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A family trauma expert, Mariel Buque, guides us through her own path of acceptance and healing. Her perspective was shaped by her family's difficult transition from the Dominican Republic to New Jersey.

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Host and producer: May Ortega Mixed by: Luis Antonio Perez Editors: Erin Jones, Andrew Villegas Project Manager: Rebekah Romberg Additional editorial support: Jo Erickson, Kibwe Cooper, Emily Williams Theme music by Pedro Lumbrano; additional music courtesy Universal Production Music Cover art: Mia Rincón Executive producers: Brad Turner, Kevin Dale

Thanks also to Hart van Denburg, Jodi Gersh, Clara Shelton, Matt Herz, Kim Nguyen, Brittany Werges and CPR's members and staff.

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Mariel: As we were transitioning to start living in the U.S., my sister and I would make up like these American or, or English words.

Mariel: There was a song. It goes like, [singing "Pump up the Jam"] “I want a place to stay.”

May: Oh yeah I don’t know the name, but I know what you’re talking about. [Sings along to “Pump up the Jam”] "Get your bootie on the floor …"

Mariel: [Laughing] Exactly. So we thought we knew the lyrics, but we, we would say like, instead of, [singing] “I want,” we would say agua, like water.

May: [Laughing] Really making it your own.

May: It makes sense that this story involves her sister because this episode is all about family. Family, healing and growing. Let’s get our booties on the floor for season two. From Colorado Public Radio, This is “Quién Are We?” – exploring what it means to be Dominican, Latiné, Afrolatino, or however you identify, and diving into the beautiful things that make us who we are.

I'm May Ortega. Hola y bienvenidos a season two! I hope you’re as glad to be listening as I am that we are back. This year, we’re taking you on a tour through the lives of people who come from all over Latino America. We’ll talk about the intensity of family game nights, the good, the bad and the beauty of fatherhood, and the complexities of Queer Latinidad. And lots more, of course. So let’s kick off this season with some healing.

Mariel: I'm a licensed psychologist and an intergenerational trauma expert.

May: Mariel Buque went through a lot to get to where she is. She was destined to become someone who helps other people. It all started when she was a kid, sitting in a U.S. immigration office with her family. And in very Latino fashion, her parents would give her something to do.

Mariel: Total child of immigrants. They would get us to speak on their behalf, on people that they just met five minutes ago. My parents would like, especially my mom, would make friends, and then she would be like, “well, Marti, can you, you know, tell them this?” So then I think I always wanted to be helpful to my community because I would see how much suffering would be happening, and I just never really knew how I could help.

May: The first five years of Mariel’s life were spent in her home country of the Dominican Republic.

Mariel: I remember everything was so different. I mean, as you can imagine, the sights, the smells, the food, the people, the culture, the music. Which, I think that the music was one of those elements of my culture that helped to keep me grounded and even helped me to maintain the language.

Um, but even now, there are times when I listen to music and it teleports me right back to the little bodega – colmados is what we called it in the DR – that I used to play around. What I remember the most were two things. So I remember a lot of joy and a lot of happiness and a lot of energy.

May: There are so many things about that time that stick in her mind. And one of them has left a lasting memory on her taste buds.

Mariel: And ugh, the best, which remains to be the best to this day. Dominican cake. Oh my goodness.

May: Can you describe it for our listeners maybe who’ve never – I have had it once. Can you describe it for me?

Mariel: Oh, yeah. Dominican cake is this scrumptious deliciousness that is, um, uh, basically mostly a two layer cake. And the, the middle of the cake is usually filled with either dulce de leche, um, guava or pineapple filling, and then the [laughter] frosting is actually meringue. So it's like, you know, whipped soft meringue, just gooeyness just covering the entire cake. It is absolutely heaven.

Mariel: Those were the memories. It was like this, this experience of like, this energy and this joy and this happiness. And then the transition happened, and it felt like a sharp contrast.

