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Dispatches from Puerto Nowhere
That I was born Puerto Rican was happenstance, but that I have no connection to what it means is no accident. My grandparents made conscious decisions and so did my father as part of the first generation born here in the States. And none of it bothered me until recently, which is probably why I can’t quite put my finger on any of this. I’m still grappling with what I’ve lost and how I can miss something I’ve never had.
Robert Lopez’s grandfather Sixto was born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, in 1904, immigrating to the United States in the 1920s, where he lived in a racially proportioned apartment complex in East New York, Brooklyn, until his death in 1987. The family’s efforts to assimilate within their new homeland led to the near complete erasure of their heritage, culture, and language within two generations.
Little is known of Sixto—he may have been a longshoreman, a painter, or a boxer, but was most likely a longshoreman—or why he originally decided to leave Puerto Rico, other than that he was a meticulously slow eater who played the standup keyboard and guitar, and enjoyed watching baseball. Through family recollection, the constant banter volleyed across nets within Brooklyn’s diverse tennis community, as well as an imagined fabulist history drawn from Sixto’s remembered traits, in Dispatches From Puerto Nowhere: An American Story of Assimilation and Erasure, Robert Lopez paints a compassionate portrait of family that attempts to bridge the past to the present, and re-claim a heritage threatened by assimilation and erasure.
Robert Lopez’s grandfather Sixto was born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, in 1904, immigrating to the United States in the 1920s, where he lived in a racially proportioned apartment complex in East New York, Brooklyn, until his death in 1987. The family’s efforts to assimilate within their new homeland led to the near complete erasure of their heritage, culture, and language within two generations.
Little is known of Sixto—he may have been a longshoreman, a painter, or a boxer, but was most likely a longshoreman—or why he originally decided to leave Puerto Rico, other than that he was a meticulously slow eater who played the standup keyboard and guitar, and enjoyed watching baseball. Through family recollection, the constant banter volleyed across nets within Brooklyn’s diverse tennis community, as well as an imagined fabulist history drawn from Sixto’s remembered traits, in Dispatches From Puerto Nowhere: An American Story of Assimilation and Erasure, Robert Lopez paints a compassionate portrait of family that attempts to bridge the past to the present, and re-claim a heritage threatened by assimilation and erasure.
- GenresMemoirNonfiction
224 pages, Hardcover
First published September 13, 2022
6 people are currently reading
249 people want to read
About the author
Robert Lopez
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
March 24, 2023
“This is perhaps the greatest tragedy of being a person on the world, that we all become a story for someone else to tell until no one is left to tell it firsthand, if it’s told at all.�
My thoughts at Chicago Review of Books
My thoughts at Chicago Review of Books
May 4, 2023
reading this book was like taking a guided meditation by a man who is very bothered by not talking to his grandfather very much who has some sort of compulsion about tennis shots. enjoyable
October 6, 2023
Maybe 3.5? I have a hard time with books by men, especially memoirs. However, a lot of this resonated with me, in particular the moments where Lopez expresses guilt and feelings of loss about language and assimilation. His romanticization of the idea of knowing one’s history and family lore spoke to me as well, but in a way that was more uncomfortable for me to sit with.
April 30, 2023
Amusing but repetitive. He's half Puerto Rican but doesn't speak Spanish; was called a racial slur in grade school; plays tennis; and wonders if he should have learned Spanish along the way. Would be fun to chat with over a beer.
August 30, 2024
I picked up this book hoping to learn more about Puerto Rican life in America, but I don't think I was prepared for the assimilated-American perspective it offered (I probably should've read the synopsis more carefully). But perhaps that's the whole point. It's rare to find a book that feels simultaneously relatable and unrelatable.
As someone who grew up very close to her grandfather and lost him at a similar age as the author, I found it difficult to process that the author never had a real conversation with his own grandfather. It astonishes me how some people grow up so isolated from their ancestral stories. I know this is true for many, but it makes me curious about how one can be so uncurious about their roots.
