Gonzalo Rahman

At eighteen years old, Gonzalo gets high almost every day, but only enough to listen to his music better and feel good. What is wrong with that? His red eyes and silly smirk tell the others what he has been up to. Yet, he does not care: everybody does it. He uses milder drugs than his friends. So…

Gonzalos's parents migrated from very different countries and met in Houston, where he was born. His mother came from Puerto Rico, and his father from Lebanon. Yet, they found themselves falling in love immediately, as if they have known each other from other past lives. Every wedding anniversary they told him the same story perhaps believing that if repeated over and over, it would become eventually true.

This mixed family lived in a mixed society where mixed was the norm: Mexicans, "Centros", Natives from all parts of the South, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, African Americans, and, of course, the Whites. In Houston, love overcame race way too often, so thousands of mixed race children have to find their own place in a segregated society. Gonzalo had been working on his cultural identity at home, in the streets, and in his school, where race and identity was the base for friendships, and therefore for staying safe and alive.

In Houston, as a "mixed race", he had plenty of company. Through his father he knew the Arab community. He kept close contact with his mother’s family, whom he visited already a few times in the Island. Thanks God, he has seen more than the Texas deserts. He has seen the green mountains, "El Yunque", eaten the “arroz con habichuelas”, and gotten soaked in the three o’clock “aguaceros” or rainfalls in San Juan. One of his favorite memories was to get in shorts and go outside to play in the rain with his cousins.

The rain in Puerto Rico was nothing like the rain in Texas. It was trans formative. For few minutes, --or hours, or days-- the rain changed drastically people's lifestyle. The tropical rainfalls in Puerto Rico are a force to be reckoned with. Still, Gonzalo loved the rain: its noise hitting the metal roofs; its smell mixing with the earth; its cooling effect in the air, and the miraculous double rainbows after it stopped. Many times in Texas, he dreamed of the rain, and he missed it.