May: It’s easy to see how meaningful something like Dominican cake was for Mariel. Gathering at fiestas and digging in with her family, exchanging expressions of pure indulgence.Then suddenly her parents broke the news that the family was moving to America – a place called Newark, New Jersey. On October 30. Mariel Buque was very young when her family moved to the United States, and they did so just hours before All Hallows Eve.

Mariel: Imagine a five and an eight year old waking up the next day after their arrival to a new country, and everyone's dressed up as like clowns and witches and magicians.

May: This Dominican kid had never heard of Halloween. Remember that Halloween isn’t really celebrated in a lot of Latin Countries. Some places like Guatemala and Mexico have festivities that honor the dead. But costumes and trick or treating were not really involved.&nbsp;

Mariel: And it was just like this super strange experience that was so hyper-rstimulating because you also had the cold with the sharp contrast of like 90 degree weather.

Mariel: I mean, night and day. And imagine this, I don't know where adults get ideas from, to be honest, because I just …

May: Even in my adult life, I don’t get it [laughter].

Mariel: I still don't get it. Someone had the brilliant idea of dressing me up in an elephant suit, and it was one of those ginormous elephant suits that you, like, it was a full nine, like a full head gear that was an elephant. And I – tiny little me in this elephant suit that I was like swimming in. And I was, I mean, like, I'm like, yeah, this is definitely not DR [laughter].

May: They had to keep you warm! It’s so cold.&nbsp;

May: So Mariel leaned into living in the U.S. She was making friends, improving her English, learning the correct lyrics to some of her favorite songs. But while all this was going on, there was a tinge of sadness to this new life in the U.S.

Mariel: What we don't talk enough about, I think, in the immigrant experience is how families have to come together and make a new normal. My dad, he came to the U.S. on a visa for two years, when I was like eight. And then he had to go back. And then it was 10 years until he could come back.&nbsp;

May: So for most of her childhood, that’s just how they had to live their lives: visiting the DR here and there, talking to papi over the phone. Mariel missed her dad. And the rest of her family in the DR.

Mariel: When we migrate, some of us migrate with a lot of guilt. We survived the turbulence of our home countries, and so we have to like, take care of the people that are back there. And that's been a training that my mother has like implicitly instilled in myself and my sister.

​​My mother is the eldest of like eight children, and she has been the, as the eldest daughter, the one to take care of everyone. So as she left the DR, she continued to take care of everyone all the time, like monetarily – to this day. My parents, I believe, have remained in a status of economic impoverishment, partly because of their big hearts. Because they've, you know, they've wanted to ensure that everyone else is taken care of. And it has caused us a lot of emotional pain to be constantly in survival mode financially.

May: Mariel learned to live without her dad. She grew up. And then, one day, she found out her father was finally getting his citizenship. He was coming to the U.S. It’s great news, for sure. But their decades of separation were palpable. For one thing, Mariel and her sister were now grown women in their 20s.

Mariel: Those moments where we had to then reintegrate Dad into our lives now as adults and no longer as the little girls that he needed to protect, he just couldn't adjust. And we couldn't adjust to now having a dad that was always like there and present and wanting to coddle us when we didn't have that growing up. He missed my entire childhood. And what he was doing at that point in time was that he was in essence treating me like his little girl. So it was very like, jarring. And that's the thing about these family separations, is that there are enormous consequences that happen on multiple levels.

Because there's so many of those consequences that are so deeply traumatic that we have to pay attention to them. Now imagine my mom, my mom didn't have a husband nearby for a decade, and now all of a sudden she has a husband there every single day. Can you imagine? And they, you know, they, they subscribe to, like, more traditional gender norms. And so can you imagine like being a person that now has to cook for a husband [laughter] at 50? Like, what? May: Like, surely, she’s happy overall. But also …

Mariel: It's the stuff we don't talk about. I saw my mom was worn out. Like she was like, not okay. Because now all of a sudden she needed to make these adjustments, and then she had to integrate her girls back into, like, the fatherhood journey. It's very hard. And so, yeah, it wasn't easy. But I think what kept us afloat was the enormous love we have for each other.

