♪ PALOMA VALENZUELA: I am trying way too hard.

Way too hard to wait for somebody else to see me.

MARK REDMOND: Where we lived was pretty safe.

Our house was only broken into one time in five years.

But see, we were in a war.

And the first casualty of war is truth.

WES HAZARD: Our theme for this evening is "Welcome to the Neighborhood."

(cheers and applause) WES HAZARD: Your first teller coming to the stage is a Dominican-American screenwriter, playwright, and actor.

Please join me in giving a huge, warm, Stories-from-the-Stage welcome for Paloma Valenzuela.

Make some noise.

(cheers and applause) Tonight's going to be your first real time telling a story in this kind of setting.

What are you feeling about that?

I'm really nervous.

I'm really nervous.

I've told everybody and their mother that I'm terrified.

It is different because it's not something that you rehearse and memorize to the T. Everything I say comes from the heart, and somebody told me, um, to not think about being good, or being entertaining.

Just to forget all that, just tell your story truthfully and honestly and authentically, and that's what I'm going to take with me on stage tonight.

I've lived in a bunch of neighborhoods in my life, and I feel like, in each one of those neighborhoods, I always hoped to find myself, find my place.

Because I always felt different.

I am biracial, and that subject might be, you know, not as big a deal right now.

I'm 29 and throughout my life, I've encountered many people who can relate with me.

But when I was growing up, I felt pretty alone.

And so, I mean, just to give you a little bit of information about me, I am Dominican-American, Jewish-American, and my maternal grandmother was Hungarian-American.

And, growing up, I didn't speak Spanish, so that was very complicated as well.

Just a little information about me.

And I feel like, my experience, my personal experience being biracial was that a lot of people felt entitled to put the identity that I "should have" on me.

And so, there was a lot of, you know, encouraging me to pick a side, but then discouraging me from identifying with one side more than the other.

It was complicated.

And I feel like, throughout my entire life, I've been searching.

I've been searching for that identity that I could hold onto.

And in high school, the question of "What are you?"

"Like, what's your nationality?

"Like, you Latina?

"Like, I can't really figure it out..." was constant.

And I really didn't feel comfortable with that question.

I would answer it, "I'm Dominican... "I'm half Dominican, half white... "I'm Jewish-Dominican..." It just was always this long answer.

And I always had wished that I could have a really quick answer.

And I did feel Dominican.

I really felt proud of being Dominican.

Even when I was in high school and I didn't speak Spanish, but I didn't feel like I could connect with the Latino students in my school because they all spoke Spanish and I didn't.

Or Spanglish and I also did not.

And I just felt like it was a club that I didn't have access to.

So, basically, toward the end of high school, I was just like, "You know what, I'm done.

"I'm going to learn how to speak Spanish.

"I'm going to teach myself how to speak Spanish.

Like, that's it."

So, I decided to practice Spanish and before I went off to college, I took a month; I went to the Dominican Republic-- I fell in love with the Dominican Republic-- practiced some Spanish and I said, "It would be a dream of mine to move back to the Dominican Republic to connect again."

And so, I came back, I went to college, I kept practicing my Spanish, I read, I would translate.

I would read and translate music lyrics, and listen to music in Spanish, and I could finally understand the lyrics to those Shakira songs.

I was like a big fan of Shakira before I could speak Spanish and I had no idea what she was saying.

But she was cute and now I understood what she was saying.

And when I graduated from college, I was like, "Okay, well, I'm going.

"I'm going to go to the Dominican Republic.

This is happening."

And so I did.

And the first job that I got was as the second assistant director for a television series out there called "Juanita's Gran Salon y Spa."

And just to translate it for you, it was called, (overenunciating) "Juanita's Grand Salon and Spa."

You're welcome.

(laughter) You're welcome.

And I could say, my first neighborhood in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, was where I lived, but really, it was where I worked.

Because we worked 14, 15 hour days, sometimes six days a week, for four months.

So, the people that I worked with were my family, and my neighborhood was that set, that TV set and studio, QuitaSueño in Haina, Dominican Republic.

And I was speaking Spanish every single day.

Everything I wrote was in Spanish.

And I felt like I connected.

I felt such a connection.

