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Throughout my lifetime, the US government has been in a permanent state of war. Over a hundred overt military campaigns of varying degrees have been undertaken in the name of peace; and who knows how many covert operations have been launched. As a Puerto Rican child, my very identity from the beginning has been intimately intertwined with a legacy of war. My citizenship is the direct result of the Spanish-American War, which converted my country into a colony of the United States. The year I was born, 1952, the United States was embroiled in both the Cold War and the Korean War. As a preteen, reports about the Cuban Missile Crisis and the action at the Bay of Pigs were interspersed with fears of nuclear war on the evening news. During my teen years, civil rights conflicts erupted on the domestic arena, as I watched Black Panthers being shot in their home, on television screen. Growing up in Los Angeles, I also found myself smack in the midst of the Watts Riots, and later, as a witness to violent police attacks on Chicana and Chicano activists who had congregated at Laguna Park, after a peaceful march along Whittier Boulevard. As a young mother, radio reports of the Vietnam War comingled with the lullabies I sang my babies.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-137-38212-2_8

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