At the same time, I found the book relatable because, like the author, I cannot speak my ethnic mother tongue, even though I grew up in my home country, just in a different region from my ancestral village. It's something I still struggle with, and it's a feeling that never truly goes away. Yet, learning the language now doesn't feel quite the same.
Overall, it was a decent, three â� s.
As someone who grew up very close to her grandfather and lost him at a similar age as the author, I found it difficult to process that the author never had a real conversation with his own grandfather. It astonishes me how some people grow up so isolated from their ancestral stories. I know this is true for many, but it makes me curious about how one can be so uncurious about their roots.
At the same time, I found the book relatable because, like the author, I cannot speak my ethnic mother tongue, even though I grew up in my home country, just in a different region from my ancestral village. It's something I still struggle with, and it's a feeling that never truly goes away. Yet, learning the language now doesn't feel quite the same.
Overall, it was a decent, three â� s.
October 15, 2023
Thoroughly enjoyed this book. I listened to the audio version and finished in about one week. I have always been anti assimilation. I think that differences should be acknowledged and celebrated. The same way each ingredient in a stew contributes to its complex and amazing flavor.
Mr. Lopez touched upon the complexity of race and identity in America. It is also very interesting to see how Latino/Hispanic culture has been viewed throughout the last 40 or so years. A population which was recently forced to erase its culture is getting a moment to shine. I predict that in 10 years the Spanish language will be spoken by most Americans, latino or not.
Mr. Lopez touched upon the complexity of race and identity in America. It is also very interesting to see how Latino/Hispanic culture has been viewed throughout the last 40 or so years. A population which was recently forced to erase its culture is getting a moment to shine. I predict that in 10 years the Spanish language will be spoken by most Americans, latino or not.
April 8, 2024
A really beautiful collection of reminisces about the consequences of assimilation that is not so much resentful as reflective. It is an evaluation of self, development, and experience, that draws to a strange sort of contentment and self assured resolution that still itches a little at the edges. I welcomed this point of view that I'm sure will resonate with the second and third generations who may have not felt themselves heard in a way vastly different than those of people closer to the culture that is just as different and valid as theirs as being vastly different than what is seen as the 'majority' perspective.
May 27, 2024
As a reader, one of my favorite nonfiction forms is the braided essay. I love the recurring themes, surprise juxtapositions, the sense of being on the journey inside the skin of the author as they make their way toward some new understanding of their place in relationship to the subject matter and the world. Dispatches from Puerto Nowhere is all this and more: a braided essay on steroids in the best of ways. With wit, insight, and vulnerability, each vignette casts light on a different facet of Lopez’s identity and invites the reader to see a variety of issues—race, immigration, assimilation, family relationships, and even tennis—through a fresh lens. Lopez is a masterful writer.
December 22, 2023
I decided to read this on a trip to Puerto Rico to spread my Abuelo’s ashes. I thought it would be fitting as Lopez’s family’s assimilation is very similar to mine with some small differences. While his father was discouraged from speaking Spanish at home, mine was encouraged. I grew up with a few Hispanic dishes but not many. We celebrated one Hispanic holiday. The culture wasn’t really passed down to me and neither was the language. I thought I was alone in this so it’s nice to know someone relates.
April 8, 2024
While it is often overlooked or forgotten, many families of all ethnicities had their home cultures and languages erased by assimilation here in the US. I identified a lot with that part of the book since I feel like I wish I had known my ancestors better and knew the culture they didn't pass on.
But the tennis part had me snoozing, so I couldn't say I really liked this collection of dispatches. Also started to get repetitive after a while, and nothing is worse than repetitive stories of watching tennis.
But the tennis part had me snoozing, so I couldn't say I really liked this collection of dispatches. Also started to get repetitive after a while, and nothing is worse than repetitive stories of watching tennis.
October 2, 2024
The writer's grandfather was from Puerto Rico, but the writer doesn't speak Spanish and this seems to weigh pretty heavily on him. What I don't understand is the obsession with one particular family member who he didn't have much of a relationship with anyway while he was still alive. Lots of interesting things to think about here though, like the connection between language and (ethnic/ancestral) identity, what it means to "be" something (in this case, Puerto Rican), race, how families (often fail to) share anything about the past with younger generations.
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April 28, 2024Actually yes, girls also got called “spic� in the tri-state area in the 1980s.
(And that’s where I stopped reading. Growing up and again writing this memoir, there were just too many people the author didn’t take the trouble to talk to. It’s all internal experience without striking me as having sufficient depth.)
(And that’s where I stopped reading. Growing up and again writing this memoir, there were just too many people the author didn’t take the trouble to talk to. It’s all internal experience without striking me as having sufficient depth.)
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October 24, 2024Mostly I don’t feel respected by the author. The reader, we just have to take the short popcorn of disconnected rants. No direction. No cumulative meaning. Stuff That the author thinks now, and now, and now, but more shrugs and memories and episodes that amount to shrugs, a lot of maybes. I hacked it but I can’t recommend it.
December 28, 2024
Such a punch to my heart - I resonates so much with Lopez and his rumination on identity. I also really loved the sort of vignette style format this book used. It helped to balance the dark and the sad with the levity and the thoughtful which meant you can take it in tiny sips.
October 25, 2024
Not expecting much, this book definitely surprised me. It spoke to me so much deeper than I had expected.
September 19, 2023
This book is about identity and yearning of childhood that could have been but wasn't. Robert Lopez was raised by his parents strictly as an American culturally, speaking English at home and living as your average American. Perhaps his parents wanted to protect he and his sister from others looking down on their children for being different and allow them to become the best they could be without the burden of another culture. The result however, is an emptiness that Lopez has, he feels like he missed out on experiencing another whole culture that his father was part of, the Hispanic, Puerto Rican culture. He yearns for the music, the food, the speaking of Spanish. But it's too late now to embrace a part of him that was never part of him. He feels like an outsider when people speak Spanish and he can't understand what they are saying and gets tired of telling the world that he has an Spanish last name but doesn't speak Spanish. He has no history, no past, no culture, no identity that he wishes he had. It is always better to Speak two languages than just one and it is better to know where you come from, it gives you identity and a rock to hold on to.
August 14, 2023
I read this book because it was written by one of my professors in my MFA program, who also happens to be my thesis advisor. I'd never read any of his work prior, though now I'm tempted to, in part because I was pretty disappointed by this book. The title and cover were captivating, but the content itself is repetitive and not very stimulating. I even found myself getting annoyed by how small the font was, yet it was such a long book. I enjoyed the tennis connection, though also found myself confused by it because I don't play tennis or know much about the sport. I just feel like he doesn't even know what he want because he goes back and forth about not feeling Latino but wanting to be and not knowing Spanish and wanting to learn but also not caring enough to. It's like make up your mind dude!! Also, I don't necessarily appreciate the fact that he mentioned me in this book...
2.5 stars
2.5 stars
February 27, 2025
TLDR: WE WERE ALL ROOTING FOR YOU!!
I had high hopes for this book and was really looking forward to reading something that took on assimilation in America, so this was really disappointing. The author is repetitive and apathetic, and he doesn't really invest much time or thought in the topics he sets out to explore There were definitely moments that were funny, profound, and touching, but just about as many moments were off-putting, frustrating, or boring. He seems proud of how little he cares about anything and how much he dislikes other people.
I had high hopes for this book and was really looking forward to reading something that took on assimilation in America, so this was really disappointing. The author is repetitive and apathetic, and he doesn't really invest much time or thought in the topics he sets out to explore There were definitely moments that were funny, profound, and touching, but just about as many moments were off-putting, frustrating, or boring. He seems proud of how little he cares about anything and how much he dislikes other people.
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