Hispanic Fanatic

I am the child of an immigrant. My mom is from El Salvador, so I grew up with the tastes and influences of a typical American teenager, all mixed with a strong awareness of Latino culture and history. I’m pretty grateful for the combo.

You know who else is the child of an immigrant? Omar Mateen, the psychopath who murdered 49 people in Orlando a few nights ago.

Mateen and I clearly had different interpretations of the dichotomies that come with being members of the first generation to be born in America. For example, I blended a love of hamburgers with an appreciation for pupusas, and I gave the music of my mother’s homeland a fair listen before popping in a Soundgarden album. It was a bit of a mezcla.

But Omar Mateen wasn’t interested in mixing cultures. He found it easier to just embrace the problems, prejudices, and anger of his parents’ country. Mateen latched onto his father’s homophobia and the religious mania that is widespread in his family’s homeland. And in so doing, he set out to be more culturally authentic than his parents ever were.

This is not an issue of assimilation or integration, as so many people believe it to be. No, it is more of a cultural mindset.

It is a mindset that provokes young men, born and raised in America, to adopt the radical politics of their parents’ homelands. It is a mindset of fear and fury.

The massacre in Orlando — and the fact that so many of the victims were Latino — got me thinking about how this cultural perception forms one of the many roots of bigotry and violence.

Let’s ask, why are there no Latino terrorists, going on shooting sprees or strapping on bombs to avenge the pain and misery that the United States government has inflicted upon El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and other Latin American countries?

Indeed, there is ample reason for Hispanics to be more than a little pissed about our treatment and standing in the United States.

And yet, survey after survey shows that Latinos are more optimistic about the future and more positive about life in general than just about any other American demographic. We are pretty much the last people to use the injustices of the past to justify abhorrent behavior.

One reason for this is so obvious that it borders on the simplistic. But here it is: Latinos tend to look forward.

We pack up and move to new countries in search of better lives. We assume our kids will do better than us. We have faith that circumstances will improve.

And this forward-thinking mindset, this cultural tendency to dismiss the woes of the past, helps us to maintain optimism in the face of economic and political tribulations. It helps us to set aside our pain and disappointment, rather than hoist them upon our backs for all to see.

In contrast, angry and hate-filled people tend to look backward, toward some vague past, and then they threaten to make America, you know, “great again.”

And other people, like Omar Mateen, not only look backward — they glare at it with a white-hot obsession and rage. They believe that their culture’s best days are long behind them, that the present holds nothing more than humiliation and despair, and that someone — maybe American society or gays or left-handed dentists or whoever — is to blame.

Omar Mateen, in addition to being a pathetic and homicidal loser, was an unimaginative, scared person who had no faith in the future. And someone taught him that mindset, inculcating him with the belief that it was reality.

As for his victims — people with names like Almodovar and Guerrero and Rios and Flores — they most likely had great hopes for tomorrow and next year and the next decade. But that optimism and those dreams were cruelly taken from them by a furious man who could do nothing better with his life than stare backward into the distant past.

Is there another word that conjures such blood-pumping, swooning love and/or as much headache-inducing vitriol as “America”?

Excuse me — make that “America!!”

Regardless of your level of patriotism, you no doubt have some kind of strong association to that simple word. “America” is shorthand for freedom and power and excess and liberty and dozens of other intellectual, emotional, and political concepts.

And what is the source of this four-syllable monument to complexity? Well, as you learned in history class, our mighty nation was named after Italian explorer, navigator, and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci.

Or was it?

You see, what we have been taught for generations may not be, strictly speaking, the truth.

There is a theory that Amerigo Vespucci was an opportunist who changed his name after the New World was christened, thus earning him some level of fame and improving the hell out of his branding efforts.

This theory holds that the word “America” actually comes from the name of an Indian tribe and of a mountain range in Nicaragua called “Amerrique.”

Well, consider my mind blown.