It was incredible.

I felt like I saw so many sides of myself in the Dominican Republic, and I felt like I found my identity in the Dominican Republic.

I was Dominicana.

And I loved it.

And then, towards like... not... towards the middle of maybe those four months, my boss, who was the first assistant director on the show, we got along really well.

She had a really quirky sense of humor.

And she decided to give me a cute little nickname.

And that nickname sort of did the rounds on set.

And the nickname was "La Gringa."

"La Gringa Loca."

(laughter) That was my nickname.

And to me, it was like... For Latinos in the United States, "gringo" is a Caucasian, someone who is not Latino.

But of course I felt Latina.

I felt very Dominican as well.

I said, "No, no, no.

I'm not gringa.

"Yo no soy gringa.

"Yo soy Dominicana.

I'm Dominican!"

"No, you're gringa."

"But my dad's Dominican, you know... "I grew up, you know, there's Dominicans in the United States."

"Yeah, but you're like gringa-Dominicana."

And I don't know if I can describe how it felt.

It feels like...

Imagine being in a crowded room, and you're telling everybody that you're there, and everybody's telling you that you're not.

That basically was what that kind of felt like, and you'd think that it would break me because I was so determined to be accepted somewhere.

And I was so determined to be accepted somewhere and realized that I was just as different there that I was everywhere else.

And you'd think that it would break me, but it didn't.

An amazing thing happened with this nickname, La Gringa.

I decided to embrace it.

I decided to embrace it because it made me realize, like, after all that, I'm really out here.

Before I had to have my parents translate a conversation with one of my tias before, and now I'm creating shooting plans, and editing scripts completely in Spanish, and living here in the Dominican Republic.

I have my cellular, I have my passport.

I know how to make mangu con cebolla.

And I make a mean mangu.

And now you're calling me "gringa"?

And I was like, "You know what, I am trying way too hard."

Way too hard to wait for somebody else to see me, to decide that they are going to see me the way I want to be seen when this entire time, I was always everything that I am.

And that's why I embrace the nickname, because you can throw all the nicknames at me, and I'm still here, exactly the person that I am, and moving to the Dominican Republic was the most incredible experience, life-changing experience that I ever had.

And living in the Dominican Republic did not make me feel proud of being Dominican.

Because I always felt proud of being Dominican.

Even when I didn't speak Spanish.

Even when a conversation with my abuela was... a kiss and a hug.

And I didn't know Shakira lyrics.

I was still proud to be Latina and proud to be Dominican.

So, moving to the Dominican Republic didn't teach me to be proud of being Dominican because that...

I already felt that.

But it taught me to be proud of being me.

Everything that I am.

The daughter of my father, the daughter of my mother.

Dominicana, Dominican-American, Jewish-American, gringa, loca.

Thank you.

(cheers and applause) HAZARD: Where you from?

Where'd you start out?

MARK REDMOND: So, it's funny, I grew up on Long Island.

And I lived in New York City, worked in New York City and lived in Brooklyn for five years.

Then I lived in another part of the suburbs.

And then I've been up in Vermont for the last 14 years, which is a big departure from Brooklyn.

Has Brooklyn given you a lot of stories?

Yes, Brooklyn has given me a lot of stories.

Brooklyn was a very colorful and exciting and it could be dangerous place to live at times.

Growing up, was there someone in your family or your friend group who was like, "That's the storyteller"?

"We always look to this person"" It was my dad.

I grew up in an Irish Catholic, you know, American family.

And his father was from Ireland.

And he... he's 87, he's still alive... he doesn't have quite the energy, but in his day, he would hold court-- at the dining room table, with family gatherings.

You know... Christmas, Easter, he would just tell stories.

As kids, we heard them over and over again, but I really think watching him for decades like that, I caught the storytelling bug from him.

HAZARD: And do you have brothers and sisters?

I do, but they don't tell stories like me.

(both laughing) So, I used to live in Brooklyn, New York.

Anybody live in Brooklyn, New York, ever?

Not Brookline.

Brooklyn.

It's a little different.

It's a little different...

I lived there with my first wife.

Our son was born there.

Brooklyn had its challenges in the late '80s, early '90s.

