If we flip the channels fast enough, we can turn almost anyone Puerto Rican, blurring black and white into Boricua. When we can’t find a good show with a Puerto Rican actor, we make our own, turning the knob selector on the TV as hard and fast as we can, watching all the brown faces click by until our mother yells from the kitchen for us to choose a show and stick to it.
Reruns all summer long because cable is brand new and only for the rich. Like everyone else, we want our MTV, but we never get it. We’re stuck with the same old summer vacation lineup of mornings filled with game shows and soap operas, of summer syndication afternoons and reruns of Fantasy Island, Gidget, Good Times, Happy Days, and Trapper John, M.D. Our mother says it’s important to see oneself on the big and little screens; she goes on and on about growing up watching Rita Moreno in West Side Story and Nichelle Nichols on Star Trek, and every Easter she makes us sit through The Greatest Story Ever Told to see José Ferrer play Herod the Roman tetrarch.
Satisfying our black side is easy enough. We’ve got George and Weezy, Fred and Lamont Sanford. We’ve got Webster, Tootie, Arnold, and Willis. We’ve got Rog, Dwayne, Rerun, and Dee. We’ve got the Evans family—Florida, James, Michael, Thelma, and J.J. a.k.a. Kid Dy-no-mite, but we have to work to find the Boricuas. We collect Puerto Rican actors the way other kids collect comics, valued all the more because they’re so rare. The Boricuas are hard to find and easy to miss. Cast to blend in, they play Asians, Italians, Jews, Mexicans, and Romans—almost anything but themselves. Sure, we know we can find plenty on channels 41 and 47, on Univision and Telemundo where all of the shows are in Spanish, but that’s a language neither one of us speaks.
“Don’t give up,” I tell my sister who’s taking her turn at turning.
We sift through reruns of old shows, hoping for Antonio Fargas on Starsky and Hutch or Erik Estrada on CHiPs. We can usually glimpse Gregory Sierra on Sanford and Son or Barney Miller. Last week we found him on All in the Family, playing a militant Jew who gets blown up by a car bomb the moment he steps out of Archie Bunker’s house. The men are easier to find than the women—unless you count Maria on Sesame Street, but we’re too old for shows that are meant for babies.
What we really want is Irene Cara in Fame or Charo on Love Boat, but my sister lands on The Electric Company and we get Rita Moreno instead. We don’t want the woman our mother grew up watching, but she’s everywhere we turn. She’s the Siamese concubine Tuptim in the King and I, she’s the cleaning lady on The Cosby Show who works in the hospital where Dr. Huxtable delivers all the babies, and she’s here on PBS all summer long. But we don’t need a new abuela. We buried our grandmother two years ago and there’s no going back.
It’s too soon to settle so we keep playing channel roulette. Finding Boricuas requires a careful hand and a discerning eye. We cross our fingers and hope for someone good. “It’s all in the wrist,” I say, determined to do better with my turn at the knob.
“Stop here!” my sister says when we hear the theme song to Love Boat. I step back in time to see Charo’s face encircled by the life preserver. “Titi Charo!” my sister whispers, happy with the day’s find.
We’ve seen Charo on more episodes of Love Boat than we can count and we like to pretend that she is our famous, flamboyant aunt. She plays a Mexican woman, Angelina Patricia Ruiz Inez Lopez or “April” Lopez, who returns to the Pacific Princess again and again, morphing from stowaway to singer to language tutor to nanny. There’s the one where she’s hired as the ship’s entertainment to sing during dinner, but she really wants to be a cruise director. At night she performs in a slinky silver off-the-shoulder dress with a thigh high slit and layers of fringe, and during the day she shadows Julie McCoy to learn the ropes of cruise directing, and ruins Bingo and shuffleboard in the process. Then there’s the one where Gopher falls asleep while watching an old movie and dreams that it’s the 1940s and the Pacific Princess is carrying soldiers to France for war, and Charo plays a Brazilian spy and double agent. Today’s is the one where she’s a stowaway seeking a career in show business. Dressed in a white peasant blouse and a long red flouncy skirt, she’s all big hair, big lips, big accent, and big personality. She boards the ship with an arm full of souvenirs, floppy hats, and sombreros to sell, but when Gopher turns his back, she runs and hides in the housekeeper’s closet. We lie on our stomachs, stretched out in front of the TV on the floor in our living room, and watch, rapt, as Captain Stubing, Julie, and the housekeeper discover her in the laundry cart, buried beneath a pile of the ship’s bedsheets.
Though she looks nothing like either our aunt or our mother, that doesn’t stop us from believing we could be related—Puerto Ricans come in all colors and shades. We clamor to claim her as kin. If Titi Charo came over to watch us, we’d be sure to have fun. There would be music and dancing and cuchi cuchi. We’d trade her for our real aunt any day, swapping out the titi who threatens us with her chancletas, who only leaves her apartment twice a month on the first and fifteenth to pick up her check, and whose adult son still lives with her because he’s too lazy to find a place of his own. We’d prefer a titi like Charo who actually liked us, who didn’t mind the way we looked, who didn’t complain that we get darker and darker every year. Instead of teaching us to play the guitar and sing, our real titi sucks away our summer break, convincing our mother to bring us inside every day from noon to one when she says the sun is highest in the sky. She tells our mother this will protect us from the hole in the ozone but warns us that we’ll never find husbands and that no one will ever want us if we turn into negritas. Whenever she comes over to watch us, she ridicules our hair, calling us mini Stevie Wonders. She pulls the beads and the foil from the tips of our braids, unravels our cornrows all the way to our scalps, and presses our hair straight and flat with her hot comb. She pops us with her chancleta any time we fidget, pinches our cheeks, and warns us that we’ll have to be smart because we’ll never be beautiful. This is not a thing Titi Charo would ever stoop to say.
After Captain Stubing puts her off in Mazatlán, Titi Charo/April Lopez sneaks back on again and convinces Julie to let her sing. Free of her flounces and dressed in a strapless lace-topped black evening gown, she sits on a stool and leads the band into a song that shows off her guitar skills before leaping to her feet, undulating like a belly dancer and shimmying around the dance floor, charming all of the passengers with cuchi cuchi effervescence.
The phone rings and our mother yells for us to turn down the TV. She plucks the receiver from the cradle and can’t get a word in for a full five minutes, so we know she’s talking to our aunt.
“No, they ran away this morning,” she says. “I woke up and they were gone. No note. Not a clue. Since I finally got some time to myself, I’m watching soap operas.” We flip over and stare when we hear the fib. Our mother looks over the kitchen counter and winks. She laughs and says, “Of course I’m joking!” and we snicker to think our aunt could be so gullible. “The twins are right here, they’re watching TV. Love Boat. An episode with Charo. No, not Chano. Charo. Yes you do. Sure, you remember. She sang on Merv Griffin, and we used to watch her on Ed Sullivan. You know, the guitarrista? Yes, that’s right. The white woman from Spain.”
