AND HERE WE GO AGAIN

Yesterday I heard back from my lawyer. I was hoping this whole process would take at most six months and that after half a year I would be flying to Europe to go to Ireland to see the Cliffs of Mohr and the land of Oscar Wilde, or England to visit Platform 9 ¾ or Hawaii to see the sunrise on top of a dormant volcano, or hell Indiana to see my in-laws but as things stand I can’t even legally drive to buy some chimichangas at the Don Ramon Restaurant down the street.

Yours truly has to wait for at least six months for a judge to decide to reopen my case, six months for some overworked middle age man/woman with too much on his plate to care about me, to look at the black and white “facts” and decide if they reopen my case and let me prove to them that DH and I are REALLY married, six months for some stranger who doesn’t know me at all to decide if I am worthy of staying here. I guess in paper I sound good, I have paid my taxes, and I haven’t committed any felonies or misdemeanors or broken ANY law. I speak the language, I have gone native. But until everything is finally done I will not feel at ease. My future rests in (on) the desk of someone stranger who doesn’t know anything about me, or what I’ve been through, or what I have brought and could still bring to this country, my future lays in the hand of someone who doesn’t know my awesomeness. It’s a scary thought to be just one more random, anonymous spic.

Since I refuse to remain quiet about all the hullaballoo that’s going on in the U.S. ever since I stopped writing here I am, back to this beautiful place where I can be myself and express my idea and have total strangers tell me what they think. I’m sorry but the U.S. is going nuts! And it all seemed to explode the moment I said I was going to shut up! Cruel, simply cruel to have such juicy crazies to bite on and find myself with no teeth.

I hope I haven’t lost some of you, those precious few who take some moments out of your lives to listen (read) my drivel and who are not by blood or law, related to me. If I haven't completely lost you, then please stick around because some of my not so smart, sometimes funny rhetoric is back.

Oh if only they (IRS, ICE, UCIS, etc, same entity different acronyms) knew just how native I have gone I think they would let me stay. I am a woman without land, an immigrant without a country. I belong nowhere. I know I have a flare for dramatics but people when I tell you I have no land I mean I have NO LAND. I am an effing pariah!

It’s kind of sad to find oneself at Bruzz Room, they whitest place you could go to, to see the Rays lose like little bitches to the Rangers and find yourself surrounded by Colombians watching a friendly game of football (soccer for those of you who think Football means pigskin and shoulder pads) and have them call you a race traitor because you are not watching the football game but are watching baseball. Baseball? How dare I? Not even Hispanic baseball like the Caribbean Series but American “World” Series Baseball. The offspring of my offspring will feel the shame this ancestor brought upon them.

Never mind that I grew up in Venezuela and baseball is the national pass time. Never mind that in Colombia, Football not Baseball is the national pass time. Are you following my conundrum here? No matter who I root for, no matter who I follow it will be the wrong choice. You were raised in Venezuela, you should follow baseball. Your family and you are all from Colombia: Viva el Pibe y la seleccion. I am living in the U.S. I am supposed to embrace the culture: Bring on the cheese hats, the foam fingers, the expensive cheap beer and all the sports that come with it.

Next year in April I will celebrate my ninth year in the U.S. Six more years than I ever lived in Colombia, more than half the time I spent in Venezuela. How can I have ANY identity at all? I am forgetting some of my Spanish. I no longer read books in my first language. I have almost forgotten who I was back then... I was so young and so damn stupid when I came into this country. I was nineteen but in reality I was younger. I was pampered and silly and spoiled and I did all my growing up here. I became a woman here. Let’s enjoy this Lifefime moment.

This is home. I love Colombia. I love Venezuela. I will never, ever forget that I am a part that, that I came from spicy looks, cumbia smelling heat, coffee smelling sounds and tall those discombobulated senses that make one a Latino. I, however, am becoming something else.

I am not sure if I am happy about it. I am not sure I can belong here. I want to stick seventeen people in a small car before I go to a party (that stereotype is so true) I want to teach my kids (If I have any) to dance as soon as they can walk. I want to eat pig blood and rice and not find it icky (I so do) I want to drink aguardiente and dance gaitas in December. I want to be everything that my race, breed, culture, background demands of me but I can’t. I am a hybrid. I am a mutt within a mutt.

Not to sound all existentialist, but where the fuck do I belong?