May: That love played a significant role in what Mariel ultimately ended up doing for a living. But it was not a straight path or a quick one. Her father had been a reporter in the DR, so she pursued that. But it was a tough field to break into. So she settled for advertising, but she was not a fan. She wanted to help people on a personal level.

Mariel: What I did in order to kind of balance out my life was that I started volunteering. And I started volunteering more and more in the area of mental health. I would actually go to work, go to the suicide hotline after work, take the night shift, shower there, and then come back to work.

May: Wow. And you were all about it because you felt like you were helping people.

Mariel: Yeah. I, yeah. And it, and it felt like, almost like a calling, like it felt like this is what I have been commissioned to do. And it also just felt like the work that we were doing there felt meaningful versus being in advertising, which was very capitalist-driven and like, about making money for big organizations. Like I was actually one-on-one helping people in a way that felt very grounding and meaningful to me.

Mariel: And then I started realizing, oh my goodness, this is like an actual field of work [laughter].

May: Ohh, like “you can do this for a living?”

Mariel: And because, you know, in our communities, we don't, don't really talk about mental health. We don't even talk about psychology as a profession. It wasn't anything that I was exposed to at all. And so to actually get that experience firsthand of being able to help people and realizing how at home I felt.

May: So Mariel started the long road toward a graduate degree in psychology. And earning that degree was no joke. She spent long nights hunched over her nights, choosing books over parties, painstakingly enriching her mind to achieve her dream. Sure. She expected the hard work: the tireless reading and writing and research. But she was not expecting clarity. With every bit she learn, she began to see the trauma behind her family dynamic. And she knew how to fix things. At least, she thought she knew.

Mariel: And it was not pretty in the beginning, because in the beginning I didn't, I'm talking about 10-plus years ago. I knew that I wanted things to be different, and I knew I had an inner frustration as to how we were operating as a family, but I didn't have the language to apply to it. With me, having a better understanding and a more compassionate understanding of some of the things that were happening in my own home, it allowed me to reconfigure the actual language by which I started conversations with my family versus like, you know, I would point fingers, I would yell, I would point fingers. I would – everything that we all do, “you didn't deal with your stuff. Now I gotta deal with it. It's your fault.” It never worked. May: Mariel has obviously put in a lot of work to earn about breaking the cycles of intergenerational trauma. But she also gives credit where it's due – from her own family.

Mariel: My sister and I, we developed a team between the two of us, a cycle-breaking team, and we decided we're gonna do things like this, and we're just gonna let our parents catch up.&nbsp;

May: You know if you can get your parents to own up and change, that is monumental. Mari knows, because she’s just like her mom.

Mariel: My sister and I were in essence, like being very, I think knuckleheaded about, like not wanting to move past an issue. And my mother, who is the biggest knucklehead of us all …

May: [Laughter] Like that’s where you get it from.

Mariel: 100%, I'm my mother's daughter, there's no question, no question whatsoever.&nbsp;

May: The apple fell right there. Right at the base of the tree.

Mariel: Oh I don’t even think the apple fell. Stayed right there on the tree. People will tell you, Oh Mari? She’s just like her. Yeah. It was the most beautiful set of words my mother has ever heard uttered in my entire life. “I'm in my era of peace.” And my sister, and I – remember, we, my sister and I were literally in our angry phases. We were like ridden with anger, and we like, both looked at each other. Like, it almost felt like a moment where everything felt lifted from the room. And we were like, oh my gosh. Even mom doesn't wanna be stuck in this cycle anymore. And then we, we went downstairs and we spoke with each other, and we were like, okay, “maybe we're the problem.”&nbsp;

Mariel: We were like, we, I was like, we gotta let it go. Because if she has the capacity to let it go, and she should be the person that's most perhaps, like, hurt by this circumstance, then we have to follow her footsteps. And her footsteps are so beautiful, and they're probably even a reflection of all the work we've done as a family. So let's just step into this era of peace that she's talking about and walk that path with her.&nbsp;

May: Now that she has her PhD in counseling psychology and has her own practice, now she gets to be the person that she needed as a kid. And she’s already seeing this play out with her nephew.

