Becoming Maria

Becoming Maria is a memoir by Sonia Manzano. The book traces Manzano's childhood and adolescence in the Puerto Rican neighborhoods of the South Bronx during the 1950s and 1960s, through her artistic awakening, and into her early career as a performer.

Manzano's earliest memories establish the volatile household she was born into. Her father, Bonifacio (Pops), drank heavily and destroyed furniture in drunken rages. Her mother, Isidra (Ma), worked in a garment factory and endured his beatings. A dark-haired girl named Aurea drifted in and out of the household. Sonia eventually pieced together that Aurea was her half-sister, Ma's daughter by a man named Aureo Andino. When Sonia voiced this discovery, Ma sharply forbade her from ever mentioning that name again.

Domestic violence defined the family's daily life. Neighbors offered Ma makeup to cover bruises and concluded Pops hit her because he loved her. Ma periodically fled with the children to relatives, but refuge proved elusive: At Uncle Eddie's house on Long Island, Eddie's mother, Bon Bon, beat her own children violently. Each time Ma left, Pops wept, begged forgiveness, and blamed the rum. Each time, she returned. Stories from the extended family deepened Sonia's dread: One uncle had driven his wife to kill herself and their two children, and another uncle's wife had been banished and never seen again. These stories sharpened Sonia's nightly fear as she watched Ma hide the kitchen knives whenever Pops had not come home after dark.

Poverty shaped daily life. The family shopped on credit at a bodega, a small neighborhood grocery store. Friday evenings brought the extended family together for music: Pops played guitar while Ma and Uncle Eddie sang sad Puerto Rican songs about exploited workers and starvation. Ma recounted her own devastating childhood to Sonia: Orphaned at five when her mother died of a broken heart, she was given away by her father, Dionisio, to work for strangers in exchange for food.

School brought further humiliations. A kindergarten teacher mocked Sonia for bringing toilet paper instead of a tissue. During Brotherhood Week, a teacher insisted there were only three racial categories and dismissed a Puerto Rican classmate who asked where brown people fit. The same teacher informed Sonia that she was poor, contradicting her assumption that her family was middle class. Amid these hardships, small revelations sustained her. On a subway ride with Aurea, Sonia discovered she could read independently, decoding advertisements on the train and resolving to keep this ability as a secret weapon.

As Sonia entered adolescence, her developing body drew unwanted sexual attention from strangers and older men. She told no one, fearing blame. The family moved repeatedly, and Sonia drifted through school in a daze until a teacher named Miss Pellman gently drew her out. On Southern Boulevard, Sonia befriended Vanessa Delmonte, a striking girl recently arrived from Puerto Rico whose mother worked in a bar and slept during the day. They became inseparable, making dresses from T-shirts and laughing about forbidden topics of race. They even attempted to cure Pops's alcoholism through Santería, an Afro-Caribbean spiritual practice, and anti-drinking pills ordered from True Confessions magazine. Nothing worked.

The artistic turning point came when Miss Pellman took Sonia to see the film West Side Story. The movie depicted Puerto Rican life with a beauty and dignity Sonia had never seen represented. She sobbed uncontrollably, feeling as though she were waking from a long sleep, and went home with a new question: What could she create?

This awakening gave Sonia new strength. When Pops came home violent one night, she grabbed a black ceramic panther off the television and smashed it onto his head, stunning him long enough for Ma to escape. When Sonia told her parents she could not take the abuse anymore, they responded with bewilderment, insisting the fighting had nothing to do with her. She briefly ran away to her grandmother's house in El Barrio, a Puerto Rican neighborhood in East Harlem.

A drama teacher at her junior high school recognized Sonia's talent and encouraged her to audition for the High School of Performing Arts, a specialized public school in Manhattan. She was accepted. At Performing Arts, Sonia encountered sharp, outspoken students but struggled in acting class. Teachers told her she lacked energy. When assigned a scene from the play Street Scene, about the daughter of a violent drunk, she broke down, overwhelmed by unexpected emotion. The teacher pulled her from the scene. When asked to write about her hopes and dreams, Sonia wrote bluntly about her father's violence and her wish that her parents would divorce. The teacher began to notice her, but Sonia recognized it was because of her troubled life, not her talent.

Performing Arts would not recommend Sonia for college because of her low grades, but her employer at the American National Theater and Academy (ANTA), where the school had placed her in a clerical job, wrote her a recommendation. Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh accepted her with a scholarship, and Sonia became the first person in her family to attend college. Before leaving, she visited Puerto Rico for the first time. She arrived hostile toward the island she associated with the family's suffering, but the balmy air, hibiscus flowers, and Caribbean Sea overwhelmed her defenses. She left longing for Puerto Rico "with the phantom ache of an amputee who still feels his missing arm" (184).

Ma managed to buy a house in the upper Bronx, but on the very first night Pops dressed to go out, confirming that a house could not fix the marriage. Vanessa announced she was pregnant, and Sonia watched their shared plans for independence evaporate. She resolved to leave the Bronx behind.

At Carnegie Mellon, Sonia hustled her parents out of the dorm room, eager to reinvent herself. She found that narrating her life stories to her roommate, Sharon, transformed them into tales that had happened to someone else. She found solid ground in Professor Jewel Walker's movement class and was electrified when Walker showed a Charlie Chaplin film. Chaplin's ability to be simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking mirrored Sonia's own experience, and she became obsessed with physical comedy.

She thrived in a production of Godspell, a show in which clowns act out Bible parables. The cast developed the material through improvisation, and on opening night Sonia grasped a key insight: The harder the audience laughed, the deeper the sorrow they would feel. The director took the show to New York, where Sonia sang directly to the audience, channeling the bawdy confidence of actress Mae West and ad-libbing with crowd members.

Offstage, anger became her constant companion. On Christmas Eve, Pops struck Ma with a telephone ripped from the wall. Sonia called the police, gathered her mother and brothers, and took them to her Manhattan apartment. She became a crusader for her parents' divorce, pushing Ma relentlessly despite signs that Ma did not want to go through with it. The judge granted the divorce, but Ma did not celebrate. Months later, Sonia's uncle Félix called from Puerto Rico and casually mentioned that her parents had recently vacationed together on the island. The revelation stunned Sonia into laughter. She accepted that she knew nothing about her parents' relationship.

Stripped of certainty, Sonia threw herself into daily dance classes before performing Godspell each night, reasoning that "a moving target is harder to hit" (260). Her agent sent her to audition for Sesame Street. Executive producer Jon Stone asked her to tell a scary story as if to a child. Without thinking, Sonia returned to her earliest childhood fear: a giant eye stalking her in the dark. She transformed it into a tale about a girl in the woods who is hunted by a bloodshot eye, confronts it, bites it, and eats it. The next morning, the girl is no longer afraid, and the world looks brighter. Stone looked pleased. Sonia left, went home, and waited for the next thing to happen.