handing you money. It was nasty.

GONZÁLEZ: It doesn’t take Zenaida long to realize that she’s living a life she hates just to make money. And it’s making her depression and grief worse. She quits the job, but she’s still deeply unhappy. One day, Zenaida’s at her doctor’s for her yearly check up. He asks how she’s doing, and she bursts into tears. He recommends she go get help at a mental health clinic called the Providence Center. That’s where she meets a therapist named Sandra. Sandra is a first-generation Mexican-American from Texas. She’s bilingual and is able to meet Zenaida where she’s at, both with her language and her mental health needs. Zenaida trusts her and begins to open up about her life.

ZENAIDA: Como yo me pasaba llorando, durmiendo, no motivation, no self esteem. Y all my grief on my mother, from my sisters.

English: How I was always crying, sleeping...

GONZÁLEZ: Sandra helps Zenaida understand that she is suffering from depression and PTSD from the years of abuse and loss. Sandra guides Zenaida through the grieving process and gives her the support she needs to let some things go. She also helps her be more present with her kids and give them the parenting they need.

ZENAIDA: I want to give them a good life. And I left my oldest taking care of my other two, sometimes my mom. I think that happen when you are single mother... When you are single mother, you have little kids at home and you have to leave them behind to go to work...and you miss a lot.

GONZÁLEZ: Zenaida is healing and taking ownership of her life, bit by bit. But she’s still unemployed. She has been for years now, living off of government and family support, because her English is still limited.

ZENAIDA: After I left Walmart and CVS, I tried to apply, and I was failing the application and the test when I applied for price rite, walgreens. Nobody want to hire me. So I was talking with Sandra. She told me ‘Zenaida, you want to find a good job, you need more vocabulary. You have to go back to class.’ And I wasn't working. So I say, ‘Okay, I'm going back to class.’

DAVE: My first impression was her coming into the room in sweatpants... And she was not carrying herself with the same poise and valuing herself in the same way that she, if you look at her now, she does.

GONZÁLEZ: That’s David Buchalter. He’s an ESOL teacher at the Genesis Center. He works with adult learners from all over the world who have arrived in Rhode Island, like Zenaida, with a lot of baggage. For Dave’s students, living in the US and speaking English was never something they planned to do. When Zenaida walks into his classroom in 2017, she’s petrified. She hasn’t taken English classes in 20 years. She’s worried she’s going to say the wrong thing, mess up.

ZENAIDA: I went to Dave's class....He was very nice...He want to hear us. Listen to us.. When I start to talk, I start to cry.

DAVE: To be honest, I don't remember the moment that she cried. It happens very frequently. The lines between crying and not crying are blurred, because it's all very intense and emotional stuff that, you know, we go through. We do a little grammar too, but [laughs].

GONZÁLEZ: In every class, Dave tries to get Zenaida and his other students to open up about themselves in English. He has them draw pictures of their memories, set scenes, and analyze poetry and novels.

DAVE: She was so good at, like, explicating literature. I mean, her grammar wasn't, like, perfect, but her ideas were amazing. And she was able to tell such colorful stories. After a month, or a couple months, I just asked her to stay after class. And I was just like, ‘You know, Zenaida, you know, that you're like, really intelligent, right?’ And I just was like, checking to make sure that she knew that. And I remember she's like, ‘No one ever told me that before.’ .And she started writing more and more, and it was like, the kindling was there. I just lit the fire, and it was phwew.

GONZÁLEZ: Zenaida writes about her life in English, Spanish, and Spanglish. She writes about how her and her ex-husband snuck out of their parents’ houses when they were teenagers to makeout on the beach and got attacked by fire ants. She writes more about the violence of their relationship. She writes about her mother and sisters. She writes notes to her children. Dave reads all of it.

ZENAIDA: He say, “You should write your story because your story is very beautiful. It’s hard. And other people, other students can relate.”

GONZÁLEZ: Around this time, there’s this magazine called The Change Agent. They describe themselves as “an adult education magazine for social justice”. They take the stories written by people just like Zenaida, immigrants learning English and processing trauma through writing, and turn them into lessons for ESOL teachers and students. In 2017, they put out a request for stories.

DAVE: And it was about making career decisions, like career pathways. The title or the name of the class that I teach is “ESOL for college and career readiness.” ...and so it just seemed to match up perfectly with the writing prompts.

GONZÁLEZ: Dave thinks of Zenaida. She’s definitely had her struggles with work and finding her career. And she’s ready to take her writing to the next level.

ZENAIDA: He talked to me about the Change Agent competition. And I got totally freaked out. I got stressed out. “Ay no no no! I can’t! I’m scared!”

GONZÁLEZ: That same scaredy girl pops out, the one who was afraid of the plane from Puerto Rico falling out of the sky. But just like then, she takes the leap with Dave’s help.

ZENAIDA: I wrote whatever I can in English and Spanish. ...So he helped me with the translation and editing.

DAVE: There were chunks of great stories, and they were kind of mixed all over the place. I helped her organize it.

GONZÁLEZ: After months of writing, editing, and rewriting, Zenaida submits her story to the Change Agent.

ZENAIDA: And I got the first place. So, I won the story in the Change Agent magazine.

GONZÁLEZ: Zenaida’s winning story is titled “Can I Still be Somebody?” It’s only 2 pages, but, before this, Zenaida couldn’t even fill out a job application in English, so it’s such a feat. The whole thing is beautiful, and you can read it on our website. But one of the parts that stands out is when she writes about her relationship with Dave. She writes: I told him, ‘You opened my eyes and found something good in me that I didn’t know about. You made me think about what I really want. One day, I’m going to write about my life—about all my struggles and my path to success.’

DAVE: In the process of taking stock of her life, she was able to gain some control over the confusion that she was stuck in. She was like, basically lost. And, you know, she was receiving benefits, she wasn't working, she was, her self esteem was really down. And she didn't really know what happened. Like she was blindsided by life.

GONZÁLEZ: Dave notices a change in Zenaida after she wins the competition, and Zenaida feels a shift in herself.

ZENAIDA: And I started to see the world another way. Then I traveled to Puerto Rico again. So I started to travel and to lose all the fear about traveling. Que se va a caer el avión o que me voy a morir. And all that crap.

GONZÁLEZ: She’s learning to let go of things that are harming her, like her fears and self doubt, and chase after the things she likes, like travelling to visit family. Soon, a position opens at The Providence Center as a Peer Recovery Specialist, someone who helps addicts and victims of abuse get the help they need. Zenaida applies and gets the job. Then, The Change Agent hears about Zenaida’s success and invites her to give a speech at their national conference in Boston. [file coming up with applause] Dave and Sandra go with her and record her speech, which she slays: ZENAIDA: Good evening. I started preparing to speak to you tonight. I look for inspiration on YouTube and found Oprah. In other words, I looked outside of myself. What I realize now is: an empowered woman can look inside of herself for inspiration. Look inside yourself. Tell your story, like I did. Sharing my story with you tonight has helped me to do that. Thank you so much [applause fades into narration].