A New Story By Amina Gautier from KWELI

RERUN

If we flip the channels fast enough, we can turn almost anyone Puerto Rican, blurring black and white into Boricua. When we can’t find a good show with a Puerto Rican actor, we make our own, turning the knob selector on the TV as hard and fast as we can, watching all the brown faces click by until our mother yells from the kitchen for us to choose a show and stick to it.

Reruns all summer long because cable is brand new and only for the rich. Like everyone else, we want our MTV, but we never get it. We’re stuck with the same old summer vacation lineup of mornings filled with game shows and soap operas, of summer syndication afternoons and reruns of Fantasy Island, Gidget, Good Times, Happy Days, and Trapper John, M.D. Our mother says it’s important to see oneself on the big and little screens; she goes on and on about growing up watching Rita Moreno in West Side Story and Nichelle Nichols on Star Trek, and every Easter she makes us sit through The Greatest Story Ever Told to see José Ferrer play Herod the Roman tetrarch.

Read the rest of the story on KWELI: https://www.kwelijournal.org/fiction/2022/3/7/rerun-by-amina-gautier