Hispanic Fanatic

In the park where we gathered each July 4 when I was a kid, my family was just one the groups who turned the area into a smaller, less-bloody reenactment of one of America’s numerous land rushes. Each clan’s blanket on the bumps and dips of the main lawn signified sovereignty, at least for the day. Grills were stoked and coolers were stocked, while people lounged in the sun and blared radios that were tuned to salsa or Sousa or “Casey Kasem’s Top Forty.”

Virtually everyone in the park was an immigrant or first-generation progeny – thousands of people in one place at one time to laud an adopted country. It was as if some immense Latino family reunion were taking place, cordoned off from the rest of the state. The newest arrivals celebrated America’s founding with the zealous belief that each subsequent generation could never appreciate the nation’s charms as much as they did.

Scores of teenagers huddled in packs organized by gender, scouting for patrols of the opposite sex. The adults were less mobile, and they laughed and ate and yelled, “Ai ya ya” after gulping what they promised would be their final Tecates of the afternoon.

Old men sat in lawn chairs between fluttering American flags and smaller, but still majestic, banners of Mexico or Puerto Rico. The men spoke about the United States with such fervor that it was as if they could account for all of the country’s previous 200+ birthdays.

Until dusk, kids ran around the park, gathering together at random to see things explode into bright shards. The powerful firecrackers we lit would horrify modern parents, but these were the days when infants bounced around in station wagons without car seats and teens went for afternoon-long bike rides (sans helmets) and children played king of the hill on mounds of rusty, jagged-edged trash in the local junkyard. By contemporary standards, it’s amazing that anyone came out of this era alive.

When the fireworks started, hundreds of children scrambled for their families’ blankets. The initial salvo was always a surprise, which was inexplicable in that it was the most eagerly anticipated sight of the weekend.

The fireworks popped off one at a time, with up to a minute between each burst. An explosion in one of a dozen different styles lit up the evening, and a second or two would pass before the boom thundered upon us.

One year, we brought our new cousins – all young children who had come from El Salvador – to see the fireworks. They either watched in stunned disbelief or cringed in outright terror. As we discovered later, putting on a pyrotechnics show for children who had escaped war and witnessed horrific firefights was not the sharpest move. It was, to be blunt, a fuck-up. We had to coax one of my cousins out from under a blanket. But by the second year, with their Americanization in full force, they cheered every supersonic outburst of color in the sky.

The finale was majestic, and as the final rumbling echo rained over us, flames in the shape of an American flag erupted over the water, and the audience cheered its birth.

The crowd stretched to its feet like a great cat awakening. The adults scooped up their blankets and coolers and backpacks. The colossal American flag smoldered in the pond, and the last cloud of smoke faded into the night.

First off, thanks to Eddy for commenting on my post “Witnesses Described Him as Brown…” He supplied one of the best, bravest, and most poignant comments that I’ve received.

Thanks also to all who have commented on “From the Motherland,” the post about my mom. Most of the comments have been via email or verbal, but it’s still good to know that certain pieces resonate.

Along those lines, I will continue with the theme of family by introducing you to the cousins.

Let me be clear that I’ve never related to the the whole concept of extended family. I don’t have distant relatives I’m forced to visit or creepy old uncles who make everyone uncomfortable or anonymous children who just show up at Thanksgiving.

Rather, I have the cousins. There are eight of us, and we were basically raised as siblings. Growing up, I thought it was normal to see your cousins at least once a week (usually more) and go to stay at their houses for days at a time and share inside jokes and get into fights about what TV show you were going to watch.

It wasn’t until I was an adult, and talked to other people about their childhoods, that I realized most Americans think of “cousin” as that weird kid they saw at funerals or the exotic older relative who bought them beer.

It wasn’t like that for us.

Perhaps this is because in Hispanic culture, valuing family is not just lip service. It is a hardcore component of life. There are good and bad aspects of this principle, which I’ll address in a future post. But regardless of its consequences, I can verify its existence and strength with Latinos.

Among the cousins, I’m the oldest, and my brother (about nine years my junior) is the youngest. That means all eight of us are within a decade of each other.

We remember being children together, piling into our parents’ cars and jostling for space. We recall being teenagers and going through goth or grunge or rave phases. And now as adults, we go out to dinner together or visit each other’s houses or do other respectable grown-up things that would have amused us to even contemplate back when we pulled each other’s hair or stole one another’s CDs.

We are not as close as we used to be, which is inevitable in even the tightest of families. But we see each other, in various combinations, when we can. And our spouses have become de facto cousins, and the children are our collective nieces and nephews (again, we don’t keep track of all the “second cousin, twice removed” jargon).

This is not to say that everything has gone smoothly for all eight of us, or that feuds haven’t erupted along the way, or that some relationships are at this point, more tangential. But for the most part, we pretty much like each other, which took me a long time to realize is a rarity in American life.

I’ll profile each of the cousins in future posts. Suffice to say, I’m grateful that in one respect, at least, we were raised old-school Hispanic style – you know, like a family.

