Homecoming: Growing Up Dominican in South Dakota

We reflect on a year of building Tradition Café, then move into a vulnerable reading of Homecoming—a story about growing up Dominican in South Dakota and redefining where home lives.

This episode explores identity, heritage, and belonging across cultures—touching on Dominican roots, Midwestern upbringing, and the tension between language loss and cultural pride. Through memory, family, and chosen community, we return to a deeper question: what does “home” really mean?

There’s gratitude, a little awkward self-promo, merengue in the kitchen, and a ring passed through generations—all threading a path back to self.

Happy New Year, everybody. I love you.

Thank you for listening to Tradition Café. Visit www.traditioncafe.com for blog posts, news, and links, and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube for videos and updates.

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Transcript

Welcome To Tradition Cafe

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Hey friends, welcome to Tradition Cafe. The spot with a past buffed into the present, and we get to sip our favorite drinks while digging into the stories that make people well people. I'm on the subject of hosts and carriers and hopefully for the fun of learning about people's lives. In each episode, we'll celebrate heritage, family, and community, whether it's immigrants, the generations that came after them, or chosen families that make life messy, interesting, and unforgettable. So if you're like me, inquisitive, a little nosy, and love a good story. Pull up a chair, grab your cup, and thanks for listening. So long, 2025. Before anything else, thank you to the listeners, my sponsors, the Fireside Lounge and Alameda Gallery and Collective. My biggest cheerleader, Jordan, and friends and family who supported this from the beginning, and to all the new listeners from across the globe. Thank you, thank you, thank you for joining me at the table. I appreciate you all so much. This project comes from my own story. I'm Dominican, born and raised in South Dakota, where there was very little Latino culture around me, and limited access to speaking Spanish, as I'm sure you can imagine. But you know what? That absence shaped me. It made me deeply curious, almost hungry, I would say, to talk to other kids of immigrants and to understand how we form our identities, how we carry culture, memory, and a sense of belonging, really. The first year of Tradition Cafe has been challenging, very challenging, tiring, and it's full of learning curves from the research that I love to do, finding guests. The technology learning curve is huge. The worst part for me is social media, and I am not great at it. I'm so I'm so lame. I just hate it because self-promotion doesn't come naturally to me. So what you see me post online, or maybe sometimes the silly or mischievous rapport that I have with my guests, it's me. Uh it's it's what you get. What you hear is what you get. Following my curiosity works best, though. But in all seriousness, this project is helping me grow. I want to thank all the guests who entrusted me with their stories. Sharing them has been a gift. So instead of going deep today into all of those ideas like culture and identity and ethnicity and traditions, I'm actually going to read a story that I wrote in grad school, and it was published in 2004 in an anthology with SEAL Press. But hey, full disclosure, this story might sound a little rough and, well, a a lot cheesy. It was the first thing I wrote in grad school, though, and the first thing I ever sent out to be published. I had a teacher who I was in her class and I wrote this story, and she loved it, and she persuaded me, encouraged me, persuaded me, whichever, to actually send it out to some writing contests and stuff like that. Well, I looked him up and this submission call was the first thing I saw, and I turned it in. I was completely flabbergasted when they accepted it. I mean, this doesn't happen normally when somebody sends out a piece in the hopes of being published. You usually have to go a long time of getting rejection after rejection after rejection. I'm not saying that I didn't get rejections after that, because I've I could probably wallpaper my closet. But this was the first thing and it got accepted, and I was so proud of it. And but I gotta tell you, this is a super vulnerable thing for me to be doing. But, you know, as corny as it is, it just goes to show that these are questions. This is a topic that has been with me my whole life. And in many ways, Tradition Cafe has been there with me since well before podcasts were a thing. I just didn't know what I was gonna do with the idea. I didn't think there was anything I could do with the idea. And I'm just gonna jump out on this ledge and read it to you. I just want to say happy new year to everybody. 2026 is hopefully gonna be better for all of us. It's a really divisive time out there, and that's why my tagline is many voices, one table. My dream is that people can all sit together and talk about where they come from, their heritage, their lineage, their ethnicities, their traditions, and everyone is respected, and everyone is welcome to that table. Cause you're sure as shit, welcome to the table at Tradition Cafe. Happy New Year, everybody. I love you. Bye. Homecoming by Anna Xavier Camagno. A homecoming story is told like this the wayward traveler makes it across the world in her quest to return to the one place that holds her heart. Her family welcomes her with tearful joy and stories of what has occurred since last they saw her. The traveler also has stories of what she has seen, learned, and become. It ends with the traveler gleefully proclaiming that of all the places in the world, of all the people she has met, of