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What kind of place required a man to work all day without being allowed to eat or drink?
The truth was that I didn’t know which I was. I wasn’t allowed to claim the thing I felt and I didn’t feel the thing I was supposed to claim.
A while after I was old enough to understand this story, I pointed out how backwards it was to have fled to the nation that had driven them out of theirs, but they never copped to the irony of it.
But one beach isn’t every beach. And one home isn’t every home.
She said if I didn’t like the way things were, I shouldn’t run away. I should stay there and commit myself to fixing them. But that’s what the guerrillas had been trying to do for decades and I saw no progress.
The Mexicans look down on us. They believe Guatemalans are stupid.
It’s not a wonderful story, but it’s mine.
What if God wants us to be happy? What if there’s nothing else around the bend? What if all our unhappiness is in the past and from here on out we get an uncomplicated life? Some people get that, you know. Why shouldn’t it be us?”
“You have to think like a gringa now,” Arturo said. “You have to believe that you’re entitled to happiness.”
“It’s like how everyone thinks I like tacos. We don’t even eat tacos in Panamá!” my dad said. “That’s right. We eat chicken and rice,” my mom said. “And seafood. Corvina as fresh as God makes it.”
If people want to tell me to go home, I just turn to them and smile politely and say, “I’m already there.”
I felt the way I often felt in this country—simultaneously conspicuous and invisible, like an oddity whom everyone noticed but chose to ignore.
“We’re not like the rest of them,” I went on. “The ones they talk about.” He unclasped his hands and looked at me, his expression sad and weary. “We are now,” he said.
Not a name for a Venezuelan.
English accents
She would not be able to hear the accent.
“You’re supposed to say ‘Asians,’ not ‘Orientals.’ I don’t know if ‘Arab’ is right, either.”
Spann speakers would not say oriental.
I feel like telling them sometimes, You don’t know me, man. I’m a citizen here! But I shouldn’t have to tell anyone that. I want to be given the benefit of the doubt.
We’re the unknown Americans, the ones no one even wants to know, because they’ve been told they’re supposed to be scared of us and because maybe if they did take the time to get to know us, they might realize that we’re not that bad, maybe even that we’re a lot like them. And who would they hate then?