She arrived in New York City on an autumn day in 1967. She knew four English phrases: “yes,” “no,” “please,” and “thank you.”

She came here to get a college degree and to see more of the world beyond the confines of her tiny village in Central America. To earn tuition money, she got a job scrubbing floors and cleaning house for a Holocaust survivor. She spent evenings memorizing phrases such as “Does this train go to Grand Central?” and “I would like a slice of pizza.”

Once enrolled in school, she picked up English rapidly, and soon, she was reading books that had been banned in her home country. Some of these books told of the atrocities that her nation’s government had committed. They told of the thousands murdered and the land stolen and the cultures despoiled. She had traveled multiple time zones to learn the truth about her own homeland, but once she knew it, there was no returning to her old life. From that point on, she was American.

Because she was beautiful and exotic (especially for the time), she picked up some modeling gigs, which paid better than housecleaning. On one shoot, she met a divorced photographer a dozen years older than she. The man had three kids and drank too much, but he was smart and funny, and he took her to great parties, where she hung out with Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan and other NYC icons.

She married the photographer and moved to the Midwest. At the age of twenty-six, she had her only child, a boy, to go along with the three stepchildren she was raising.

Her husband wanted to start a new career in real estate, and to cover the exorbitant start-up costs, she got a job as a cashier in a grocery store. Her thick accent in a place staffed almost exclusively by ninth-generation Anglo-Americans caused no small amount of hilarity.

The real-estate business boomed, and the family got a big house in a developing part of the city. Her husband had a flair for making money, but as the cash poured in, his drinking increased proportionally. Before long, cases of brandy were being delivered to the house weekly. Like all upper-class alcoholics, he soon embraced the violence that had always been lurking beneath his smiling façade.

They came to an arrangement: When he hit her, she would fall down. This arrangement was played out often, just to make sure it was still in effect.

The children from the man’s first marriage left to go live with their mother. By this time, her husband’s chief occupation was drinking. So the real-estate company began to falter, and it was only her stepping in to work the details that kept it solvent.

One night, her husband hit her as usual, but she decided that she had endured enough. She went to the shed, grabbed an ax, came back, and walloped him in the head. She used the flat part of the ax head, for which he should have been grateful. After he got out of the hospital, he threatened her just once more, and she knocked him flat. He never touched her again.

She didn’t file for divorce, however, until the night he threatened to blow up the neighborhood, and the SWAT team deployed outside her door. It was a good time to leave.

She found work as a waitress and went back to school. She was a full-time worker, full-time student (making the Dean’s List), and full-time single mother. She still had energy to become a community activist and organize political rallies on behalf of the people in her home country, which was, at the time, a bloody pawn in the Cold War.

In the land of her birth, her brother and sister were murdered. Both died at the hands of a government funded by U.S. tax dollars. She brought over the orphaned children, and together with her sister (who had emigrated years before and started a family of her own), they helped raise the kids.

She made sure that her own son was well-fed, had all the books he could read, and received plenty of Christmas presents.

She worked her way up from administrative jobs to management, and then moved on to government jobs. Before long, she was advising mayors on cultural matters and giving speeches at grand openings and forming subcommittees and chairing meetings.

Today, she owns two houses in the nicest part of town, using the real-estate knowledge she learned salvaging her ex-husband’s business. She has an office in City Hall, where she helps run her adopted city and is one of the leaders of the state. She has met with governors, senators, and former Presidents. Universities around the country pay her to give guest lectures.

It is far removed from the small village of her birth or the NYC apartment floors that she scoured or the runways she walked or the check-out line of the grocery store where she toiled. It is the American experience.

She is my mother, and today is her birthday. She remains my personal hero. 

In honor of Mother’s Day, allow me to give a shout out to all the moms across the blogosphere. Let me also take the time to make a plea to those who are considering becoming a mother through adoption.

My request is that you look south. There are plenty of Latino infants for you to choose from.

I know what you’re saying. Hispanic babies have simply not become fashion accessories like African or Asian infants have. This is true.

There are perfectly good orphans in Central America, but the celebrity moms and dads appear to swoop only into places like Vietnam and Mauritania. Can’t they take home just one adorable brown kid to complete their ethnic menagerie? I would think that, at the very least, Angelina Jolie would have snagged a Bolivian child in her relentless quest to form a toddler UN.

But alas, this has not happened, and Guatemala is a perpetual second to China when it comes to Americans going abroad for the offspring needs.

You can change all that. Look past the obvious cuteness of Asian babies. Decline that trip to a Pacific archipelago to see the latest batch of infants.

Instead, grab your husband/wife/partner and say, “Damn it, let’s get a Nicaraguan baby! Today!”

You won’t regret it.

Early in our relationship, my last girlfriend received some advice from her mother. The cautionary statement came when my girlfriend informed her mother, a white Midwestern housewife, that I was Hispanic.

“My mom said, ‘Just remember. Those Latins love you, and then they leave you,’” my girlfriend told me.

That girlfriend is now my wife. As of last week, we have been together for 17 years. It’s clear that if I plan to love her and leave her, I must really be fucking with her head.