all the adventures she has lived, nothing compares to her one and only home, her blood, her family. Mine is not that story. Traveling west with my window rolled down, I suck in the unsullied gusts of the South Dakota plains. The slight hills that lead Minnesota into South Dakota on Highway twelve rock me like a baby and then at last lead to a peaceful, almost sleepy flat terrain. The horizon is clear and very far away. Fields, sky, and that's all. My eye is finally able to rest without the obstructions of the buildings of San Francisco where I have lived for four years. When I come home to see my parents, I must first fly to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and then backtrack by car five and a half hours west to Aberdeen, South Dakota, my hometown. Flying into Aberdeen is too remote and therefore too expensive for me. Groton, South Dakota sits 20 miles outside of Aberdeen. The small town's one stoplight marks the deadline to start a mental preparation for my homecoming. My parents and childhood home await me. In some way, Aberdeen felt foreign to me all of my life. I was born and raised in Aberdeen. I lived there until I left for college, although I'm sure I called it escaped back then. But now, the uneasiness that I feel rises up to meet my excitement. And as I get closer to home, my questions begin to surface, buoyant and persistent. What if the buildings don't feel familiar anymore? If they have faded into the ground, do they swallow my memories of childhood with them in order to make way for a new unfamiliar generation's memories? The gap of time that I've been away could possibly have been much too damaging. I'd gone away from Aberdeen not wanting to own the small town Midwestern American girl part of me. Am I able to call this a homecoming at all if I've denied this piece of me? Do I still have this right? Well the faces recognize me. The wheat fields wave me in the right direction in case I've forgotten the way. The cornfields offer an endless green comfort to my growing anxiety. As I reach Aberdeen, I slow the car to a law abiding, nearly impossible twenty five miles per hour. Here, all the trucks and Oldsmobiles signal their turns and give small town waves of hello as they pass by. My city mind wonders if I know them. Aberdeen is skewered by Highway twelve. It's name changing to Sixth Avenue in town. It starts with a horse stable and ends with the Starlight Truck Stop. This town where I stood out with my Caribbean freckles and curly hair made a Midwestern American girl out of me. I passed the John Deere Tractor Sales Lot, the McDonald's where I held my first job and joked with my friends that I got the job so the establishment could fill its ethnic quota. Alexander Mitchell Library, where storytime was the best babysitter my mother could find. Roncali High School, where I once found inscribed on my desk the words get back on your banana boat and go back to where you came from. A few blocks later, the house where I attended Girl Scout meetings and finally into the driveway of my childhood home. As I stepped out of my car, like a sailor returning from a long voyage, I understood the urge to kiss the ground and worship the familiarity. The house, a nineteen sixty eight rambler my parents built on the outskirts of town, is now surrounded by a thriving middle class neighborhood. Outside I pause, listening to the stock cars hum and whistle their way around the Brown County Fairgrounds racetrack. The crickets chime in, as if to remind me what summer sounded like when I was a child. The South Dakota girl in me wakes to notice that by the look of the clouds a thunderstorm is approaching. It will reach us in an hour or two. My hand on the doorknob, I can already hear the merengue from mom and dad's stereo. It takes me back to our nighttime flights into the Dominican Republic, where below us the sporadically dispersed lights throughout the countryside lay like a golden shawl over the brown skin of the island. The cab from the airport always reeked of sweat, cheap cologne, the Caribbean Sea and sausages, and Merenga shouted from radios in the Colmados along the highway to the capital city of Santo Domingo. The people grouped around lit up stores buying rum and drinking it from squishy plastic cups while sitting on their mopeds, watching us speed by in our rented transportation. My parents and four little girls tourists packed in with noses pressed to the windows. Opening the door and stepping into the kitchen I am greeted by the thick smell of a roscom pollo and platano, the same smell of a buellas Gosina in Santo Domingo, where upon my arrival a throng of aunts, uncles, and cousins would run to welcome me. But here in Aberdeen, I slip serenely into the arms of just my mother and father. The Brugal rum is on the counter waiting for the inaugural drink. My home is the moment when the cultures cross, that fleeting glimpse of change, and then the constant rock and sway of Midwest and Caribbean customs. As a child, I wasn't able to bridge that gap in my mind. The gap that meant I felt at home neither in Aberdeen nor in the Dominican Republic. Things fall into those gaps, acceptance and belonging. When I was a kid, my mother would dress herself and us in traditional Dominican clothes and make traditional Dominican dishes for Aberdeen's International Food Festival. She decorated her booth with sea creatures, Dominican art, the flag, and a map. I was too young then to realize how our booth differed from the Scandinavian and German ones. All I knew was that traffic at our booth was very slow. Later I didn't want to dress up to explain myself and my family, our customs, where in the world the Dominican Republic was, what language my parents were speaking, what the smell was coming from my mother's kitchen. How do you explain Tostonis La Bandera