I used to have a handwritten sign on the side of my car window that said, "Radio already stolen.

Please don't break the glass."

I used to use The Club on my steering wheel.

Who remembers The Club?

Right?

The red bar... you'd lock it in.

Where we lived was pretty safe.

Our house was only broken into one time in five years.

We lived in a neighborhood called Borough Park, and Borough Park, it was pretty safe.

It was clean.

People were friendly.

It was like row houses.

Little kids would come down the block and play with my son on our front stoop.

And I liked it.

Demographically, it was half Italian-American Catholic and half Orthodox Hasidic Jewish.

Now, I'm Irish Catholic.

So, I was the odd man out on both counts.

There was a lot of tension between the two groups.

It wasn't overt, but it was there.

You could feel it but, basically, they got along pretty well.

Borough Park was white.

It was very white.

There were no people of color who owned or rented a house in Borough Park.

In fact, there was a terrible racial incident about two years after I moved there.

A young, 16-year-old African-American teenage boy named Yusef Hawkins took a subway to Bensonhurst, which is about ten blocks from my house, to look at a used car.

He went with three of his friends.

And he was chased by a group of white teenage boys and they shot him and killed him just for being there.

This was ten blocks from my house.

So that was Borough Park.

And about three years after that, word got around that a Catholic non-profit called Catholic Guardian Society intended to buy a house at the end of our block and use it as a group home for eight adults with developmental disabilities.

Well, the whole neighborhood went nuts over this.

Maybe the Hasidic Orthodox Jews and the Italian-American Catholics couldn't get along on much, but they could agree on this.

That house was not going to open.

That house had to be stopped.

And I'm thinking, "What's the big deal?"

Right?

It's a couple of adults with... probably on the autism spectrum, maybe Down syndrome.

What's the big deal?

So, there's all these meetings.

And finally, I thought, "I'm going to go to one of these meetings."

And it was in the basement of a VFW hall.

And everybody's going on and on, and I'm thinking, "None of this makes sense."

And finally, this elderly man says, "We can't let that house open "because who knows?

"Maybe some of those adults living there "will be black.

And we can't have that."

And with that, there was this silence, and everybody's looking at their shoes.

And I thought, "Aha!

This is what's really going on.

This is the real reason nobody wants this house to open."

About a week later was the official meeting of the city council for that part of Brooklyn to vote on opening this house.

So I thought, "I'm going to go to that meeting, and I'm going to sign up to speak."

Up to this point, I haven't spoken at any meeting.

I haven't said anything.

Go to the meeting early...

It's in a school auditorium, it's packed.

All my neighbors are there.

I signed up when I got in as the public part to speak.

So, the meeting begins.

The city council president goes through all the pro forma things, says, "Now it's time to vote "on the proposed residence.

"First is the public comment, and only one person is signed up.

Where's Mark Redmond?"

And I'm like, "I'm the only one?

"Everybody's been talking about this for months.

I'm the only one here..." And all my neighbors, of course, look, you know... "What's he up there for?"

So, for a second, I really was like, "This is not a good idea.

I should just sit back down."

But I didn't.

I made myself get up at that microphone and they're all looking at me.

And I said, "Number one, I work "for a Catholic non-profit organization here in Brooklyn, "and I know the Catholic Guardian Society, "and it's a good, solid non-profit "with a great reputation.

"So I have every confidence in their ability "to run a quality program.

"But, more importantly, I live on this block.

"And this is a nice block.

"It's clean.

It's safe.

"People are friendly.

People are nice.

"And if I had a relative with a developmental disability-- "an aunt, an uncle, a cousin, a brother, or a sister-- "I would want them to live in that house on this nice block.

"So I don't have any problem at all "with the opening of this residence.

"In fact, I hope you, the members of this city council vote for it."

And I went to get off the podium and I didn't even have to look.

I could feel the stares of hatred.

Hatred is not too strong a word.

I could feel the stares of hatred from my neighbors, and as I went to sit down, I passed the city councilwoman, who tapped me, grabbed me on the arm, and said, "That was so beautiful, so moving."

And then the city council president says, "Call the vote.

All in favor of the home, say aye."

Nobody says aye.

"All against?"

