LISTEN TO HER ORAL HISTORY

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He just loves the Beatles. He has every single one of their albums. He has all the compilations--which is crazy to me because if you have all the albums what do you need the compilations for? But he wants to have everything by the Beatles and I don´t know what the influence of the Beatles was in Puerto Rico--like if people listened to the Beatles but I have this picture of him where he´s wearing kind of this sweater and these sharkskin pants or something real tight and that´s tacky nowadays but cool then and this Beatles wig and he has his guitar and he´s just looking up this way and it´s--hilarious to me. And then he has another picture of him with the guitar on his back--like he´s the traveling guitar guy, you know. He has this really thick accent but he´s been here over 30 years but his accent is still really thick. And he´s like--"Jesterdeh, lof was soch en easy gem to pleh..." And it´s so sweet, you know, and I told him--Yeah, I like that song--and he went and got me an album and we listened to it together. This is when I was 14 and it was cool and he gave me the history for every album and he goes--"Listen to this part right here..." and he would sing it to me in his thick Spanish [accent]. It was so cute.

And when I turned 16, I stayed over his house. He lived in the suburbs--in Yonkers. And I´m getting out of bed and he´s coming out of the bathroom in his bata and his hair is sticking up and his chanclas and his beard all grown in and he sees me and he brightens up and he´s like "Seezteen Candels" and he just sang me the whole song and I was like--Aw Pop--´cause, you know, I was a teenager and I thought it was so corny-- ¡Hay ya! Stop! Stop! And he sang me the whole song. He would not stop and I think about it now and it is so sweet, it´s such a cute dad moment. He took me to Red Lobster that night. So it was crazy cool and it´s like my dad is this interesting barometer for me of how American culture influences Puerto Ricans from over there. My mom is the other end of the spectrum. She´s very Americanized. She grew up over here, mostly speaks English, listens to R&B--so their worlds clash.