My teenage years were punctuated with as much fact as fiction about my family's history. I knew the prejudices I experienced in my own life, I knew inklings of stories that never really got fleshed out until I was older, or that I couldn't bear to listen to anymore, and then I had my imagination.

I read Maus, for example, and imagined myself as that writer, peeling away layers of horrors, and coming to terms with the unimaginable. I read about the Holocaust like I read a family photo album. I didn't know what to relate to me, but I feared that it was more than I knew. How could I, born and raised in the US and developed in the decade of greed, ever know what it meant for me to have what I had, and be where I was?

How could I hear the words of my parents and grandparents, with tears in their eyes, as they expressed their pride at where our lineage had progressed? I was both reaching for adulthood and trying to make sure I kept true to the dreams mi familia escaped poverty and communism for at the same time.

And then there was education. As a teacher, my mother felt that education was the key to everything. I would go to the right schools, get immaculate grades, do wonderful things, and be the shiniest of trophies. A trophy son, I would be called, if we had any money. I would go to Harvard and become the Cuban Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic Hispanic President of the United States. That's what I repeated to everyone at ten years old, because that's what I was told.

Of course, I'd have to get through high school, but that was nothing but a given. I could not have been more wrong.

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