All the hands go up.

Including the woman who, two seconds ago, thought it was so beautiful and moving.

(laughter) It was hard to live on that block after this.

There were no more little kids coming down the street to play with my son in our front yard.

The people who used to drive by and smile and wave, nobody was smiling at us.

Nobody was waving.

You know?

It was really hard.

The home, ironically enough, did open up.

There was a law on the books in New York state called the Padavan Law, whereby to block a program like that, you had to prove that the area was already oversaturated with social service programs.

And it wasn't.

They couldn't prove that.

So, despite the vote of the city council, the home opened up.

So, it's 25 years later.

My little son, he's 30 now.

He lives in New Hampshire.

He's got a little boy.

I live in Vermont.

I think about that incident many times because it was one of the first times in my life I had to take a stand for what I thought was right and good and true, knowing-- knowing-- that it wasn't going to be popular and it was going to cost me.

But it helped me because it helped set my moral compass for the rest of my life.

Thank you.

(cheers and applause) HAZARD: Tonight, the theme for Stories from the Stage is "Welcome to the Neighborhood."

I was hoping you could shed a little light on how you are seeing the story that you're going to tell tonight, in relation to that theme.

DOOLEY: I was really excited by that theme because one of the most important incidents of my life was moving to a new neighborhood that really made a huge difference in my life.

It was a neighborhood in Cambridge.

It was the first time I rented an apartment by myself.

It was my first, you know... just as one single person putting my name on the lease, that kind of thing.

But that's not why that was an important neighborhood for me but it just had a lot of firsts in it.

So, the first day in the neighborhood, I came home from work and I went down into my kitchen, and I looked out my kitchen window, and I could see my neighbor.

That wasn't hard because there's only three feet between the fence that divided his yard from mine.

And he came right up to the window because he saw me too, and he said, "Hey you!

You, you...um... excuse me!

You really to pay attention to something here."

I said, "Excuse me?"

He said, "Yeah, you know... "You can't leave your window open like that.

"And unlocked while you're away at work all day long.

"I mean, I saw two kids trying to climb "right into your window there.

"So you need to pay attention.

Where are you from?"

And I said, "Well, you know...

I lived in Boston and Brookline."

And he said, "Yeah, yeah, you're not from here, huh?

Welcome to the neighborhood."

So, that was Mr. Darlington.

He was our next-door neighbor on one side in Central Square in Cambridge.

And on the other side, the Trans lived.

And they were from Vietnam.

And our neighborhood was an immigrant neighborhood.

It was full of people from all over the world.

We had people from all over the Caribbean.

From Central America.

We had people from Portugal, from Greece, from Ethiopia, all these people, all around, living together in this neighborhood.

And we were in a war zone because there was the drug war going on.

Now, the politicians have a different name for it.

They call it the "war on drugs."

But it was a drug war.

And it was going on all around us, and our little neighborhood there, from one block... one end of the block to the other, just one little block of Washington Street was kind of an oasis, kind of a no-fly zone, a no-kill zone there.

We had neighbors who took care.

Because we had neighbors who were immigrants, who had come for decades before, like Mrs. Darlington, who had raised all of her children there, and it was her grandchildren now who played right next to our windows, and played kickball there.

But she had raised all of her children after she and her husband had moved from Barbados.

And she was the one who had no-- she had absolutely no patience for any nonsense, and she instructed me how to act when I was out on the street.

If I saw anything that was nonsense, I was to stop it right away and take care of business.

And that's why we had the kind of street that we had because people took that kind of interest and took that kind of care with what was going on around us.

But see, we were in a war.

And the first casualty of war is truth.

And propaganda runs wild.

And so, the stories that we're told about our neighbors in our neighborhood were so completely missing the humanity of the people that I knew there.

And because we realized that we were in a war, that we were going to have to know our stories and each other's stories if we were going to get out of this all right, because the war around us was real.

It wasn't propaganda.

There was illegal activity.

There was street crime.

There were shots in the night.

There were people killed in the park, stabbed and shot to death.

So, it was real.

And we were going to have to know each other's stories.

So we sought each other out.

And I remember when Ha Nguyen moved in next door from Vietnam.

She came with her six children.

