![]() ![]() Back in Puerto Rico, after I had finished college, I would meet friends on Thursday nights for a casual group ride called Bicijangueo (bike hangout). The bike I was riding that night, a refurbished 1970s maroon Raleigh road bike that I’d brought with me when I “hopped the puddle,” had been a gift from my dad. 5 Things You Need to Do After a Bike Crash.(And then I actually ended up making hats for a few years, but that’s a story for another day.) Somewhere, between jobs, I had competed in Puerto Rico’s knockoff version of Project Runway, and my mentor and teachers urged me to apply to schools abroad. ![]() That’s how I made my way from Puerto Rico to New York City in 2010 to study fashion after four years of journalism school. I was saving up so I could take an introductory workshop at Ropajes, a small fashion design school in San Juan. And for a couple of months, I worked night shifts at the mail facility in San Juan’s Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport, sorting letters and packages and sending them on their way to their destinations. During college at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras, I was a personal assistant to a tango dancer who once claimed to have had a vision from my past and told me that I’d been a hatmaker in a past life. At age 16, I had my first “real job” at the Mayagüez Zoo, where I spent my time tending the butterfly garden and making sure visitors didn’t get poop-sprayed by the hippo. In elementary school, I made and sold macramé bracelets and beaded jewelry and delivered phone books on weekends with my mom. So while they kept second jobs on evenings or weekends, we didn’t mind helping where we could. My parents didn’t mean to put us to work at such a young age, but they valued a good education, and in Puerto Rico that can come at a great cost. Dad would pick us up from school and drive us back to his office at the University of Puerto Rico in our hometown of Mayagüez, where he would finish work while my siblings and I knocked on every office door on campus selling M&Ms and Hershey bars for a dollar apiece. In some ways, this job was no different than when I sold chocolate bars door to door as a kid whenever we were short on cash at home. I left with a sweet $20 tip, and on to the next stop I went, traveling by bike and serving the finest cannabis that sunny California had to offer to the good people of New York City. He asked a few questions, made his selections from the spread on the coffee table, and handed over the cash. I nodded back and followed him down the hall to the living room to set up. “Cool kicks,” he said with a nod to my feet. Upstairs, a tall, friendly guy greeted me at the door. I gave a fake name at the front desk the doorman pointed to the elevators. I arrived at my destination, locked up my beater bike, and double-checked the instructions on my burner phone before walking into the fancy new building on the Williamsburg waterfront.
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