Is who we are shaped more by nature or nurture? It's a question science has grappled with for years. In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers dive into their family histories to explore how the people and experiences that came before them continue to shape who they are today.

Part 1: As a teenager, Mark Pagan worries that having an old dad is affecting his social development.

Mark Pagán is an award-winning producer, writer, and editor for non-fiction podcasts and film. He is the creator and host of the critically acclaimed show Other Men Need Help. His work has been featured on Latino USA, Radiotopia, On the Media, 99 Percent Invisible, Code Switch, among others. His films and performances have been shown at dozens of festivals and shows worldwide including Slamdance Film Festival, Maryland Film Festival, RISK!, The Moth, and Story Collider. Mark's work has been nominated for a Peabody, has made The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Yorker annual “best of” lists, and has been recognized by Vulture, TIME Magazine, CBC, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Financial Times. Before working in digital media, Mark was a teacher, social worker, comedian, part-time mascot, and bboy. He currently lives in NYC with his wife and an emo pit bull named Soca.

Part 2: Curious about his DNA, Christopher Rivas takes his father on a journey to the Dominican Republic to learn about his family history.

Christopher Rivas is quickly becoming one of the most sought after multi-hyphenates as an actor, author, podcaster, and storyteller. His book Brown Enough, explores what it means to be Brown in a Black/white world. The book is part memoir and part social commentary. He also hosts two podcast series with SiriusXM's Stitcher: Brown Enough, which explores the parallel themes of this book through interview-style episodes; and Rubirosa, a 10-episode documentary-style investigation of Porfirio Rubirosa, a Dominican diplomat, race car driver, soldier and polo player who is believed to be the inspiration for the famous character ‘James Bond’. On screen, Rivas is known for his work on the Fox series, Call Me Kat, opposite Mayim Bialik, Leslie Jordan, Kyla Pratt and Cheyenne Jackson.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

Sometime over the last year, I don't know when it happened, but I got designated the one that walks the dog every morning. The dog's name is Soca. Soca and I have carved out a path in Brooklyn where we live where we do this walk every day. We go down the street and there's a lot of garages there, a lot of gear heads.

Mark Pagán shares his story at QED Astoria in Queens, NY in March 2024. Photo by Zhen Qin.

And so there are these cool cars that are there and there's one car that's always stationed in the same place. I don't know the model, but it's a late '60s two‑door sports car. Just imagine like a very cool Porsche from that era.

And the same thing happens every day. Soca and I will walk by and a new guy, every day, will stop, look at the car and take out his phone to take a picture, and then put it away.

I notice it because I do the same thing, too. And I'm not even that much of a car guy, but I am a stick shift guy. And there's something— I don't know. When I was an adolescent, it's just like something energized in me about the idea of stick shift. It could have been getaway scenes in spy movies or older brothers driving us around. It was the combination of male stoicism and strong forearms that I just found very attractive.

All I wanted to be at that age was cool and hot, and I felt anything but cool and hot. I was moving into high school. I felt like I was a short, ethnic, hairy kid being raised by a short, ethnic, hairy father. And the thing that made me feel even more like an outlier is that my dad was old. I had the old dad at school.

I don't know if anybody here has grown up with an old dad, but I minored in sociology to figure out what the hell went wrong growing up. And sociologists, they've done a lot of work. Researchers have looked at the effects of having an older parent and some sociologists will say, “Nah, no big social effects,” or anything like that. And there's a whole group that said, “Oh, yeah, this fucks a kid up a little bit.”

Because, especially a parent having a child over the age of 45, and my dad was significantly older than that, can have a lot of effects socially.

So if I would have heard those studies when I was of that age, I would have said, “Oh, yeah, later finding. I'm messed up because of this.”

But I loved my dad. He was a great guy. I was like, “All right, I'm moving into high school. I at least have like a mooring of masculinity and like a servant to help me drive or help me learn how to drive.”

Well, sadly, before I started high school, my dad unexpectedly passed away. I was going into my freshman year and I wasn't sure how I was going to do this without the guidance of my father. The first week of high school, I remember I decided to shave for the first time. I remember looking in the mirror going, "How the hell do I do this, Dad?"

