Dear Maria,
I heard the news you were retiring today and realized I needed to write and thank you for all you have given me. It’s been years since I’ve spent any regular time on Sesame Street but I was a regular visitor all through the 1970s. I returned with my own child to find you older, wiser but still bringing kindness and care to the many emotions young children feel but don’t always have the words to express. My most vivid thought of you was imagining how your hugs could heal the worst of hurts. You were the emotional center of Sesame Street for me, a girl who loved the escape of books, stories and imaginary play.
Maria, your were my first true friend. I so deeply admired that you were smart, independent, and said what you thought. More importantly, you showed me that people would like you FOR those qualities, not in spite of them. As a little Puerto Rican girl growing up in a predominantly white community in the suburbs of New York, that belief sent me to school with confidence to be myself, knowing I would be accepted. You walked with comfort on Sesame Street where acceptance was the norm and because of it, I never expected (or accepted) anything less in the communities I was a part of on the playground or in my neighborhood.
You taught me that being different was an asset. Being the only girl in a space sometimes didn’t make me weird, it simply made me true to myself. I didn’t realize its importance then, but you gave me someone who looked and spoke like me and my family on television. Not the stereotype that had been written into the fabric of our culture about Latinos as a whole. You were a driving force for the power of kindness to the most cynical of characters melting even Oscar the Grouch’s rough exterior away.
Because of you I saw Puerto Rico for the first time. Growing up, I’d hear stories about the island from my family but didn’t visit until I was 15. When you visited your family on the island and took Sesame Street with you I could see my own family in yours and our traditions given color and life as they were celebrated. It reinforced a love for my culture and validated it in a way that made me proud to share in my classrooms and with people who did not have those experiences. You helped me know from a very young age that my personal story was important, that I was seen. It was a life lesson that carries me today and is present in how I parent a young, multicultural child to love her unique contributions and know that being accepted doesn’t require that you assimilate to sameness.
Working in and later becoming co-owner of the Fix it shop you walked a non-traditional road that showed me the paths that were open to me were only limited by my own desire and capacity to imagine them. You helped teach me I could be anything I set my mind out to be. In a world and time that would go on to tell me I had limits as a girl, as a Puerto Rican your voice told me and showed me different. You echoed my parents in believing that doing your best was the most important thing you could do in the world, even when it doesn’t work out. It is a lesson I continue to pass on to my own child in a world so focused on being the best.
As I look back on my days spent with the community on Sesame Street you were my reflection into a better world. A world where I sang and danced to count and spell. A community built on compassion and understanding. A world that was based on what was possible. A community that celebrated my heritage and culture instead of the real world that was actively seeking to marginalize and stereotype it.
Maria, for the little girl on Long Island who didn’t look like anyone else at school thank you for being one of “the people in my neighborhood” I am forever grateful.
