By Victor Greto
It’s weird what some people think is their business.
“A cook I worked with once said he didn’t like me going out with a Hispanic,” says Heather Jones. “He said he’d punch my stomach if I got pregnant.”
Heather doesn’t bat an eye.
“I put in a complaint, and he never bothered me again,” the 25-year-old says.
Her live-in boyfriend, Cesar Taveras, Jr., 23, also doesn’t blink. In fact, his mouth subtly curls into the hint of a smile.
“I try to act cool when I hear things like that,” the first-generation Dominican-American says.
Sometimes you just can’t help being cool, as a couple, or as an individual trying to reconcile starkly different cultures.
Cesar has known his future bride since both attended Parkway Middle School. In the 7th grade, they dated for two weeks; in 8th grade, for three months.
“We must have gotten into an argument,” Cesar says, “I started dating someone else.”
In 9th grade they didn’t talk. In 10th grade, Heather was playing “truth or dare” with a friend, who asked her who she wanted to spend the rest of her life with.
Out of the blue, “I said Cesar,” she says. “Weird, huh?”
But cool.
Since then, they’ve been together. They moved out of their parents’ homes this past March to live together in a cramped Tamarac apartment. They plan to marry next year, and they can hardly wait.
It’s all part of Cesar’s and Heather’s determination to have a family.
Forget the stereotypes of the strong Hispanic family and the more fragmented “white American” families.
In this case, it’s the other way around.
Cesar longs for a family, and Heather, her two sisters, her parents Bonnie and Pat Jones, and their extended family back in Ohio, fit the bill nicely.
Heather’s father, Pat Jones, was raised in Ohio, “from a very close-knit, extended family,” Pat says. “The family owned property by a lake, and on Friday nights, we’d all go down to the lake, stay and fish, together. We were a true extended family.”
In contrast, Cesar says: “My dad is a very quiet man. He pulled away from his family.”
Cesar, born in Brooklyn, spent the first few years of his life in the Dominican Republic, then moved to South Florida permanently.
The family moved a lot, bouncing from Florida to New York a couple of times.
“A lot of my childhood I missed with my parents,” Cesar’s father says, which is why, after the brief stint in the Dominican Republic, he decided to stay in Florida when he started a family.
Even so, ever since his youth, Cesar’s father has not been one for family time, though he says he’s tried. But he also says he’s a loner. He recently divorced Cesar’s mother, who speaks English haltingly, and married a much younger woman from the Dominican Republic.
The two sets of parents are so different, Heather and Cesar say, there’s a barrier between them.
Heather’s parents say they both were raised in communities where the different races stayed on different sides of the tracks.
Before she married Pat and moved to Ohio to start her own family, Heather’s mother, Bonnie Jones, says she never came into contact with either blacks or Hispanics in her hometown of Pottstown, Pa.
When she, Pat and their three kids moved to South Florida from Ohio in 1978, Bonnie says, suddenly there was a mix of races she had never experienced before.
“The kids adjusted well,” she says. “It took me a while to get over it. I was raised by a father who didn’t want anything to do with interracial anything. Where we were raised, there was white, there was black.”
Even so, Bonnie’s sister married a black man, and they adopted a biracial child. Bonnie says her father “didn’t have a whole lot to do with them.”
Both Bonnie and Pat say it simply doesn’t matter that Cesar is Hispanic. In fact, both say they’re impressed with their future son-in-law’s sense of determination.
“I’ve come to love Cesar,” Bonnie says. “I’ve seen him grow. He was more sure of what he wanted when he decided to marry her. I knew that was what he wanted.”
Cesar is so excited about marrying into Pat’s Ohio family he and Heather are even thinking of moving up there eventually.
“I would like to build a family,” he says. “That’s why I like being with her. I want that family.”