So it was tough, but there was family support. And what I'm about to say might sound a little weird, but I found a silver lining to all of this, and thought, "You know what? I'm starting high school. A lot of kids don't know me here, so I can put together a new identity. I just need sort of like a model to help me do that. I need a role model.”

I figured my mom is going to start dating. That's probably going to happen. And maybe if I coach her in the right way, we can bring in a cool dad.

My conditions, they started pretty simply, like, have him wear jeans. Then it got, you know, maybe they should be ripped a little bit, maybe he's an occasional smoker. I don't want him to be like a terrible dad. I want him to, like, pick me up and maybe help me with my homework. But also, when I'm done with my homework, be like, “Hop in, kid. Let me show you how to run a racetrack.”

So that would be pretty cool. I could work with that.

So my mom did start dating and she eventually brought her boyfriend home. Now, at the time, during this freshman year of my life, I was 14. My mom was 45 and this man named Lauren was 70. This was not the age range that I had ordered.

He started being there at night, then he was there in the morning. Then he got tasked with driving me to school in his Jurassic‑era Buick, and I'd be pulling in with like the oldest person alive. My peers, they had age‑appropriate parents who would do things like take them to basketball games and do wrestling with them. How was I going to compete?

I'm like, "Oh, hey, guys. You know how we're learning about President Truman in history class? Well, my mom's boyfriend voted for him."

Right? Like, I wanted him gone. You would too.

But my mom was falling in love with him. He adored my mom and it was so gross. On top of that, my mom, she's a single mom. She was working all the time. Lauren was retired. My mom's like, “Oh, it'd be a great idea if Lauren taught you how to drive.”

And I said, “Oh, God, I don't want to deal with this.” But I needed to learn how to drive and I really, really, really wanted to learn how to drive a stick shift. And there was one car that had a stick shift and it was Lauren's 1985 Mazda RX‑7.

So, we started to take this car out. We’d do exit on ramps and off ramps on 270 in Maryland from the DC area. It would stall but then I'd get better at it. And Lauren, I'm sure some of you have either been the driver or have parented somebody driving. It can be very stressful. He never ever raised his voice. Very calm about the whole thing.

And when a driving day went especially well, he'd guide me to go down 355 to the parking lot of heaven, which was Popeyes. We would sit and we would eat. I don't remember what we would talk about, because what is there to talk about when you have fried chicken and Cajun fries? But I thought at the time, I was like, “This is all right. This is okay.” Like, “Lauren is okay.”

And I thought, “You know what? This here, this will be a nice memory when my mom breaks up with him.”

Sometime around my 16th birthday, I came home. My mom was waiting for me in the dining room and she had this look on her face. She said, “I want to talk to you about something.”

And I said, "What's going on?"

She said, "Well, Lauren asked me to marry him and I said yes."

I didn't know how much I missed my father until my mom proclaimed her love for another man.

I had a lot of things that were going against me on top of that. Those same sociologists that I talked about earlier, a lot of them talk about this idea of, like, with blended families, there's often other children coming into the home, which does a little bit of diluting of the stepfather‑stepchild energy. Everybody was out of the house. I was going to be in that home alone.

The second thing is that quite often in those blended families or new marriages, maybe there's another kid that's born. Lauren’s sperm was very old and my mom was not going to have any more kids. So that meant that Lauren and I were going to be, I was going to be the child and Lauren was going to be the stepfather.

And, according to studies, we were going to bond, which I said, “Hell, no, that ain't gonna happen.”

We had to do all this, so we had to move into his house. We had to move into his neighborhood. We had to cater our lives to his schedule and stuff like that. I was just getting so pissed off.

And I did get my license, and I did what any teenager did with a license. I just drove around. I was like, “I'm going to leave the house.”

One day, I took the RX‑7 and I met up with some friends. We parked our cars and went to some gazebo and got really high. I came back to the car and, for some reason, I just couldn't open the door. Probably in a better headspace, I would have been able to do it, just I don't know what was going on.

