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By Dee Vazquez

I grew up in New York City. Queens. In the ’hood. When I was six, my parents divorced. I didn’t see a lot of my dad after that. Due to his situation, it was best for us not to see him: He was addicted to drugs. We didn’t understand why he left. Later we found out my mother didn’t want us identifying with a father who was a drug addict.

When my parents divorced, there was a real major shift in lifestyle. Before, he made sure that we were cultured: He’d take us to the city, to shows, to parades. He made sure that we understood life. When he left, money got really tight. Dance school, all that stuff, all the extras, had to be cut, because we couldn’t afford that dream. Everyone else had mothers and fathers. We just had our mother: single-parent household with five kids. We didn’t have much, but what she gave us was aspiration and hard work. She told us, “Just because you’re growing up in the projects doesn’t mean that you are the projects.”

Growing up, I never questioned anyone who was in any position of authority. I think this comes from my mother’s side. She’s Dominican, and she experienced the backlash of having her parents grow up during the time of the dictatorship, under Rafael Trujillo. He was like a Dominican Hitler; it was crazy. It was dangerous for them to speak out. My mother grew up being very quiet; my aunts did too. So I was always very quiet, very timid. I learned, “You don’t talk back to the people in school; you don’t talk to the teacher,” even if the teacher is wrong.

I remember when I was in the fourth grade and we moved to the projects, I was crying every day. The teacher said, “Would you shut up already?” I just looked up and said, “I have to get out of here.” The teacher slammed the door on my hand and we got into a fistfight. I was like, “Oh, my God, I fought the teacher.” My mother kept telling me, “You were wrong, you were wrong.” But she didn’t know the whole story. It was like, “Off with your head!”

I went to a Catholic high school, and it was more of the same. It was always “Bad, bad, don’t be bad, be good.” If you don’t identify with what their definition of good is, you’re bad. You were judged based on how short or long your skirt was, and how tight or baggy your pants were. You weren’t supposed to talk or talk back. My sister got kicked out after her first year because they said she spoke out too much. She wasn’t, as they said, “able to be disciplined.” I never really understood why they kicked her out, because my sister wasn’t bad; she just always spoke her mind.

From that, I understood that if you keep your mouth shut and are able to be disciplined, then you are good. I was good in their eyes. If I got in trouble, I listened, instead of saying, “No, this isn’t right.” I swallowed my truth, absolutely. But I was confused, and I knew that I needed to find answers. I needed to find out my truth.

At the same time all of this was going on, I was dealing with something else. I grew up in a predominantly African American neighborhood and didn’t really understand the Hispanic culture. I didn’t speak Spanish until high school; my mother rarely spoke it at home because she wanted to practice her English. And there was a lot of tension between African Americans and Latinos at my school. It seemed very petty at the time. We listened to the same music, we all basically originated from Africa, but there was this cultural divide. We were like enemies. They’d say, “Oh, you’re Spanish,” like it was a bad thing. You’d get cast aside: “You Spanish girls think this.” It’s almost like they were forcing an identity on me that I wasn’t aware of. There’s always so much drama going through a high school girl’s life.

So I tried to fit into other people’s world. If there was one way of being cool, I would do that. If that didn’t work, maybe I’d drift a little bit over here. Maybe if I went with this clique, I’d find myself. I was really hopping from clique to clique, thinking, Who am I? I am this clique. They’d have the tough girls, so I got involved with a bad crowd for a while, and then I hung out with the nerds for a while.

I was attracted to the bad girls. They were talking about boys in their neighborhood and how they would hang out ’til all hours of the night. I thought that was the coolest thing ever. They had this “I don’t care what you think” attitude. Before that, I never doubted my mother or any other authority figure. But now I saw that there were girls my own age that weren’t listening to anyone and were doing their own thing. I was intrigued by their coolness. Then their coolness started getting me in trouble.

One day, one of my friends got into a disagreement with a girl. They started fighting. I found myself in the dead middle of this physical altercation, trying to stop it, and ended up getting beat up by one of the girls and her boyfriend. The cops even came, trying to break it up. It was insane. And I was the only person who got into trouble.

The dean of the school told me, “You know what, I see you flopping back and forth between all these people, all these girls, with different cliques. Just do your work and don’t worry about this.” She said, “It’s time for you to open your eyes.” At the time, I didn’t want to listen to her. But eventually, I realized none of those cliques were me. The problem was, I didn’t know who “me” was. Talk about confusion.

Bit by bit, I started figuring things out, by trial and error. I had this one teacher, Mr. Santana, who was Dominican. He asked me where I was from and wanted to know why I didn’t speak Spanish. I said, “I don’t need to know that.” He said, “You need to know your culture.” I guess he made me his project. He said, “You’re going to learn it.” I started reading up on it, what shaped the country and the culture. The more I learned about my culture, the more I understood what my foundation was.

But again, it was trial and error. I started getting back into religion. My religion teacher, Mr. Mittiga, really helped me identify as a Catholic. He helped me relate to the religion and the whole notion of penance and reconciliation. Before speaking to him, I had really been questioning the religion. He brought everything back on track.

And then he committed suicide, which is the biggest sin in the Catholic Church. If he was so religious, how could he kill himself? So much confusion set in for me then, but it also helped me to personally set out and find the truth, my truth. I couldn’t get it from the dean at my school; she was too judgmental. I tried to follow the religion guy, but he committed suicide, and I knew that wasn’t the way to go. I realized that no one was going to find the answer for me. So I said, “I’ll have to find it on my own.” That’s when I created Dee-ism. It’s all about everything that I am, everything that is true to me. That’s how I got through those days, learning what is true to me, how I understand right and wrong. I really had to get in tune with who I was.

I’m still getting into my journey, my identity, establishing my own sense of integrity. This is so important. I learned this going out on auditions. If you show up with curly hair, they want it straight. It’s really difficult when someone picks you apart in an audition situation. You just have to know who you are when someone tries to dissect your being. You can’t let it get to you. You have to know yourself and be strong.

The biggest message is, know that no matter where you’re from, no matter where you are at that particular moment in time, you have to second-guess authority and find your own truth. If they’re keeping you down, question them. It’s about thinking bigger, breaking down those boxes.

Dream big for yourself.

I learned from Nelson Mandela’s example, to always have a bigger dream for myself, to carry myself with my culture on my back. If I can do it, so can you.

Dee Vazquez is creating a new standard for on-air personalities by captivating all audiences with her quick wit, sense of humor, and personable approach. As host of No. 1 Countdown: Hip-Hop on the Fuse Network, Dee brings the hottest videos and interviews from elite and ground-breaking hip-hop artists. Dee Vazquez is also an on-air personality with “The Drama King” DJ Kay Slay on HOT 97 and Sirius Satellite Radio.