Host: Luz Kenyon grew up in Mexico City… In the mid 1980s, she took a trip to New York… Fell in love with a stranger on the corner of 42nd street… And never went home.

She told her daughter, Anna Paloma, about this unexpected start to their family. 

Luz Kenyon (LK) and Anna Paloma Williams (AW)

LK: I always thought that I was going to be an independent woman and I wasn’t going to get married and I wasn’t going to have any children. And then in the middle of Manhattan, I see this uniform guy. He was African American. He was very tall and he was a traffic agent. He spoke to me first and… I fell under his spell.

AW: [Laughs]

LK: And I married your father. 

AW: What was it raising mixed kids? 

LK: The only problem I had was, like, how am I gonna brush their hair? 

LK and AW: [Laugh]

AW: Yeah. 

LK: But that was solved by the daycare teachers. When I would come to the daycare to pick you up, your hair was done. 

AW: Yeah. 

LK: Like, ‘Poor, miss Luz, she don’t know what she’s doing.’ [Laughs]

AW: That’s so special because motherhood is not a solo journey.

LK: Well, I had women to rely on. Your grandmother would take the baby from me and tell me, ’Go take a shower. Go take a nap.’ Also your abuela Lucha came from Mexico…

And I remember, abuela Lucha was sitting, and she looks, I’d say, Caucasian, and you put your hand against her leg.

And then I saw you crying. I asked you, ‘Why are you crying Anna?’ And you told me you wanted to be white like your grandmother. Because nobody likes Black people.

AW: Yeah, and I was what?

LK: Four.

AW: Four. Yeah. 

LK: Abuela Lucha, she didn’t speak any English. 

AW: Yeah. 

LK: But she understood. Well, we just loved on you. And we assured you there was nothing wrong with you. That you were beautiful just exactly how you were.

AW: I am different. And that is special. I didn’t always feel that way, but I just – I think about how rare it is to have a family that is so loving, and when we go to Mexico I don’t feel different at all. 

I don’t speak the language, so I might not understand what’s going on 75 percent of the time, but I know I belong. I’m like, I’m going to get my love tank filled up. [Laughs] I can’t replicate it anywhere.

You know, you and I both are willing to let life happen to us and then take from it the shiny pieces. 

We move aside that dust and that debris and we find the joy. 

LK: My little Palomita, te quiero mucho.

AW: Te quiero más.