I am Black and Puerto Rican. What does that mean? I am caught in a crossroads.

I have only been to Puerto Rico once in my entire life and that was over 30 years ago when I was a very small child. My father is from Ponce. He came to America when he was about 30 years old, and made a life for himself.

He was a good father to his children, and he raised us to love our heritage. He shared his cultural richness with us and filled our hearts with pride to know that we belonged to a particular ethnic group.I have tried to instill this sense of pride in my daughter who never knew her grandfather.

As a young girl, I had a very difficult time speaking English clearly. I had a lisp, was tongue-tied and spoke broken Spanish. As a result, my mother sent me to speech therapy classes. Therapy started at about age five, and ended around the age of nine.

The saddest memory I had of my therapy years were my mother's insane instructions not to speak Spanish ever again. The therapist increased my mother's fears of assimilation. She was convinced that darker Puerto Ricans leaned too heavily on speaking Spanish here in America, refusing to speak English at all and thereby becoming second-class citizens.

Every time I spoke a Spanish word she would smack my mouth. If I cried out for 'helado' when the Ice Cream man came around she would punish me by smacking my mouth and feeding my younger siblings, but not me.

I was the only daughter out of 5 boys and my mother had great hopes for me. She feared I would disappear into nothingness and not achieve success if I did not gain command of the English language early.

Now that I look back on my mother's ethnic insanity...I am angered that I now speak in broken Spanish with a vocabulary of a five year old. I am, however, eternally grateful that she had the foreknowledge to understand how valuable a clear concise speaking voice would be in our society.

As a result of her vigilant desire for me to master the English language, I have become not only a singer, an on-the-air radio personality and disc jockey, but later worked as an Advertising Account Executive, sales specialist, collections specialist and telemarketing manager. All jobs requiring a consummate command of the English language.

When people look at me now and say...What are you? What nationality are you? I simply smile and say that I am an American with Puerto Rican Flavor. Most people find that statement amusing. If I had one wish

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