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Raquel Cepeda
Atria Books, New York, 2013, 215pp., $25.00,
ISBN: 978-1451635867 (hardcover)
Timely and extraordinarily original, Raquel Cepeda's ambitious first book draws on the science of ancestral DNA testing to examine what it means to be Black, Native, Dominican and American in an allegedly post-racial society. Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina widens the scope of Latin@ studies by forging novel venues of exploration into history and the social and biological sciences, among other academic disciplines. With humor, heart and a streetwise vernacular that evokes the lyrical styling of Junot Díaz, Cepeda challenges us to think critically about how the construction and deployment of the term "Latino" by the census and mass media shape presumptions of who is Latin@ in the US cultural imaginary.
An esteemed journalist and documentary filmmaker, Cepeda now shines as a charismatic hip-hop storyteller. Like an urban griot , she chronicles the past and present, imparts insight into the future and charms audiences with colorful prose that flows from her pen like spoken word poetry. Born in the United States to Dominican parents, sent to Paraíso, Dominican Republic intermittently to live with her grandparents and raised by an abusive father in New York City at the dawn of the hip-hop movement, Raquel Cepeda travels many worlds. She embodies the sort of historic migrations, cultural exchanges and overlapping diasporas that have shaped the Americas.
The beginning of her two-part memoir reads like a fractured coming-of-age tale rendered from an impressive archive of recollections, and supplemented with interviews of her estranged parents. Rememory proves a useful literary technique in describing how the energetic presence of African and Native entities, which Cepeda comes...