Dominicana or Pastelitos to a fellow twelve year old raised on three bean salad and not willing to try anything new? Alternately, what I had craved in the Dominican Republic was a way to go undetected, to be seen as one of their own. My mom and dad, both Dominican, acculturated to American ways and simultaneously tried to maintain Dominican traditions for their four daughters. They raised us to become equal parts American woman and Muheres Latinas. What they couldn't give us was a Latino community. So they improvised, building something of a surrogate American, extended family, a German man and his Haitian wife and their children, a Chinese family, an Iranian, Finnish, Indian, and Irish families to name a few. Together we satiated our common need for cultural understanding as we shared foods, traditions, and stories. The buffet lines at holiday parties took extra long as the chefs shared descriptions of each dish, traded recipes and traditions. A culinary feast lay sprawled before us like a relief map of the world. German pastries, Chinese vegetables, Dominican meats, and always the ever present thread of translation running through the cord of conversation. How do you say goat in Spanish? Is that a custom here? What do they do for Christmas Eve in the Dominican Republic? And as the party progressed, the more the differences trickled away and left us with a festive gathering of friends celebrating together. But this international community could not teach me my mother tongue, and because I did not know Spanish, my visits home to Santo Domingo were often wordless. The wall of language that stood between my family and me has been a source of frustration all my life. My cousin Ramiro, who was the closest to me in age, was often my number one conversation partner. Eager as I was to speak Spanish, he was just as eager to hear English. Afternoons at the beach were spent with sticks in our hands, spelling words and quickly drawing their meanings in the sand before the waves could wash away the lessons. In the winter of nineteen ninety eight, my grandmother and I sat in the dining room of her house in Santo Domingo. I had approached her with a gentle voice and simple words so as not to startle her. She had gone blind from glaucoma, but her one hundred and three year old smile acknowledged my presence. I took her hand in silence and sat next to her. This would be the last time I would see her. I was sure of it even as I sat there. I struggled to emboss the image on my memory of the two of us sitting in peace together. The afternoon was thick with humidity. We had just finished eating and Abuela had already taken her afternoon bath to help battle the heat. She wore her white dress for the hot Caribbean afternoon. I wanted to ask her when she stopped wearing the mourners black and gray. My grandfather had died more than two decades before, but I had always remembered her wearing the gray dress with the black flowers on it. In our home movies in Aberdeen, I would often sit by myself and run the portions filmed in the Dominican Republic in slow motion to make them last longer. I would pause, listening to the clicking of the projector, and watch the slow blinking of my aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents, watching them mouth words in Spanish to the camera slow enough even for me to be able to decode their meaning. I pretended I was there in the room, looking my young grandmother in the face. I guess in my selfish way I had always wished it were true that they didn't move as fast as the rest of the world. That not much would change until I got there, that they would wait for me to continue so that I wouldn't miss a thing. As I felt her hand that day, the softness of it surprised me. She'd been a hard working matriarch for a majority of her life. Was the Caribbean climate really that different? How rough she must have found my American hands. Our silence soaked me entirely. In the other rooms was the chaos of the rest of the family, voices, music. Yet here we sat, stealing time to hang on to each other. I wanted to explain that my biggest regret in life so far was not being able to speak fluently with my extended family, that my heart was filled with sadness, that I had never been able to approach her with my little girl joys and my young woman troubles. Advice on love, recipes for sancocio, pasteles y platanos, directions on how to reason with my strict father, who had turned out to be very much like her husband from what Matias told me, the importance of washing rice before cooking it, and the merits of being a good listener among a house full of loud dominicanos. All of these things lost to the rapid swirl of my struggling translation. I touched the gold ring on her finger. It had been worn by four generations of Xavier women before being given to my grandmother. Whatever had been engraved on the face of it was now worn smooth. I felt their stories concentrated inside the gold. It looped her finger like a yarn of remembrance, creating an indentation from the pressures of the years and the tales of my family. She had known them. They knew one another's virtues, shortcomings, blessings, and tribulations. Word for word. On our repeated visits to Santa Domingo, we always stayed long enough that my sisters and I would begin to understand the jokes and to answer the questions, but we always left too soon to retain anything once we returned to Aberdeen. You're so dark, say something in Spanish, my friends would beg me while marveling at my tan, and I would search nervously for anything I could mutter. Sabatos, I would say, and offer up other strange exotic sounding words for everyday items like shoes and butter. Every visit to Santa Domingo would instill in me a fresh resolve stronger each time to keep the memories, faces, and words lodged in my brain.