But I stopped and I looked at the car and just all this animosity bubbled up in me. I was like, “This isn't the life I wanted, man. I didn't ask for a dead dad. I didn’t ask for a father figure that voted for presidents I'm learning about in history class. I don't want this.”

So, I lifted my leg and I kicked the door in. I didn't think I was going to kick it that hard, but I kicked it enough and made a major dent. Even my friends were like, "Damn, dude."

And I said, "Ah, it's okay, it's okay. It'll fix itself." I honestly thought that it would. I don't know. I've seen too many Transformers or something. I thought like the dent maybe just overnight would just go whoop‑boop, something like that. So that's the reason that when I drove home and went to bed, I went to bed with ease.

At 7:00 AM the next morning, Lauren is hovered over me and he says, “Mark, can you come downstairs? I want to show you something.”

So we go downstairs, we go into the garage, and there's Lauren in his flannel pajamas and moccasin slippers. My eyes are looking everywhere except the car door.

And Lauren goes, he points to the car door and he says, “What the fuck is that?”

Now, as I mentioned, in the car rides, Lauren, he never raised his voice to us at all. The worst thing we ever heard him say was the word ‘preposterous’ with a lot of emphasis. And so this F bomb totally floored me.

I don't think like, it wasn't him saying that. That was in slow motion. It was my reaction that felt like it was in slow motion. By that point, my mom was in the garage with us.

I remember just looking over, moving over to my mom and just mouthing the words, "Help me, Mom."

And my mom gave me this look like, "Tsk, you're on your own, dude."

So, I just started profusely, I was like, "Oh, my God, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I don't know what happened. I'm so sorry."

And Lauren shushed me. He said, "Go to the bathroom and get the plunger."

I was like, "What sort of weird, greatest generation punishment is this?” But I went and did as I was told and I gave him the plunger.

He took the plunger and this 70‑blank‑year‑old man got on his knees and started expunging, for lack of a better word, this dent. And he got like 97% of it out. It was really miraculous.

So he finished and the three of us are standing there. I'm probably like Charlie Brown head down. I just was feeling so shameful and couldn't even look at him.

Lauren just was looking at the car door, looking at me, looking at the car door, looking at me, and then he said, “Do you want to go to Popeyes?”

And I said, “Yes, I do.”

Now, denting your parents’ car as a teenager, some people may say that's slightly rebellious, slightly badass. But eating fried chicken at 8:30 AM is fucking gangster.

It would be very, very easy for me to stand up here and say, “Ta‑da! That was great. Everything…” No. I was a teenager. I still continued to make life hell for him and for my mother. Part of that, I think, is the You're‑Not‑My‑Dad energy that's inherent with any stepparent. But as a man now and in hindsight, I can say that I was honestly starting to care for him and that there was a part of me that was thinking, “You are of an age that you might not be around that much longer into my adulthood.”

Now, those same scientists, researchers, sociologists that I mentioned, and this should be very evident to all of us, is that the longer a child is with a stepparent, the deeper the bonds can become. That, I can say, is true. Lauren was there for high school. He was there and miraculously helped me move into my first apartment. When I had to move back home in my late 20s, he was there to pick me up at the metro after work, or whatever I was doing.

Cut to the age of 96 when he got his vaccine shot, found out I was going to be proposing to my girlfriend and told my mom, “Get me to New York. I'm not going to miss this.”

Lauren was there for nearly, nearly 30 years of my life. If you had told me that at 14, I would have lost my mind. But as an adult, now I can say I need it.

At the age of 97, just a few weeks shy of his 98th birthday, he passed away peacefully. I think about those walks I do with Soca and these cars I take pictures of, I'm like, “Am I still trying to chase something cool here, or is it more a coded scroll?” Like men like myself will do sometimes, a form of communication. Taking a picture of a car with a stick shift or making vroom‑vroom sounds. When what we're doing is thinking of the person we used to do that with and really saying, “I miss you.”

Thanks.

Part 2

All the time, more times than I can count, people love to come up to me and tell me, “I just did my ancestry. Have you done yours? What's in your blood?”

