I often speak of bubbles. As someone who grew up in the Global South, I got to experience the glorification of gated “communities”, exclusive country clubs and places guarded by the customary guachi, the watchman, hired to protect the goodies of those in power. Loaded rifles at the entrance of banks, shopping malls and grassy urbanizaciones, suburban developments, were meant be treated as inconspicuously as the omnipresent palm trees; another familiar element in a steadily colonized landscaped and society. All of the above go hand-in-hand with capitalist economies, of which the Dominican Republic–where I was born– is among the rising ones in Latin America. For decades, Dominicans living abroad, mainly in Upper Manhattan, were called Dominicanyorks and seen collectively back home as culturally contaminated as a result of having “left” our country. Call it economically, politically, gender-wise or sexually driven immigration or, in some cases, cultural and intellectual forms of exiles. Dominicanyorks were to be avoided at all costs although, in 2022 we sent to the Island over $10 billion worth of hard-earned remittances. Those in the diaspora were referred to as Dominicanos Ausentes, or absent Dominicans. Most of us visited once a year, and some returned to the homeland to educate their children or to enjoy retirement. In the midst of this influx of “Dominicans,” short for Dominicanyorks, many of those who flocked back to our country of origin in the 1980s, would deal first-hand with the culture-clashes that entailed trying to enroll children in a private school or enter a fancy restaurant or nightclub as a patron. As someone whose creative impetus lies at the core of relocations, sometimes, far away from any of my social locations, the subject of kinship is key to me and, within this, are the identities that I have been born into, inherited, embraced, elaborated upon, or that have been imposed upon me, and that includes being Dominicanyork: a Dominican from New York City.
Kinship might be one of the terms being overused these days, just like ancestors, somatics, trauma and healing. However, its meaning at an emotional level is worth examining, at least for a creative like me who has devoted three decades to being in communities and to the relational, be it encounters or exchanges of the most unexpected kinds. An example of this was my relocation in 2019 from the South Bronx, my home, to the City of Albion, Michigan, with the intention of living for two months in this Midwestern post-industrial place an hour from Detroit, and hence to connect with people from all walks of life at a time when politics were beginning to be polarized in the United States at its very core. Kinship was not a topic I brought forward in Albion because I was actually in the midst of putting it into action rather than articulating it intellectually. In any case, I found myself there connecting dots that up to this date speak to my understanding of a field that unravels like an infinite and endless continuum, that of the kin and of kinship. My mind visualizes this as a thread that is constantly linking with each other one life form, and even forms perceived as inanimate. This field, I would argue, is even more expansive than that, and surpasses any definitions that might seek to satisfy my perception of space/time–two useful constructs. In Albion, the Dominicanyork in me was able to bring together in my memory’s landscape the fact that my deceased Dominican father in the Dominican Republic ran a business that used Fords made in the Motor City and near where I lived in Albion. I was traveling full circle, on foot, since unlike my father, I never learned how to drive, and relationships are best when not forged at 55 MPH.
Back in the Bronx in 2025, kinship was something I was about to actualize thousands of airmiles apart from the Caribbean island of my youth. Walking around the Hub, the Bronx’s Times Square, I took a detour away from the congested 149st Street to guide my brother into one of the less trafficked side streets leading us to our destination. Upon the sidewalk, we came across a young rat dying in the rain. The creature would slither on the concrete trying to free itself from the suffering it was undergoing. The gash on its right side displaying a puncture and an injury that seemed to have paralyzed most of its body. Looking around for a heavy rock I locked eyes with a UPS delivery man, dressed in a uniform the color of his skin: brown. His smile showing a set of gold teeth and an advice to me to bring an end to the pain of the rat. “Man, it is suffering.” He pointed to an orange traffic cone blocking a doorway, assuring me that it was heavy enough to euthanize the furry being rapidly. I wanted to bestow the job onto him, but he read my mind and argued he could not do it because he was at work delivering packages.
I prodded the rat gently. I examined the wound carefully. I let the UPS man turn the corner and this time the rat and I locked eyes in private. What I learned through its gaze was not something I could have elaborated on, and it was a complete cosmic download on kinship. I was one with a rat dying in a busy street in the Bronx, in the rain, alone. The rat was me. We were one in what shaped itself as a timeless instant, a Kairos microsecond. I took the cone in my hands and went for the neck. Once. Twice. From there on, I could clearly see the kinship thread ramifying in all directions. I also became conscious of when I broke this. The thread was something I had to live with from then on and that would become tangible, like when I dismissed a man outside who asked for a meal as I left a food joint, or when I raised my voice at an elderly airport traveler and perceived the rupture that I had generated. I saw the thread of kinship mend upon arriving at a community garden near my home and receiving from the Nuyorican manager the gift of a basil plant. Kinship had suddenly, in one drizzly afternoon in the South Bronx shifted its meaning for me beyond any possible groupings or embodiments of the term and even beyond ancestries, nationalities, and communities. Kinship revealed itself as a field always in flux being activated by the myriad beings/presences/entities/forms in contact with one another, including this Dominicanyork turned Bronxite and a dying rat turned ascended master. Many of the teachings I have sought to access through long journeys were contained in the wet pupils of my urban teacher.
The Rat’s Eyes and the Kinship Continuum © 2025 Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful
