Hi, everyone. I'm Jenny, and this is hyphenated, the podcast about living in the hyphen. And today, we're with Gracie Mercedes. You like how I said your name. Mercedes.

I do. I do. So that's my mom's first name. Yes, I love it.

Gracie is a Dominican American actress actress, writer, and producer from

Brooklyn, and is now a series regular on the NBC comedy Grand Crew. Welcome, Gracie. Yay, thank you.

Thank you for having me. Thank you for being here. It's so funny because recently, you have been

blessing my timeline on Twitter, and there was so many good articles written

about you and what you had to say about being Afro-Latina in the industry and about Grand

Cruce. So obviously I started watching and one of my friends is actually one of the headwriters on

the show, Ify. Oh, I love Iffy. Yeah. Let's rewind. How was it like growing up in a Dominican American household?

So I was born in Brooklyn.

My parents were raised in Williamsburg.

My mom came from DR pretty young.

She was like five or six.

But my dad was like in his 20s.

And they all kind of grew up in Williamsburg and New York.

By the time I was old enough to know what the hell was going on in the world, we had moved

to Borough Park, which is also in Brooklyn.

And then I went to high school in Manhattan.

So, yeah, born and raised New York.

I went to college in New York as well, very Dominican household up until I was like 13.

Then my stepfather since then is an Italian

American so then the household split yeah two very strong ethnicity um so you know how that goes

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