This is usually followed by, like, “I'm a 10th Middle Easterner, 14% Sub‑Saharan,” or, “There's actually a little bit of African in me,” to which I respond, “The whole continent?”

One time after this writing workshop I was teaching, a woman came up to me and she said, “Oh, my gosh, I resonate with that so much and it confirms that I want to make a career change and become a life coach, because we need more life coaches.” She didn't say that part.

And she said this was true, because she just got her ancestry done, and she said, and I quote, "I know there's a little bit of South Asian in me, and that resonates with me. I feel that part deeply in my soul."

Personally, I have not done my ancestry. I have not traced my saliva to figure out my specific genome and chromosomes that make me as nervous and anxious as I am, very. Partially because I do not feel completely comfortable with giving my DNA to a private company, as if they don't have it. Ignorance is bliss, ignorance is bliss.

Also, is it really as simple as saying, “I am Dominican and Colombian?” What does it really mean to ask and live the question, “What is in my blood? What do my ancestors have to teach me? To share with me? What wisdoms, what knowings, what unknowings, what truths, what fears, what is in my blood?”

Christopher Rivas shares his story at the Crawford Family Forum in Los Angeles, CA in August 2024. Photo courtesy of LAist.

God, this question, it started to itch at me, and part of the problem is I don't actually even know my family. Nobody in my family ever talked about it. I never got the proverbial, "Oh, your grandpa was like a championship Dominican knitter." None of that.

So, I called my cousin Edwin. Edwin is the only person who ever really talked about our family. I said, “Yo, Ed, how come no one talks about our family? No one talks about the DR? Not dad, not abuelita.”

And he said, “Oh, because they're probably embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed of what?”

That's when Ed proceeded to tell me about my great‑grandfather Juan Alba, who was the founder of a town in the Dominican Republic called La Caleta.

“Yo, finding a town is kind of pretty dope. Why would you be embarrassed?"

He said, "It's not that simple." And he proceeded to tell me that Juan Alba was a cousin‑in‑law to Rafael Trujillo.

Now, for those of you who do not know, Rafael Trujillo was the bloodiest dictator in Latin American history. I mean, this man with Haitian descent, Haitian blood himself, someone who baby‑powdered his face multiple times a day to move himself closer to whiteness, committed the overnight genocide and the racially motivated massacre of 20 to 30,000 Haitians in one day. Talk about hating your blood.

I got off the phone with Edwin and I thought, "Oh, God, is this how everyone feels when they get their 23andMe results back?" Grime me.

On one hand, it's like super nasty that I'm related to Trujillo in this way, not by blood‑blood, but it's still like a weird part of my family tree. On the other hand, it's kind of a joke that, like, the DR is a small island so everyone is related in one way or another.

Anyway, I'd gone down the rabbit hole and so the next obvious step was to assault my father. On my next trip home, I took my dad to lunch and I just bombarded him with questions. I said, "Why didn't you tell me about this? Are you ashamed? What are you embarrassed of? What else are you keeping from me? Hey, is this why you never took me to the Dominican Republic or why you never wanted me to learn Spanish? Is this why abuelita told me to sleep with a clothespin pinched to my nose, like they do it back in the campo, to help keep it thin, or why every day I still do this in the shower?”

“Are you looking for an apology,” my dad said, “because I'm not going to apologize to you.”

Oof, my dad. For those of you who don't know, my dad is like the Dominican Samuel L. Jackson, the Pulp Fiction one. He's got mad wisdom, but like wisdom with a hammer. He also has like resting get‑out‑of‑my‑face face.

“Pops. I'm not looking for an apology. I just feel like I never got any ancestral wisdom, any history.”

“No, but I fed you. I kept you alive. I loved you. How's that for wisdom?”

Touché.

“I'm not going to apologize to you, Chris. Look at your life. You live a good life, right?”

“Yeah, Pops, I live a good life.”

“Okay. Good. So you want to know more about your history? You want to speak Spanish? Bien. Perfecto. Estamos aquí hablamos juntos. But don't come on me like that. History and no history, we did the best we could and we think we did a damn good job.”

“Yeah, Pops, you did a good job.”

