The other night, I finally found the time to satisfy the closeted nerd in me and watch a series billed as a history of the men who built America on one of my favorite networks. Like most storylines told from the point of view of the victor, the series followed the lives of a few remarkably driven freedom-loving patriarchs who, as the story always goes, risked life and limb to reign supreme in the 19th century. Some of these men, like John D. Rockefeller for instance, had humble beginnings. Another, Andrew Carnegie, was an immigrant born in Scotland. And Henry Ford, the man who revolutionized how we get around town, was a diehard anti-Semite. Regardless of their backgrounds, an overwhelming majority of these well documented men whose life stories I’ve watched on TV and learned about in school, have something else in common: they are white. And those that emigrate from countries across Europe become white and seamlessly American without the same kind of acrimonious haterade many so-called immigrants from Mexico and other Latin-American countries face today. The fact that Mexicans were here before Europeans isn’t even an afterthought.

As I watched the series, I began to doze off at the recurrent stories that started blending into each other like one seamless narrative about realizing the American Dream. Instead, my life so far started flashing before me: sitting through history class at the subpar parochial and public New York City schools I attended in the late 1980s and through the dawn of the ‘90s. I thought about the capitalists and slavers who came to the Caribbean, Central and South America dressed in the guise of God-loving missionaries: about how seeing these images have impacted the way in which Black and Latino-American kids see themselves; and I thought about this Dominican dude who went by the name Jan Rodrigues—also known as Juan Rodriguez—that doesn’t get the props he truly deserves as a founder of post-Indigenous, modern-day New York City.

Mostly, however, I thought about my own journey reconciling my hyphenated identity in my book Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina. I fiercely love New York City and I totally dig my Dominican ancestry, but criticizing either side shouldn’t make me less authentically one or the other. I don’t buy into the ideal of the American Dream as it relates to communities of color here—total assimilation or bust!—just like I don’t believe that we live in a society where race doesn’t matter anymore. It isn’t a radical notion to question our society’s norms like the men who are credited for being the founders of this country did. If they were crammed into the same checkboxes that we are today, they might not have had the freedom to spread their creative wings and soar. I wonder if they would have been systematically taught that the parts of themselves that were not characteristically European were “primitive,” “pagan,” and a slew of other negative code words for nonwhite and non-Christian, if they would have been armed with one of the most important ingredients of a life without borders: a healthy self-esteem.

These are a few of the topics I explore in my book, a format-breaker that is part memoir and part chronicle of my year-long genetic adventure unearthing where my ancestors came from before I became Latina, using, in part the popular tool of ancestral DNA testing. I initially intended to write a book that leaned more heavily on reportage than using my own life as a microcosm to explore the broader strokes of living while Latina in America. It took me a minute to realize that it wasn’t working. Then I realized that there simply aren’t enough memoirs written by American born Latinos—certainly not of Dominican ancestry—in the complex and rich quilt of American literature.

Arriving at a place of truth and reconciliation with my hyphenated identity and, somewhere along the road, my father, was more of a challenge than I originally anticipated. I was ready. The wonderful thing about life is the winding road it takes you down once you trust the universe enough to guide you. I’m certain that my readers, Latino and American alike, will agree and see themselves in my own story.