Mariel: My sister is the original cycle breaker in our family. I’m the little sister that would just copy everything my sister would do. And so I became a cylc icebreaker because of my siste.r I see my nephew; he’s fifteen, going on sixteen.Oh my goodness. And he’s so emotionally intelligent, emotionally mature. Grounded. Steady. And I like to think it’s my sister having told herself I want a different experience than what I had growing up that was filled with so much chaos and uncertainty that she worked so hard to be a cycle breaker. And you can see it. He’s literally the embodiment of it.&nbsp;

May: Seeing the effects of her and her sister's intentions play out through the family’s future has infused her with hope that she's doing the right thing. The way you speak about what you do – I can see that you’re very passionate about it. And very good at it, too.

Mariel: Thank you. I love what I do so much, and I have to give credit where credit is due. I've had some people that have mentored me and supervised me. Also, uh, Latinos, you know, of, of different backgrounds and as we reference to the work, we do community work, right? Like most people think it's like, it's psychology and it's mental health work, but really it's people work. And so they've trained me to think this way, to operate this way, to reflect, the work in a way that is humanizing, but also to bring myself into the work because I'm a reflection of my community and it matters for them to see me and to see my humanity, and to see that I'm just a fellow human with them in the work. I'm literally, like hearing stories from people that look like me, people that sound like me, and stories that literally reflected my own.&nbsp;

When you look at me and when you know my backgrounds, none of them fit the traditional ideas or identities of the people that are in trauma work. A lot of the people that are in trauma work don't look like me. They don't talk like me. They don't have my backgrounds. They don't have my identities at all. May: Mariel realized that maybe other Latine people besides her clients needed this knowledge. She knew she wanted to shrink the unspoken pain that lives in Latino families. And she wanted to place a spotlight on where that pain could come from. She wanted brown and black people to have a better self-esteem. And she wanted the toxic dynamics within these families to be cleansed through self-healing. So she gave herself the task of pouring everything she’d learned into a book. After years of learning, months of writing, and a lifetime of experience, “Break the Cycle” was published in January. Over the course of nearly 250 pages, Mariel explains the many forms intergenerational trauma can take. One recurring thread through the book is the way the trauma of our parents and even their parents can manifest within us. Something Mari knows well. Then, she provides a buffet of ways to approach not only our individual pain but how to include our families in that as well.&nbsp;

Mariel: I'm really, really proud of this book. I'm proud of everything that has gone into it. And I am really excited for what people are gonna say about how healing happens in their lives as a result of their book. This is major. And it's like a major book with a major publisher, and it's like, so incredible. I'm like, yo, this Dominican from Newark, like literally wrote a book that is about to be up there in the trauma world with people that are not black, not Dominican, not from Newark. That's a, that's pretty major. So I try to sit with that, uh, as much as I can.

May: Dra. Mariel Buque is a licensed psychologist and an intergenerational trauma expert born in the Dominican Republic. She now lives in New York. Her book is titled “Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma.” Thank you to Mariel for explaining what it means to be a cycle breaker, and for sharing how your family is doing the work. Here’s to giving ourselves space to heal, the self-recognition we deserve, and lots of love.

I’m May Ortega. This episode was produced by me. With mixing by Luis Antonio Perez. Pedro Lumbrano wrote our theme music. This episode was edited by Erin Jones and Andrew Villegas.&nbsp;

You can find a list of everybody who helped make this episode in the show notes. “Quién Are We” is a production of Colorado Public Radio.

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¿Quién Are We? is a podcast from Colorado Public Radio exploring what it means to be Latino, Hispanic or Chicana ... or however you identify. Host and journalist May Ortega shares stories about our wide-ranging identities and the beautiful things that make us who we are.

¿Quién Are We?

A family trauma expert, Mariel Buque, guides us through her own path of acceptance and healing.

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