And so we had a very awkward lunch in silence. I let him have this one for now. Then a couple years later, I somehow create the opportunity to fly myself to the Dominican Republic for the first time for a piece that I'm making. It's a piece about my life and history and what's in my blood and, most importantly, I have enough cash to take someone with me.So I call my pops.

“Yo, Pops, let's go.”

He says, “Nah, I'm busy. I got work.”

I said, “The trip's on a weekend. You don't work on a weekend.”

“I, uh, I don't want to get in the way.”

“Yo, Pops, you are the way. Come on. There's no other person I should be here with. There's no other person I should go with. Let's go.”

And when I land in the DR, y’all, let me tell you, I feel this peace wash over me. Like I'm not pretending or code switching. I'm just in a sea amongst myself and it feels right. I'm like resting, resting in my own skin.

My dad, on the other hand, he's like full Dominican at the rental car place. He's like ____ [06:06] this and “que lo quiero” that. I see this little boy in him and it is beautiful. He is ecstatic. He also does not have to pretend here. He doesn't have to prioritize and decide what language do I give my kids for the best life possible?

My dad, he's starting to get really nervous, because we have a lot of families we're supposed to see here. The first person on the list is my dad's uncle Beto. He lives in La Caleta, the town my great‑grandfather founded. He doesn't have a phone number and we don't have an address, and my dad hasn't been to the DR in 30 years, so who knows.

We get some salchichon and aguacate and we get on the road. As we're driving, my dad says, “I think a while back, Beto sold some of the land to the Mormon church.”

And I swear to you, I swear to whatever you believe in, that as he's saying this, two Mormon kids are crossing the street. Like, white shirt, ties, the whole thing. Let's just say they stick out, because on one side of the street it's like Dominicans, Merengue, Domino's, and then it's like two, white Mormon kids.

My dad, he basically jumps out of the car and he goes, "Hey, hey, hey, where's your house?" These missionaries are terrified, y’all.

“Our house?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, your house. You got a house, right?”

“Our church?”

“Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, your church. Where's your church?”

“Uh, that way,” and that way we head.

And the closer and closer we get, my dad's memories, they start to solidify and he says, "Oh, we're close. We're close, we're close.” And then, boom, I hear him say, “That's it. That's my uncle, that's my uncle.” He's just whispering, “That's my uncle.” I still get chills. “That's my uncle, that's my uncle.”

And off in the distance is this old man. He's pretty fly, y'all. He's got sunglasses on, he's sitting outside, he's surrounded by three dogs and he's got mad swagger. He kind of reminds me of myself.

My dad, he starts walking towards him and he says, "That's my uncle, that's my uncle."

And his Uncle Beto, he says, "Germito, Germito." That's my father's nickname as a kid.

Now they're both crying, I'm crying. The entire neighborhood is crying. The two Mormon kids are crying.

My dad, he's not an emotional person, especially not outwardly. I didn't expect him to cry, not like this, but I guess that's what the things in our blood do. They reveal to us who we are.

That was a crazy time for me and my pops. I saw sides of him I'd never seen before. I met family that I didn't even know he had. He has a sister. I didn't know he had a sister. And one day at lunch, my dad, he starts to cry again. He cried more in this weekend than I'd seen him cry in 35 years of knowing him.

He starts to tell me about his mom, he starts to tell me about my mom's mom and how they came to this country and they struggled and they struggled and they hustled and they hustled and how hard it was.

He said, "I didn't want you to have that. I wanted things to be different for you. We just did the best we can. I didn't keep anything from you on purpose. I was just trying to give you a better life than what we had.”

“You did, Pops, you did.”

You see, my father he didn't keep anything from me on purpose because he was ashamed of his Latinidad. He did what so many brown Americans are forced to do in this country, assimilate, adapt. It's actually pretty universal for any outsider, the hope of possibility for their children.

And I am not less because what I do not know about my blood, or my history, or my ancestors, because regardless of what is in your blood, your genomes and your chromosomes, you still have work to do when it comes to opening your heart, showing up, and meeting yourself day by day.

Thank you.