Log In 
Liza's FAQs
That Liza Minelli song is so on point. It's not just for the eternal explaining of my name. It so happens I was indeed named after Liza.
My name is Liza Michelle;but I grew up in Puerto Rico and had to take on Lisa. Spanish is a phonetic language and people would consistently miswrite my name as "Laisa" if they heard it or mispronounce it as "Lee-tha" if they read it.
I grew up in Puerto Rico. I grew up in Mayagüez and I lived there until I turned 15; which is when my father decided to move us to Toa Baja (Urbanización Valparaíso to be exact) where we lived only a few years before my parents divorced. But I also lived in San Germán, Bayamón, Toa Baja and Río Piedras.
Both my parents are Puerto Ricans. At home, la patria was very specifically Puerto Rico. At no point my parents wanted
to stay forever in the United States. They always spoke of "going back home". Which is what happened when I was 3-4 years old.
I grew up in Puerto Rico and didn't even travel to the United States until I came to NYU as a transfer student from the University of Puerto Rico. You could say I am an American by birth but my ethnicity and cultural identity are 100% boricua.
No, I did not. At home we only spoke Spanish. My parents, especially my dad, would read to us in English. Not from books, mind you, but mostly magazines. It was just natural for me to read National Geographic, TIME and Newsweek on a weekly/monthly basis. It certainly built a foundation, but when I got to NYU in my early 20s I not only had a heavy accent, but could hardly write more than a short letter in English.
Here's the breakdown:
- Native language: Spanish.
- Native fluency: English
- Speaking/Writing Fluency: Portuguese
- Near speaking/writing fluency: French
- Reading comprehension: Italian and Catalá.
When I started blogging in 2001/2002, I really didn't a particular target audience in mind; but I started blogging as a response to my intense involvement with the net art, digital activism and homeschooling communities. Even though there were a few latin@s here and there, the vast majority of these people at the time were English speakers. And so I stuck to writing in English even though am a native Spanish speaker/writer.
That's actually a good question. It really depends. If am dreaming about being "home", it's in Spanish because Puerto Rico is invariably my homeland even though I was born in the New York City. That's why if am dreaming about being in NYC, it's almost always in English. I have dreamt in French and Portuguese. This always is triggered if I've been immersed in the language either by reading/writing or traveling.
I rarely remember my dreams, by the way. When I remember, though, it's usually given the contexts above.
I did most of my elementary schooling in Mayagüez (Academia Immaculada Concepción) and high school in Santurce (Colegio de la Universidad del Sagrado Corazón). I studied two years at the University of the Puerto Rico - Río Piedras but finished college in and went on to earn an ABD at New York University.
ckDistro is a distribution of the open source content management system Drupal. It was designed and developed by Liza Sabater for the micro-publishing needs of her company, culturekitchen.