When I was one year old, rainbows came in black and white… but luckily for me, Polaroids were already in color. It was 1978, and my family was still living in the house where I was born. Many things we now take for granted didn’t exist back then. Thanks to my father’s passion for photography, I have proof that there was color back then, and I’m not that old—after all, we did have “modern” things like color cameras.
There’s a saying in the Dominican Republic that implies a person is really old: someone might tell that person that when they were little, rainbows still came in black and white. I used to say that, too. Now, as I look back to when I was one year old, I realize how easily that saying could apply to me and my childhood years. By the time my kids read this, it’s going to seem like it was the dinosaur era.
Even though life was lived in full color when I was one year old, you can imagine things were pretty rudimentary in the Caribbean of the late seventies. While I can’t remember much from that time, I’ve heard stories about what our lives were like back then.
My father was still a civil engineering student at Universidad Autónoma of Santo Domingo, which would later become my alma mater. He drove a chocolate-brown 1968 Volkswagen Beetle that he had gotten the year before, and he would let me “drive” it sometimes. By then, I had been walking for about two months and could say many things. It’s funny to me how my three kids hit similar milestones at that age.
Since I don’t have my own memories of when I was one year old, here’s a list of seven things that were happening as I turned one in 1978:
- My mother was only 23 years old and already the mother of two girls: my sister, who was four at the time, and me.
- My grandmother Amparo, who had been a surrogate mother for my mom since she married my dad at 17, was 53 years old and the clear head of the household.
- Besides my older sister, I then had another sister who is only three months younger than I am. Growing up, when people asked our age, we would say we were “twins” because for nine months each year, we shared the same age. Yes, my dad had two women pregnant at the same time. Can you imagine?!
- It was an election year, and in two weeks, a new government was taking over, ending Balaguer’s 12-year era—the bloodiest in the history of the Dominican Republic after Trujillo’s 30-year rule. The youngest, smartest, most educated, and progressive minds of the time had been murdered or had disappeared forever.
- Phone numbers were only five digits. My father remembers this was his first telephone, installed in the early seventies. He even remembers the number: 2-24-56.
- My grandmother was the ultimate entrepreneur, and one of her enterprises was organizing tours for the neighborhood. She would rent a bus, plan a trip to a river or the beach, and charge a fare that would turn a profit for her.
- I was discovering the world—a curious child from the very beginning, already starting to name the things around me.
