He’s not wrong.

but, look, they are both in dark blue suits... and something else, i can't quite put my finger on it...🤔

Indeed

Certainly, my grandmother had married a Texas cotton farmer--but when the laws keep telling you where you belong and where you don´t, you make it so that none of those dead flies get into your mouth, to quote the Spanish refrán.

In fact, the 1922 Supreme Court Case Balzac v Porto Rico made clear the second-class citizenship of Puerto Ricans. And then, even in the 1927 Amendment to the Jones Act and the 1934 Amendment rights and privileges were only granted to those born on the island.

and given the politics of citizenship post 1898, or more precisely post 1899 and the Foraker Act, and then 1917 and the Jones-Shaforth Act, if her reticence to ever admit to having been born in the Dominican Republic had to do with a feeling political precarity.

Again, my parents took this to be something close to vanity, or better said, national chauvinism--and certainly it could have been.
Yet, I wonder. Given that she was born in 1922 in the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rican parents...

But when we moved to the DR, she asked my parents to go to the courthouse/parish archives, I don't know which, to get her birth certificate. & my mother was astounded to learn that her Puerto Rican mami, una Ponceña que rebosaba de orgullo boricua, had actually been born in the Dominican Republic.

out of need or curiosity; anybody can visit that great house which was for so many years forbidden, prohibited, defended by armed guards, locked, and as dark as the souls of the Warrior Emperors of the Dynasty of the Ellydróvides

&gardeners rake the parks&young people argue&innkeepers water the wine&teachers teach what they know&we storytellers tell old stories&archivists archive&fishermen fish&all of us can decide according to our talents&lack of talents what to do with our lives—now anybody can enter the emperor’s palace

now that a just man sits on the Golden Throne&people look peacefully out of their doors to see if the weather’s fine&plan their vacations&kids go to school&actors put their hearts into their lines&girls fall in love&old men die in their beds&poets sing&jewelers weigh gold behind their little windows