TESTIMONIO Vanessa Rosa ......................................................................................... Mi Casa Is Not Su Casa A Research Reflection Abstract: Drawing on family photographs and documents, as well as archival research, the author reflects on her grandmother’ s migration to New York City from Puerto Rico in the mid-1940s and examines her journey and new life in New York in relation to the broader sociopolitical context. The reflec- tive essay considers how housing and homeownership were positioned as key to the promises of the American dream, while also revealing the limits of such ideals as tied to U.S. empire building on and off the island. The author analyzes her grandmother’ s role as the president of her public hous- ing tenant organization and her father’ s experiences growing up in Harlem to better understand what it means to strategically navigate sites of inclu- sion and exclusion. This reflection is written in the spirit of testimonio in an effort to honor and extend Latina feminist epistemologies and contribute to scholarship that challenges traditional modes of knowledge production. Introduction In 1966, my grandmother, Calixta Rosa (1910 –2002), received a New York City Housing Authority Certificate of Merit (fig. 1). I learned this as I sorted through a box of family photos during graduate school. I had never knew that my grandmother was politically active or engaged in community work. While I was excited by this discovery, I did not know what to make of her award. I previously assumed that she was detached from “politics” in the normative sense (at that point, I had not yet fully understood that, even in my own family, the personal is always political). Yet, as I came to learn, meridians  feminism, race, transnationalism 19:2 October 2020 doi: 10.1215/15366936-8308385 © 2020 Smith College Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/19/2/278/829350/278rosa.pdf by MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE user on 16 November 2020