IT KEEPS SPREADING…AND A SHORT HIATUS

To those of us following the wildfire-like spreading of the Arizona immigration law, or similar laws inspired by it, it is discouraging to see that now a small town in Nebraska is trying to flush out its illegal immigrants. The funny (not funny ha-ha) is that Freemont, Nebraska doesn’t have an illegal immigration issue. They don’t even have an unemployment problem since their unemployment rate is 5 points below the country’s average.

So what exactly is the reasoning behind that law being applied in Freemont? They aren’t overrun by them so what exactly is the point of bullying out a group of people who are minding their own business? They aren’t stealing any jobs, and they aren’t creating any violence, they are not a nuisance, or dependent upon the state since as illegal cannot claim any help, so what is the beef to put it bluntly?

I haven’t written in a while. I guess the fact that there is nothing nice to say dries out my creative juices. All I hear is the oil spill and the racist immigration law who keeps popping up everywhere, mutating like all diseases into something more and something worse.

I was in bed the other day and I realized that this blog and some of the things in it might be interpreted in a way that could be detrimental to my case. I am married to a wonderful man, have a wonderful family, an amazing dog, a beautiful cat, a great life. I don’t want to risk all that I have accomplished because of some things I said through here.

It seems like a good idea to pause, to wait until I am not just one more of those unwanted individuals that they are trying to get rid of. Once I am here as a resident, once I become visible again then I can speak come back here and do what I love, talk shit and tell you what I think.

Right now I am just one more nameless face. Hopefully by the end of the summer I will be so much more.

I wonder if once I am a resident and later a citizen I will stop caring about those who aren’t because the issue doesn’t touch me anymore. I hope not. I hope I always care enough.

So, farewell for now. I will be back soon!

DIRTY MINDS THINK ALIKE

It never ceases to amaze me just how incredibly inappropriate Hispanic people are, sometimes I forget or simply don’t notice because I am so used to it, but there is nothing like having dinner with a bunch of Colombians, Venezuelans, Chileans and Mexicans for the combination to be too much for all our dirty tendencies.

DH and I were enjoying a delicious night of BBQ and Karaoke, or maybe I should say I was being tortured by the smell of delicious cow murder while he ate (5 months 21 days of vegetarianism and counting!) when the hosts of our dinner started passing along an array of penis shaped paraphernalia. From an eight inch penis-shaped flute (you blow at the head of course) very accurate with balls and all and another one of a mustachioed guy seating on a toilet with his pants around his ankle and with a ecstatic look on his face while his hand wrapped around an engorged penis that was bigger than he was. Don’t ask me why a host would do that. Is one of those Hispanic mysteries nobody has an answer to, right up there with what’s in a morcilla (no longer a mystery and wish I never knew) and why we can’t help it but be loud.

While I made do with rice, and salad and bread and all those around me feasted on the mouthwatering victims of murder I thought about how weird it was for people to bring out those pieces of porny, tacky sexual art. Then I realized I have lost my edge. I have been surrounded by that inappropriate shit all my life and never before made me blink an eye.

I remember having lunch at my aunt’s house in Colombia and across her dinner table she had a painting of a woman who seems to be either touching herself or someone else is touching her, and another of two lovers that seem to have escaped from a porn version of Cirque du Soleil. The thing is the strokes of the brush in the paintings are so delicate and sometimes not quite there and you never know if you are really seeing what you think you are seeing or if it is in fact blatantly sexual art.

The result is that you spent the 45 minutes of dinner at times staring at the painting and other’s trying not to stare while you pretend to be eating and incredibly uncomfortable that your hosts and owners of the painting is your family and the figure sticks hanging in the wall are getting it on and feeling oddly hot and bothered at THE MOST inappropriate time. That same family member also served their morning coffee on boob-shaped cups and you had to drink from the nipple, which I didn’t really considered weird when I was growing up but now that I have been here for 8 years I find rather odd. The prudishness here is contagious!

As I passed along the clay guy with the huge schlong and manic look in his eyes to DH I expected him to be somewhat chagrined at what I viewed as another weird thing we do that he has to get used to and I laughed and said: “I can’t imagine passing this along at dinner with your family” since his family is fairly conservative. I expected him to laugh and enjoy the “art” I didn’t expect for him to ask loudly and in front of all the natural born hecklers I hang out with (who by the way are all over 40, married and with children) for me to blow on the head of the “flute” and make some music. Neither did I expect him to say “You have more practice than me” in front of all of them (my mom included) when I told him “Why don’t You blow?”.

All I can conclude in that he has been thoroughly and completely corrupted and that he will no longer be embarrassed by anything.

Which considering my family and friends it’s a blessing.