All the Dominicans I knew in those days sent money home. My mother certainly did. She didn’t have a regular job outside of caring for us five kids so she skimp the loot together from whatever came her way. My father was always losing his forklift job so it wasn’t like she had a steady flow ever. But my mother would rather have died than not send money back home to my grandparents in Santo Domingo. They were alone down there and those remittance, beyond material support, were a way, I suspect, for Mami to negotiate the absence, the distance caused by our diaspora. Hard times or not she made it happen. She chipped dollars off from the cash Papi gave her for our daily expenses, forced our already broke family to live even broker. In those times when nobody gave a damn about nutrition we alone among our friends never had juice, soda, snacks in our apartment. Not ever. And you can forget about eating at McDonald’s or having clothes with real labels. The family lived tight and that was how she built the nut that she sent home every six months or so to the grandparents