Leaving the Bronx: My Journey to Discovering Identity and Finding My Voice
Two weeks ago, my family and I made a quick trip back to my childhood apartment in the Bronx. It was the first time I’d been back to New York, and my old neighborhood, in over a year.
That might not sound like a long time, but for me it is.
Ever since I moved to Miami in 2016, I've traveled back and forth to New York at least two or three times a year. That first year or two after moving to Florida, I made even more frequent trips because I felt like I needed to.
Adjusting to a new city was hard and disorienting. From time to time I needed a taste of home just to hit the reset button and remind myself who I was. After all, the Bronx was really all I knew.
I grew up living in the same apartment building for 25 years. When I’m back in my neighborhood, I run into old friends I used to play with outside who are now grown, women who used to babysit me, the gated courtyard I used to climb to retrieve balls that would go over it, the incinerator I got stuck in during my fifth birthday party, the bodega I’d buy honey buns and quarter waters from.
Leaving all that behind to move to Florida was a big upheaval. For a while, I wondered if I’d even made the right decision. Who would I be without my neighborhood? Without my place of comfort?
As a writer, I also worried how leaving might affect my work.
My forthcoming novel, VICTIM, was started a decade ago and has evolved many times since. But one thing that has remained constant is the location. It’s mostly set in New York, and mostly set in the Bronx—in a fictionalized neighborhood representative of the one I grew up in.
If I really wanted to capture the Bronx on the page, did it make sense to leave it for a place that was completely different? Looking back, seven years into my new life in Florida, the answer is clearly yes.
It turns out that leaving the Bronx and my old neighborhood freed me to write about it in a more poignant and vivid way.
When I was living in the Bronx, I wrote setting journalistically. I tried to capture things as they were. I focused on the shape of a fire-escape as it cascaded down the side of a building in Z’s, the gum stained sidewalks, the advertisements for clubs, bottle service, and cigarettes plastered on the walls of my local bodega.
Important details, sure. But if you imagine writing setting as holding up a camera and pointing at something to capture it, I would say my writing was zoomed all the way in—so much so that I often missed larger aspects of setting on the page: the tone of a location, the feeling it evokes, the colors, sounds, and atmosphere.
After moving to Miami and confronting a completely different environment on a daily basis, I found myself contrasting my old home with my new home, and pulling out important differences I hadn’t been able to see before.
Experiencing the silence of my new apartment made me understand what living with the constant noise of police sirens, trains, and booming sound systems outside your window means. The constant sunshine made me think deeper about how cold, gray days can influence emotions. The sparse sidewalks made me consider how cramped, dense spaces can shape your worldview and influence how you carry yourself. The reggaetón, salsa, and merengue pouring out of cars made me examine the particular sort of energy boom bap New York City hip-hop fills you with.
All of this translated onto the page.
I found myself exploring my characters' relationship with their setting more than I ever did before. When trying to describe something simple, like an elevator ride in the Bronx, I relied less on the actual experience of the ride (the journalistic version I would have written if I still lived in the Bronx), and more on my memory and imagination. I traded concrete details for the feelings I could tap into—especially after contrasting a ride on a Bronx elevator with the experience of riding clean, high-end elevators in Miami.
I allowed myself to go in new directions on the page that I realized I’d blocked off previously with thoughts like: Well, the neighborhood doesn’t really look like that, or this sort of thing really wouldn’t happen there, or this kind of character from this kind of block wouldn’t say this thing.
Because I wasn’t home, I could take more liberties. I could allow my creativity to run wild and go wherever it wanted to go.
I’ve been thinking about all of this ever since I got back from my recent trip. Maybe because a big part of the trip was taking the author photo that will appear in my book next year. It was shot by my friend, mentor, and Bronx legend David Gonzalez in the building I grew up in.
But also because I’m currently working through the copy-edit stage of the publishing process, setting things in stone for the most part.
As I make my way through my novel, scene by scene, I’ve wondered a few times, as it relates to setting: Did I get this right? Is this accomplishing what I want it to?
Being back home in my old apartment recently, and taking some time to walk around my old neighborhood, quelled a lot of these concerns.
Perhaps my novel isn’t capturing a methodical researcher's version of the Bronx. But I believe it is capturing my version of the Bronx.
I realized that, sometimes, to see a place more clearly, and filter it through your own particular lens on the page, you have to leave it behind.
Peace,
Andrew
Recommendations:
George Packer has an excellent piece in The Atlantic on the particular way we tend to view American history these days, and the fatalism about the future often born of that view.
D.T. Max wrote a fascinating profile on the author H.G. Carrillo. His real name was Herman Glenn Carroll, and it turns out he was a wild fabulist, reinventing himself as an Afro Cuban, when in fact he was a Black man from Detroit.
For Dazed, James Greig wrote convincingly about how our culture is awash with “adult babies” and calls out Gen Z’s and Millennials in a way that I really appreciated.
Over at the Honestly Podcast, Bari Weiss interviewed author and journalist Sebastian Junger about why men seek danger and how humans have traditionally found meaning in life.
Speaking of podcasts, author and historian Geraldo Cadava has a new one called Writing Latinos. It will feature interviews with Latino writers discussing their books and “how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad.” Cadava is sharp and always thoughtful when writing about Latinos (peep his Substack!). I’m looking forward to adding this podcast to my rotation.
The corner of Memory & Imagination is where Story hangs out, dodging po-lees and playing the dozens. A Pulitzer Prize winning novelist once told me that a poor memory is a gift to a fiction writer, leaving more room for imagination to romp
Hey, thanks for shoutout! I’m looking forward to following your newsletter, and, even more so, to reading your book next year!