Yanqui struggles

4 decades struggling to understand the dominant culture

I’m going to mix a lot of metaphors here, metaphorically speaking, so forgive me.

Previously on: me. I was born in NYC long enough ago that I’m still getting over the loss of subway tokens as the metro card is laid to rest. I’m the 2nd person in my family to be born in this country, crafted emotionally of a table full of loud Cuban exiles, and consequently I grew up in a weird pocket reality, less apple pie and more arroz con pollo. There were a lot of Cubans, but also Chileans, Mexicans, Guatemalans, Dominicans… I think I was literally 6 the first time I met Argentinians, my friend’s mom handing me an alien blob with an antenna, a pre-columian gourd full of mate, the tinny bombilla like a diving board down to the less than appetizing oatmeal texture of the green mush below it. I think I thought it was a pipe, and that I was being invited into something illicit, and was instead surprised to find a mushy, vaguely sugary sort of tea come through the metal straw, which won me over because we weren’t allowed much sugar in my house. It was a very unCuban practice, both in its composition and in its communion. Cubans drink tiny cups of rocket fuel, aggresssively potent coffee at all hours to power their primary communal act: the endless deafening argument. But this was instead a family sitting close and quietly sharing this gourd full of verdant goo, like a british tea-time if the british liked eachother and only had the one teacup.

I lived in Argentina a while, and while the people outside any home are actively willing eachother dead and their cars doing so proactively, behind closed doors there is no more social people. They aren’t a bar culture, unlike my NY life, they don’t need the courage whiskey brings, they drink malbec with ice as if it has electrolytes and eat steak and ice cream at every meal like they’re on death row, and I guess given the outdoors I mentioned, maybe they sort of are. But over that steak whoever you’re with will lock eyes with you and listen with an earnest and unforced intensity I was completely unprepared for when I first encountered it . If the country of Argentina could collectively sign up for Love Island, their eye contact would make them undefeatable.

Anyway, that wasn’t the lay of the land at my house, but the differences in community helped me to be curious, to learn 5 languages, all of them poorly, and in part maybe why I’m so often boarding planes is that I crave the unknown in other people. And I mostly haven’t lacked for it. But it occurs to me that in my adult life all of my family have moved away and most of my adult friends aren’t the kind of feral diasporic children I grew up with, and I feel at odds and inundated with a profound…”American-ness” that challenges me.

What I hear often in Spanish about Americans elsewhere is that we’re somewhat culturally narcissistic, that our worldview and culture is self-centered, that we lack curiosity about our surroundings, and consider our problems the world’s. I used to be defensive about that, in the way one might be protective of one’s workplace with strangers: I can talk shit about it, but I don’t want to hear it from you. But my argument has waned as my aging body makes me more frayed and less indulgent. Even our conversations about diversity tend to center entirely on a binary, a perfectionist critique framed exclusively on “Americans” as cultural absolutes, the high standard for any budding populace mostly curious about itself.

Latin-Americans have a lot of words for the people of the US. Gringo, Yanqui, Yuma. In a place where identity is the most popular modern currency these kind of nicknames might seem insulting, but mostly to me they just describe what someone isn’t, and there is a universe of what each of us isn’t. To a certain Pan-American mindset a lot of what’s seen here is hard to reconcile. Conversations about money, a fixation on work. Or to the degree that we explore the outside world (exclusively in reading tragic histories) we often build from them a kind of cultural cosplay that fetishizes historic suffering as an ideal to walk safely towards, as walking in circles there’s no risk we’ll ever see it. People’s causes seem to be serviced mostly in conversation, between their podcasts. Fine tuning a perfect worldview like the tracklist of a record store clerk whose eyes roll at your unsophisticated political tastes. We are by any metric the most talkative we’ve ever been about our government, but also paradoxically take the least action of any era. We romanticize fierce intellectual discourse but bunker ourselves from anyone who isn’t mostly on the same page. We have a booming confidence in what we know is right, (why would we get all those likes if it wasn’t?) and fiercely insulate ourselves from any chance of having to kick the tires of our superiority. We declare ourselves radical iconoclasts like we’re choosing a photo filter for our identity. As if the act of choosing a font for revolution is itself a salvo.

It gets harder to rationalize that worldview as my spine crystallizes like sugar candy. Not because I think I know better but because I know I don’t. I lack the confidence in my ideals to be able to buy into your confidence in yours. So more and more I crave a place where I know no one and I don’t have to listen to the same cultural slop as if it’s new, to not feel embarrassed at people’s pride in borrowed rhetorical posture they’ve memorized like a school play. Because as the world hides its violence less, as reality physically disdains the communities I grew up in, I start to feel like the people I encounter are more interested in modeling the drip of their worldview than in the world. That the urgent broadcasts for radical mobilization are like that radio signal in the zombie movie, just an old 8-track banger in an empty room playing on a loop. I left the country last year for a month and next month I’m doing it again. And if I can finish the work I’m going to Africa to do, maybe I’ll leave that trip planning another. Not away from a place but towards perspectives with a purpose bigger than their own production value. Going away from this place I love so that I don’t want to wring its neck.

I made a new book recently, and I’ve been sending it out, which this time around is an often demoralizing fight against package carriers and gravity, but the embarrassment of riches I’ve received in the support of the people who’ve paid these fragile paper missiles to exist has been a balm on a brutal winter. I get emails from strangers every day offering to help in different ways, or to tell me how the book itself affected them. It is incredibly challenging work to get through, but it is genuinely galvanizing to think of its destinations as human rather than geographic and meet so many people taking the time to let me know it landed. The process of writing can be so isolating but sending the finished work out and feeling the wave of its effects roll back to me is its own form of sunlight. I feel like I’m growing in its warmth in a way I’ve never felt all these years. It’s a boost in the arm that has brought in new stories at a quicker pace than I’ve ever been able to think of them before. I went for a walk the other day, I saw an address on an outgoing label that was nearby my offices and offered to bring it to a doorman on my way home. I dressed the book like a toddler for winter, in a nice bag, a nice label. I tried to think about what I’d want to see coming home from work, if someone brought their book to me. It was a nice kind of puzzle, one with no obvious gain but 2 seconds of helping a stranger decompress from whatever their day was. I caught myself smiling when I was done. Like I’d done something sneaky. Made quiet communion out of a book exchange. When people hear I’m a writer, they often assume a joy to my existence that is rarely present. “Do what you love…”, etc. I find writing very stressful, I reject shortcuts any reasonable person would embrace, I paint myself in corners. I make everything as hard as possible, not just on the page, but on the cover, on the spine, in the placement of the copyright. There is no stone unturned, however large or however stupid. But the surprising result of this excessive, stressful process is for the first time ever I genuinely love doing the thing I do.

and now the weekend