SPEAKER_00 18:47

I promise I'll remember. I swear I won't forget.

Redefining Home And Belonging

Closing Wishes For The New Year

SPEAKER_01 18:51

There is a little anger in me at my parents for not letting us have that connection to our heritage. They partly regret it. I have seen it in the frustration of having to interpret for us even though we are all grown. I've taken Spanish classes, I've taken the initiative to learn more than what I absorbed on those childhood visits. The ever present fear of failing to speak correctly kept me from using it. Or perhaps it was the eighteen years of living in a six person Latino community in South Dakota, where I was often taken automatically for Native American by Midwesterners, or where, because I was quote unquote Spanish, I was assumed to be fluent and was pressured to speak it and to get all A's in Spanish class. My eyes traced my aboela again. As they moved across her face with all the questions and statements in my head, I simply muttered. I love you was all that was possible in that moment. Abuela and I hadn't been alone in a room since I was a baby, and all I could mutter was that? Instantly I became angry with myself, punishing myself inwardly. For my cowardice. Abuela reached over, grasped both of my hands, and replied De amo Damien, te amocho. It wasn't that she said she loved me too, I already knew that. It was that she heard me and understood me. It was as if she was saying that she understood this battle that had been raging in my head all along, and that she was just waiting patiently for me to acknowledge that I could shed my inhibitions, to acknowledge to myself that I could be Dominicana without having to back it up with the words. It made me feel more at home than I'd ever felt before in South Dakota or Santo Domingo. In her simple gesture, Abuela was able to unravel for me a lifetime of confusion of being half and half. I used to think that I had to choose one or the other. She gave me the feeling that I can create home anywhere I choose it to be. Back at home, my South Dakota home, in the kitchen my mother serves me a plate of Dominican flag, rice and beans, chicken and plantains. She and my father proceed to gossip catching me up on Aberdeen and family in Santo Domingo. Outside, the storm starts up. Just as I thought.