Mathematician and comic book writer Jason Rodriguez feels torn between separate cultural and professional identities.
Jason Rodriguez is a writer, editor, educator, and applied mathematician. Jason spends the first half of his day developing physiological models of human injury. In the evenings, Jason creates educational comic books about American history, systemic racism, and physics. On the weekends, Jason tends to visit conventions, museums, libraries, and festivals in order to talk about the unparalleled joy of comic books, and how that joy can spark a desire to learn and create in kids. Jason lives in Arlington, VA on the rare occasion when he’s home.
This story originally aired on May 4, 2018 in an episode titled “Identity,”
Story Transcript
My name is Jason Rodriguez and I am a whole person, but I haven't always been.
My elementary school was P.S. 58. It was in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. Carroll Gardens was a predominantly Irish and Italian neighborhood so, by extension, 58 was a predominantly Irish and Italian school. You could imagine a kid with the last name Rodriguez going to a school like that will run into his fair share of problems.
My problems were exasperated by the fact that I was also a giant nerd. I was such a nerd that I was in the G&T program which stood for Gifted and Talented but the other kids called Garbage and Trash. I was such a nerd that I was the valedictorian of my elementary school, which is just such a bonkers concept that a school would point to a kid and say, “This is this school’s biggest nerd.”
But I was a nerd in a lot of other ways too because I liked a lot of things that most kids my age kind of moved away from. I liked toys, I liked video games, I liked cartoons but, most of all, I loved comic books. I loved the Amazing Spider-Man, I loved the Uncanny X-Men and I loved every single thing in between.
Because of all these factors, 58s could have been a bit of a problem, but I was cautiously optimistic about junior high school. Junior high school was going to be different. I went to JHS 142. 42s, unlike 58s, was on the border of Carroll Gardens and Red Hook. Red Hook, at the time, was a predominantly black and Latinx neighborhood and I was a Rodriguez.
Additionally, I had deep roots in Red Hook. My parents were raised in Red Hook. All four of my grandparents were raised in Red Hook. Every Friday, I would be in Red Hook on Dikeman Street in my grandma’s house sitting around the table with my mom, my dad, my dad’s six siblings, all the cousins. We would eat our meal, we would tell jokes, we would sing songs, we would sometimes get up and dance. I was confident at this setting in Red Hook.
I was at my grandma’s house the Friday before I was supposed to start junior high school and I went outside and this kid I knew forever, Beto, he was outside playing basketball. I knew Beto was also starting at 42 so I joined him. We shot horse for a little bit, and I asked him if he was nervous about starting at 42s. Beto said, “No, not at all.”
I knew a lot of people there already. A lot of my friends from his elementary school, which was 29s, was going to be there. Beto was set. And by extension, I thought I was a Rodriguez with deep roots in Red Hook, and I knew Beto and Beto knew people, and I was going to be set in junior high school.
A couple of days into my junior high school experience, I’m walking home by myself and a group of kids come up to me and Beto was with them. I don't know what I’m expecting but the kids walk right up to me and they say, “Yo, shorty. Run your shit,” which basically means take everything out of your pockets and give it to them.
I didn’t want to sell Beto out. I kind of felt bad for Beto because Beto is trying to fit in too. So I do the one thing that a true nerd would do. I take out my wallet, pull out my junior high school ID, show it to these kids and say, “You don’t have to mug me. My name is Jason Rodriguez. Rodriguez. There's plenty of other kids you can mug. It’s fine. We’re good.”
Well, that didn’t work. So I tried begging and pleading. That didn’t work.
Finally, I turn to Beto. He's my trump card. And I say, “I know that guy. I know Beto. We’re good.”
And Beto looks at me and he says, “I don't know you, white boy.”
That’s when I realized that I was too white for the Puerto Rican kids and too Puerto Rican for the white kids. It’s also when I realized that these were two very separate identities that I can put inside boxes and take them out whenever I needed them. This was sort of the way I lived from the time I was mugged by Beto and his friends up until I learned about space cats. And I'll get to that.
But before we get there there was another fracturing that was kind of important to this story. I went to college, Boston University, biomedical engineering student, and within the first couple of weeks my student adviser, faculty adviser, whatever they call it, invited me and a couple of other students to his house for dinner.
So we go. He has this gorgeous house in the Boylston neighborhood of Boston, which is the most hoity-toity neighborhood possible. We go up to his apartment. It’s on the top floor. He has a wall that’s just like a window. He has a globe. He has a telescope. Like this house, this apartment reminded me of the apartment from Frasier, and I’m only saying that because that was the only point of reference I had at that age of what a fancy apartment should look like.
We had Indian food. Even though I never had Indian food, I never knew they existed, and I was sitting there eating chicken tikka masala for the first time and I thought to myself, “Man, I want this life.”
At the same time I started making comics. They were dumb comics. It was a comic about a string that was also a DJ. It was called DJ Stringboy. It was just…
But my college friends they really loved it. They laughed and they wanted to see more of it and they wanted to spread it around.
It was really exciting this thing that I've always read was now being created by me and I could share it and people liked it. And I said, “Man, I really want this life.”
But I never once said I want both of these lives at the same time. For me, these were two very different lives. So I went forward with my Puerto Rican box and my white box and my creative box and my professional box and I never used any one of those boxes at once. I always took out whichever fit the moment.
