"Bridge the gap with and extend the olive branch to people from past generations, because you don’t know everything."
Raquel Cepeda is an American journalist, critic, film-maker, and autobiographer of Dominican descent. The editor of Russell Simmons' OneWorld magazine between 2001 and 2004, Cepeda was also the editor of the award-winning anthology "And It Don't Stop: The Best American Hip-Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years", the co-producer, writer, and director of the documentary film Bling: A Planet Rock, and
"Sometimes I’ll bring that up and people will say, “Well, you can’t find a true Indian on the Dominican Republic,” and I’m like, “You can’t find a true anything.” What is it about us suppressing this part of ourselves and highlighting this other part of ourselves? I think all that leads to bad self-esteem, which has a ripple effect on society."
"My sense of self and my identity have been enhanced more than they’ve changed. I’m still Latina-American for the purposes of living here in the States. Sometimes I say I’m Dominican, or Dominican-American, depending on who I’m talking to; the codewords change depending on the community you’re engaging with. But for me, it was a very spiritual journey. It married the logos, the rational, the science, with the mythos, the spiritual."
"The way we construct race in the States is so different from the way people construct race all across Latin America and the Caribbean. All of a sudden you come to the States and race is foisted upon you. Then my generation’s like, “Wait a minute, where do my ancestors come from?..."