Moving Home

I arrived in Utah at the end of summer in 1998 right in the middle of the Clinton fiasco. I came here from the Hacienda Jatun Yaku, province of Napo, Ecuador, South America. I may as well have come from Mars. We lived hours from the nearest town, an hour and a half from the nearest road, and days away from any gringos. I dreamed about coming here America the place where everyone is rich, and everyone gets exactly what they need, America where everyone is loved and no one ever wants for anything, America the land of dreams. At least that’s what all my friends said. Of course none of us had ever been we had just heard stories. We talked about the riches of Los Estados while we grubbed around in the dirt and played pistoleros using branches as our guns or swam in the river and played on the island looking for nests and lounging around in the mud made warm by the ever-present sun. The U.S. was always something distant like a fairy tale. I knew I was born there, and that my parents had grown up and gone to school there but an eleven-year-old’s capacity for understanding is limited. I never imagined I’d have to go back.
The night before we left I stood on top of Isabel Guevara’s small apartment in Quito, Ecuador where we spent the night and looked out across the city lights and beyond to the patchwork of fields, each one a different color, that cover the foothills of an ever-smoking volcano and I felt torn. I was leaving my home and my friends our land and my river, but I was going to a new home I was going back to where I came from. On the one hand an incredible sense of loss filled me to the point of despair and on the other an excitement to finally see the truth behind the fairy tale. I was finally going to see for myself the place my mother had missed so badly my whole life. In the morning we got on the plane: me, my older brother, and my older sister, and waved goodbye to my parents and the little kids.
“Can you get the door please?” my aunt’s arms were full of luggage, some of it probably mine, that we’d just unloaded from the car. It was dark out though not pitch black. A little bit of yellow light filtered through the branches of a huge tree in the front yard from the street lamps that surrounded everything. I stared at the door knob and tried to formulate an answer, but my mind was tired from the long trip on an airplane and then in a car. I started to ask something but I was too tired and it was probably incoherent by the time it came out. I remember staring at that door knob as it glinted in the artificial light of nighttime with cars zooming by on the highway and realizing for the first time that I hadn’t just left my home I had come to a new world. I had left everything I knew behind and had arrived in a world that was nothing like the one I came from. It even smelled different. I stared at that door knob with my hand tentatively outstretched toward it, and hesitated. With a slight sigh my aunt brushed past me and opened the door. I felt silly, and wished I was more awake but I knew even that would not have helped. Even if my aunt had waited for me I couldn’t have opened the door for her because that doorknob was the first one I had ever seen.
I started school a few weeks later for the first time in my life. Having to sit for hours at a time nearly killed me, and I wished for my island and my pistolero friends more than anything in the world. My feet hurt from wearing shoes, my back and chest complained about wearing shirts all the time, and my nose bled every night from the lack of moisture in the air. Sitting on a bus on the way to some field trip one of the blonde girls in my class, I do not remember her name or face just her hair, said “where did you say you were from again?” I remember the excited feeling of knowing someone is interested in you beginning to rise up inside me. “I’m from Ecuador.” I say proudly. “What part of Mexico is that?” “umm... it’s actually further south than Mexico. You’ve got Guatemala, then Panama, then Colombia, then Ecuador right below that.” Whatever, you speak Mexican right?” she says dismissively and goes back to talking to her friends. I didn’t speak Spanish for nearly eight years, and I rarely told anyone where I was from until after high school. I realized many years later she probably didn’t mean to make me feel ashamed, but I wouldn’t have spoken dismissively to my worst enemy. That wasn’t the first” whatever” I heard nor the last, but it is one I remembered. I turned towards my window, and stared at the passing sidewalks, empty sidewalks.
“Aren’t you so glad to be back?” everyone asked me over and over again assuming in their American way that the answer was yes. I miss home I would reply, instantly earning my peers eternal scorn. “But this is the ‘land of the free’” they would tell me, their eyes growing a little in size “don’t you like freedom?” How could I explain that this place was prison to me? How could someone who had never seen outside of their city let alone their country ever understand that this place was the least free I had ever been?
Where was the freedom everyone talked about? In my world, I could do anything I wanted to, and no one was there to stop me. In my world, you work when you need money and then you don’t have to go back until you need some more. In my world, everyone takes a two hour siesta in their hamacas after lunch, and time is never money. Here if you went into the wrong area of the playground whistles would blow, and what little freedom you had would be taken away with detention. I was more foreign here than I ever was as a gringo among the natives in Ecuador.
I remember standing outside of the school waiting for the doors to open. The cold air rushing down the canyon made me hold my coat closer around me, and tousled me unruly hair. My hair had just started to go curly and it was, as yet, only curly in one patch over my right ear. “You think you are so cool with that coat don’t you?” one of the boys said mockingly. I shook my head slightly and turned away. “And what the heck is up with your hair don’t you ever comb it?” I turned to face him. I am a small guy and at twelve I was smaller than anyone in my class, even the girls. In my world I was average. “Don’t get me wrong mate, I actually combed it this morning it is just rebelling against me” I replied in a non confrontational tone of voice. My classmate looked at the other people in line around us in that “see how weird this fool is” kind of way and grabbed a handful of my hair pulling me to my tiptoes before letting me go. “Oops I guess I got you wrong.” I settle back to my feet, and try to laugh along with everyone else but I can hear them whispering to each other, “He thinks he’s so much better than everyone cause he lived in Mexico” “He’s so weird”.
America: the land of the broken promises. America: the land where presidents sleep with their secretaries and people make fun of it, and then let him stay in office. America: who built a wall a few years later to keep more people like me out. America: the land where poor people have more than the richest people I ever knew. America: the land of freedom where no one is truly free. America, America, oh America. I come from a different world.