Pink Boots and a Machete Read Free Page B

attached to the throat and displayed by means of a flexible rod of cartilage that the lizard can swing downward and forward, revealing a brightly colored patch of skin. Males display their dewlap during courtship and when defending territory. This display is often accompanied by a series of head bobs and push-ups. Years later I would observe similar behavior in overly muscular males at the gym.
    Though I thought of myself as a tomboy and was hardly squeamish about worms and lizards, I was also very much a girlie-girl who loved pink and shopping. To this day I am a walking contradiction, setting off for remote jungles carrying pink boots, a little black dress (should an unforeseen occasion arise), and a machete. A budding fashionista even at four, I would capture the little lizards and latch them, still living, onto my earlobes as earrings. Most girls wouldn’t touch them; me, I thought they completed the outfit.
    Despite my adventurous spirit and the imagination that would transport me to distant places, my mom dismissed my desire to experience the natural world. I’ll never forget at age seven asking if I could join the Girl Scouts. I could already see myself rubbing sticks together, learning to identify bear tracks, and watching the stars outside my tent. But Mom said no. Joining the Girl Scouts would no doubt lead to camping, and that, my mom said, was far too dangerous. Before I could earn myfirst badge, I was officially a failed Girl Scout. Instead, I was to go back to the piano and practice for an upcoming recital—a most grueling weekly task for an outdoorsy child. And when finally released from my sentence on the piano bench, I would need to get into my tights and leotard for ballet class. My mom, the parole officer overseeing my after-school activities, couldn’t possibly have dreamed that I would one day lead expeditions to the most distant, remote, and unexplored jungles in the world. God forbid if I had dirtied my leotard.
    It should have come as no surprise to her that I followed my Girl Scout dreams right into the River of Darkness. As much as my mom might hate to admit it, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Though in our case, the fruit was a mango.
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    Seeking political asylum, my mom left Cuba at the age of 20 with literally nothing more than the clothes she wore. She was a refugee venturing to a strange land in which a different language was spoken, with no idea of what she’d do once she got here. I often ask my mom to tell me the story, despite having heard it a thousand times. Each time, she vividly describes stepping onto the boat, holding her gaze toward the water, swearing never to look back at the island she loved. She was, in my eyes, an explorer, one I greatly admired. However sheltered she’d been as a girl, she would now have to provide for herself, her younger sister, and her parents. She had grit, the kind I like to think made its way to me.
    Despite raising me to become a traditional woman, my mom had earlier tried breaking that mold herself. Hardworking and resilient, she had been accepted to medical school in Cuba in 1965, the very year Cuba’s sole political party was renamed the Cuban Communist Party, but she was expelled before she could hold her first scalpel when she refused to sign papers professing loyalty to Fidel Castro’s regime. Under that regime, her father and brother had been jailed without explanation, her opinions had been suppressed, and her sense of security had been destroyed. Even at the expense of her dream, my mom refused to sign away her freedom. I think she always hoped I would follow in her never taken footsteps and become a doctor myself. In the end, I did become a doctor but, as I am reminded by my cousins, “not the normal kind.”
    My upbringing itself was not traditional with a mom-and-pop scenario. I was raised in Miami by not one but three very opinionated and headstrong women: my mother, whom I call Mami; my