During my season of migration to the north, did my identity change? Imbued with new vocabulary, with articulation, am I no longer, as Jennie would put it, from the block? 
I collect pebbles of knowledge; I praise dead poets that have walked down mean streets, shopped in Bodegas for dreams and are now in obituaries.

As I wiki this and wiki that, I unify string theory, particle physics, dead arts, the many hells and heavens and the lack thereof. Does this change me? I have experienced the beautiful taste of edible bread from a dumpster; I have written my memoirs of a dumpster hunter.

I cannot accept that it is a sin to want more than that. I have witnessed street corners and stool loitering to the beat of African drums. I have held non-green paper that could only be used to buy food that would so quickly disappear; the green paper disappearing up my mother’s nose or into my stepfather’s veins. He thought he could fly once, another dream bought at the corner bodega.

And now? When I’m hungry, I reach into my pocket for a plastic magnet; I feed the hunger of my memory, satiated with consumption, content as my mind is engorged. For the Lord said, “Man cannot live on rice and beans alone.”

Why is it argued that the addition of B.A., M.A., PhD, subtracts from me the Boricua, Nuyorican identity?  I chose this lifestyle to free myself from labor; my hands carved yet callous free. 
I sound like a white boy, they say, my own family classifying me under a new category, changing my indemnity. I feel cursed, a strange type of brujeria, witchcraft, chickens running about headless, the guillotine cutting away but it can’t touch my DNA, my rolling “Rs.” Mami, todavia me entiendes, verdad? Mom, you still understand me, right?

The Tainos in me, the conquistadores in me, they are fused charged particles making the me of rolling “Rs,” a poetic voice, a once defeated mind pushed away by ‘the block’ during my season of migration to the north, speak back: I am Boricua, Nuyorican, American expat in this land of calm mornings, in my dynamic state, praising my ancestors and the dead poets standing at the gate seeing the me that no one else can see and I being at last proud to be.