Free When I Was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago

said the experts will give us free food and toothbrushes and things ... and we can get breakfast every day except Sunday ...”
    “Calm down,” she told me. “We’ll go, don’t worry.”
    On Saturday morning the yard in front of the centro comunal filled with parents and their children. You could tell the experts from San Juan from the ones that came from the Jun-ited Estates because the Americanos wore ties with their white shirts and tugged at their collars and wiped their foreheads with crumpled handkerchiefs. They hadn’t planned for children, and the men from San Juan convinced a few older girls to watch the little ones outside so that the meeting could proceed with the least amount of disruption. Small children refused to leave their mothers’ sides and screeched the minute one of the white-shirted men came near them. Some women sat on the folding chairs at the rear of the room nursing, a cloth draped over their baby’s face so that the experts would not be upset at the sight of a bare breast. There were no fathers. Most of them worked seven days a week, and anyway, children and food were woman’s work.
    “Negi, take the kids outside and keep them busy until this is over.”
    “But Mami ...”
    “Do as I say.”
    She pressed her way to a chair in the middle of the room and sat facing the experts. I hoisted Edna on my shoulder and grabbed Alicia’s hand. Delsa pushed Norma out in front of her. They ran into the yard and within minutes had blended into a group of children their age. Hector found a boy to chase him around a tree, and Alicia crawled to a sand puddle where she and other toddlers smeared one another with the fine red dirt. I sat at the door, Edna on my lap, and tried to keep one eye on my sisters and brother and another on what went on inside.
    The experts had colorful charts on portable easels. They introduced each other to the group, thanked the Estado Libre Asociado for the privilege of being there, and then took turns speaking. The first expert opened a large suitcase. Inside there was a huge set of teeth with pink gums.
    “Ay Dios Santo, qué cosa tan fea,” said a woman as she crossed herself. The mothers laughed and mumbled among themselves that yes, it was ugly. The expert stretched his lips into a smile and pulled a large toothbrush from under the table. He used ornate Spanish words that we assumed were scientific talk for teeth, gums, and tongue. With his giant brush, he polished each tooth on the model, pointing out the proper path of the bristles on the teeth.
    “If I have to spend that much time on my teeth,” a woman whispered loud enough for everyone to hear, “I won’t get anything done around the house.” The room buzzed with giggles, and the expert again spread his lips, took a breath, and continued his demonstration.
    “At the conclusion of the meeting,” he said, “you will each receive a toothbrush and a tube of paste for every member of your family.”
    “¿ Hasta pa’ los mellaos?” a woman in the back of the room asked, and everyone laughed.
    “If they have no teeth, it’s too late for them, isn’t it,” the expert said through his own clenched teeth. The mothers shrieked with laughter, and the expert sat down so that an Americano with red hair and thick glasses could tell us about food.
    He wiped his forehead and upper lip as he pulled up the cloth covering one of the easels to reveal a colorful chart of the major food groups.
    “La buena nutrition is muy importante para los niños.”
    In heavily accented, hard to understand Castilian Spanish he described the necessity of eating portions of each of the foods on his chart every day. There were carrots and broccoli, iceberg lettuce, apples, pears, and peaches. The bread was sliced into a perfect square, unlike the long loaves Papi brought home from a bakery in San Juan, or the round pan de manteca Mami bought at Vitin’s store. There was no rice on the chart, no beans, no salted codfish. There were big