So, we just kind of waved when I first saw her.

And my children were sort of peeking through my legs.

And her children were peeking through their legs at each other and the next day, she brought a big bowl of rice to the door.

And she said, "Hello.

I'm your new neighbor.

I'm Ha Nguyen and hope that we can be friends."

And I was so embarrassed because aren't we supposed to do that for our neighbors, not the other way around?

And, finally, I got to talk to her and I got to know more about her because I was not only collecting stories that would help us in this situation that we were in, but I was a storyteller at that time, and I was an educator, and I wanted to find stories to tell in schools to children that would reflect their heritage and the countries that they came from.

So, I remember asking Ha Nguyen, "Do you have any stories from Vietnam?

Any folktales or fairy tales or things like that?"

And she said, "Oh no, Norah.

"I heard no stories like that.

"Or, if I did, I don't remember them.

"Because all the time, when I was growing up, there was war.

"And I saw more dead bodies than anyone should ever see.

"And finally, we lost our village, and when I was 13, "I had to go from my village, my beautiful village, "where we had a farm with oranges "and many, many brothers and sisters, "and beautiful vegetables that we grew, "I had to move to Saigon.

But there I met my husband."

And she said that she married and she followed him all around the country as he fought the war for the South Vietnamese Army.

But then they started to lose the war and they had to go farther, farther south until they came back to Saigon.

She said, "And when we lost the country, "they took my husband from me and put him in jail.

"They put him way up in the north.

"And I could only visit him once a year.

"And it took two days on the bus to visit him.

"And when I saw him, I sat on one end of the table, "and he sat on the other.

"And there were armed guards on either side.

"And he would say, 'How are the children?'

"And I would say, 'Fine.'

"And that was all we could say to each other.

"Because there were armed guards "And so we just cried and looked at each other.

But finally they let him out of jail," she said, "And he came back to Saigon, but he kept on getting picked up by the police, and being questioned" and they finally decided they had to leave because they thought that one day, they would pick him up and not release him, so they decided they had to leave, but they weren't allowed to leave.

So they bought a boat, all the brothers and the family, bought a boat, a fishing boat.

And below the decks, there were 47 people.

She said, "There were 47 of us, Norah.

"And our youngest child, he was 20 days old, "and we had to go down the river, "underneath the bridges where the men were listening, where the soldiers were listening," she said.

And they got to the sea.

And the sea... (sighs in awe) She said, "When we got to the sea, we escaped Vietnam, "but when we got to the sea, there was a huge storm.

"And the storm lifted up our little, tiny boat "and smashed it like an egg.

"And it cracked and there was saltwater in everything.

"And nothing that we could eat.

"And, oh, we were sick.

"And the baby had no milk.

"I had nothing to give it.

"It was terrible, but... "...the storm had two good things.

"Pirates don't work in storms.

"If they did, I would not be here to tell you this story.

"And that storm blew us to Malaysia, "where we went to a refugee camp, "and we stayed there for three years, "and then we came to Arlington, because someone sponsored us "to come to Arlington.

"And then, with our brothers and sisters "and all of our friends, we put together enough money to buy this house."

And so, I heard her story and I thought about all the stories that there were in my neighborhood.

And when people talk about neighborhoods, you know, people say, "I'm from Boston."

And they might be from Saugus or Revere, just the way I say I'm from New York, and I grew up in Staten Island, and everybody's got to laugh if they're from New York.

But when you say, "Where are you, where are you from?"

What neighborhood are you from?

I like to say, "I'm from the neighborhood where my neighbors share their stories with me so I can learn to become a good neighbor."

That's my neighborhood.

Thank you.

(cheers and applause) HAZARD: I do like to get to know my neighborhood, and, you know, get a sense of what I'm dealing with so I do it in a very 21st-century way.

As soon as I pull up, I pull out my phone, and look at all the available WiFi network names, okay?

That is how I get a sense of where I'm living, and I did that this week.

And I got some keepers, all right, so I'm going to share with you.

These are a couple of the names that are in my neighborhood.

These are the people I'm living with, sharing space with.

We have "kitten pizza."

Okay.

"Endless pie."

I feel there's a story there.

Okay.

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