Parents of sonia manzano3/3/2024 ![]() She said, “No, no, no, you are all poor.” I told my mother. One day, I told my fourth-grade teacher that we were middle class. Of course, my life wasn’t as bad as my parents had it in Puerto Rico during the Depression. We had a police lock on our front door-a metal bar that ran from the top though a slot in the middle of the door to the floor. Our neighborhood wasn’t particularly safe. He made good money thanks to my mother, Isidra, who was a garment worker and had encouraged him to join a union as she had. He was the foreman of workers who applied tar to the roofs of apartment buildings. The stress at home was horrible, but I had hope. My older sister had one tiny room, and I shared a small room with my two younger brothers. My mother had a clothesline out one window and in another. To me, from our window, it looked like theater-a show they would put on over and over again. When my uncle dropped her off, my parents argued in the street. One of my earliest memories is my father coming home drunk and tearing up our apartment because my mother wasn’t home. I liked the predictability of the train’s rumble every 10 minutes and watching my mother get off the train and wave to me. We lived on the fourth floor, and the elevated subway line ran past our windows. I spent my early childhood in a tenement building at 3858 Third Ave. Manzano in a 1968 graduation photo from the then-High School of Performing Arts in New York City.
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