Of course, we will never know the real answer, as half a millennium has a way of distorting people’s memories. So the Vespucci angle will no doubt continue to be the dominant story that schoolchildren learn.

But we have to ask ourselves, does it matter that our nation may not have been named after a European male, but rather took its moniker from a bunch of indigenous natives (Latinos, no less)?

Is it true that “to question the origin of America’s name is to question the nature of not only our history lessons but our very identity as Americans”?

You tell me.

As I’ve mentioned before, my family emigrated from El Salvador. But I have never set foot in that country.

The nearest I have come to this familial motherland was when I was fourteen, and my mother took me to Nicaragua. As part of the trip, we climbed to the edge of a volcano (yes, my mom took me cool places when I was a child). On the climb down, my mother pulled me aside and pointed to some verdant mountains in the distance.

“That is El Salvador,” she said.

This glimpse is the extent of my first-hand experience with my family’s birthplace.

A natural question is, why did my mother and I stop at Nicaragua? Why didn’t we keep going into El Salvador?

The answer is simple: We didn’t want to die.

At the time, (circa 1985), my mother was on a Salvadoran government hit list. If she exited a plane there, she would be shot. Anyone who thinks I’m exaggerating doesn’t realize how ruthless and bloodthirsty the junta running El Salvador was at that time. My mother was a rabble-rouser in the United States, and she spoke out against the Salvadoran government (see my previous post on this). This got her noticed in her homeland. They certainly weren’t going to send some international assassination squad after her in the Midwest (it’s not a Bruckheimer movie for damn sakes), but my mother found out through her friends in El Salvador that she was on the small list of Americans who would be quickly picked up if she ever returned. Two of her siblings had already been murdered (see my previous post on this as well), so this was no joke.

For this excellent logistical reason, we were not going to El Salvador any time soon. The war has since ended, of course, and my mother has returned a few times. But I haven’t yet made the trip.

Time, money, and the myriad responsibilities of adulthood have prevented me from packing a suitcase and yelling, “Next stop, the tiny village of San Vicente.”  In fact, although I’ve lived in several cities and seen more of America than most people have, my international jaunts are limited. Besides that journey to Nicaragua, I’ve been to Mexico (which will be the subject of a future post) and traveled about nine feet into Canada once. I finally made it to Europe a few years ago, where my wife and I hit London and Paris. And that’s it.

But with all the dream destinations in the world that I have yet to conquer – drinking wine in Italy, diving off the coast of Australia, trekking to the North Pole – why am I hung up on visiting a tiny country best known for warfare and which my family abandoned a generation ago?  

After all, few people go to El Salvador unless they have family there. I suppose there are those mega-travelers who hit every nation no matter how small or impoverished. But aside from that, people generally don’t get any closer to the place than the rainforests of Costa Rica or the beaches of Belize.

However, for those of us who are first-generation, there is always the pull of a land that we have never seen, the place where our parents come from. Their memories and stories have not been decayed by time, and we feel irrational nostalgia for a place barely removed from us. We ponder how we would have turned out if we were born and raised there (I have since found out that this is metaphysically impossible… but that’s another post or maybe even a different blog altogether).

This yearning for a lost homeland is not shared by most Americans. For example, my wife is descended from German immigrants who came over so long ago that she has no idea when they arrived or what their names were. Her desire to visit Berlin is roughly equal to her interest in roadtripping to Delaware. In contrast, one of my best friends is first-generation Serbian, and his life was incomplete until he walked through Sarajevo.

Similarly, I want to see the place where my mother and aunt grew up, and the nation where several of my cousins were born, and the focal point of so much joy and misery in the history of my family.

And of course, I have more incentive to see El Salvador ever since Cousin #8 moved back there (this will be the subject of a future post).

So I hope to someday go beyond the fleeting image of that landscape I viewed from a distant vantage point when I was a teenager. For all I know, it might be decades from now, when I’m an old man doing some kind of crazy circle-of-life final journey. But I will stand on top of that lush mountain that I saw long ago and say, “Damn, I finally made it.”