So with my professional box, I went, I got my tech job, I got business cards, I got a tie, I gave talks at conventions, I got another degree, I started getting into business development, I was doing great.
With my creative job, I started doing small press zines and then small press books and then it’s mid press books and then large press books, conventions, totally different business card, that was going fine.
But those two lives never crossed. People from the creative side knew nothing about my technical side and people from my technical side new nothing about my creative side. They were completely different identities.
So one point, I started getting into doing comic book workshops for kids. I loved doing it. I loved working with kids, going into schools, all that stuff. I had this friend Eric. He was doing a science fiction and science comic book workshop at an elementary school in D.C. and he asked me if I wanted to join.
I said, “This sounds great. What we’ll do is we’ll go in, we’ll have a scientist with us, that scientist will teach the kids something and then we’ll teach them how to make that concept into a comic book.”
And Eric goes, “Okay. Well, I mean, you're the scientist in this situation, right?”
I’m like, “Well, no. I mean this is my comic book life. This isn’t my science life. I can’t do both.”
And he's like, “Well, honestly you're gonna be there already and you're free so…”
So I decided to give it a shot. I go into this classroom, fifth grade class, and I tell the kids about NASA’s Rosetta Mission. I say, “Check this out. This is so cool. We’re gonna land a probe on a comet which is like the most awesome thing you've ever heard, right?”
And the class was like, “Yes.”
Then I go, “And then that probe is gonna dig into this comet. How awesome is that?”
They're like, “Wow!”
Then I’m like, “Then this is gonna like suck water out until it dies, and that’s kinda boring, right?”
And the kids are like, “Yeah, it’s boring.”
I’m like, “So why don’t you come up with a better fate for this comet? Like take this and do something with it.”
So there's one kid, his hand shoots up and doesn’t wait to be called on. He just says, “I wanna do a comic about space cats,” and the whole class just laughs.
The girl next to him she rolls her eyes and she goes, “That’s Timmy. Timmy is always talking about space cats.”
I’m just like, “Well, Timmy, tell me a little bit about these space cats. Like what do they do?”
And Timmy says… he just gets so excited. Timmy is just like, “Space cats they're flying around. They're catching space mice. And they have jet packs. And they've got oxygen tanks and helmets and…”
I’m like, “Timmy, all right. Let’s slow down. Slow down. Space is big. Cats are small. Big old oxygen tanks, right? How do they get from Point A to Point B?”
He goes, “Well, you know, they must‘ve refilled their tanks.” And I wait for a second and Timmy goes, “You know what? They dig into the comets, they pull out the water, they get the oxygen from the water and they refill their tanks.”
And I had a transformative experience. Because not only was I a scientist who taught Timmy something, and Timmy turned that into something creative and he took ownership of it, but at the same time Timmy was simultaneously a cartoonist and a scientist. This fifth grader! And I have never even thought of doing that.
So I doubled down. I already had this phase where I was doing these American History comics. I started doing science comics. I started doing science fiction comics. I would go to comic conventions and be on a panel and I would introduce myself as a scientist and a comics creator, and it was just freeing.
I started talking to people at my day job and I started telling them about the stuff I was doing, and they were really into it. My company actually did a full-page feature on me on the company magazine and it was just all this stress off my body just by taking these two boxes, creator and professional, and putting them together.
I had two more boxes to deal with and I wondered if I can reconcile them. So late last year I started talking to Shout Mouse Press. They're a local publisher. They work with first time teen authors and they wanted to do their very first comic book. We started talking to the Latin American Youth Center and we applied for a grant through the DC Council of Art and Humanities with three other cartoonists and we won the grant.
The idea was we were going to spend a month teaching these first generation Latinx teenagers how to make comics. Then we were going to publish their memoirs in 2018. We’re still doing that. So I was very excited about this.
I show up to the first day of workshops and the whole group of kids, 16 or so teenagers, a couple of adults sitting in a circle, we have to get up and tell everyone about ourselves and what we want to do with this workshop, we expect to get out of it, and it takes me about two seconds to realize I am the only person in this room who doesn’t speak Spanish. And additionally, I’m pretty sure most of the kids don’t speak English. I felt like such an impostor. I just felt like this was a terrible idea.
But I pushed on because I believe in the program, I believe in the kids. So many weeks as we rolled on, we would sit around tables with markers and pens and papers and the kids would tell their stories about their fears, about this current environment, about what it’s doing to them and what they want to do to it. Not violent stuff but how they want to change it and it was inspiring. It reminded me so much of these confident moments when I was a kid sitting at my grandma’s house and listening to my titis and my tios and my sister and all these people just talk about who they are and never try to hide it.
We finished up the workshop. The kids turn in their pages. They were beautiful. On the last day we got to all sit in a circle again and talk about what we learned, what we’re thankful for, all that stuff.
Everyone gets up and it’s my turn. My plan was to tell them what I just told you, about how I saw my family. I maybe got two sentences out because I was crying so hard. I’m pretty sure the kids knew what I was trying to say but, for me, I was standing there and I realized that, yeah, I helped these kids find their voice and find a way to tell their story but these kids helped me so much because, for the first time in like forever, I was a Puerto Rican, I was a white kid, I was a scientist, and I was a comics artist. For the first time in a long time, my name was Jason Rodriguez and I was whole.
Thank you.