Why I’m here

The beginning of my illicit experience in America.

The morning after my arrival in Hempstead, eight years ago, my Tia said to me “Do you know why people move to this country?” Before I could say anything she answered her own question “They do it to have verything you have at home”. My Tia had been living and working in New York for thirty two years, had a huge house in Hempstead, Long Island and had raised her daughter there but she still called El Salvador “Home”. I don’t do that.

I was twelve years old the first time I visited New York. My parents had managed to save enough money to pay for a family vacation, three weeks in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

From Elizabeth my parents would take my brother Ernie and me into New York City for sightseeing strolls in Manhattan “We can’t buy you anything” my mother would say in advance, then to visit family in Long Island.

The time was late January and it was cold. Not cold like cold cold but cold in a way I had never imagined it could ever be cold: walking was difficult; balancing on the ice, couldn’t speak because my mouth was always covered with a scarf my mother had wrapped around my head to protect my nostrils and mouth from the wind.

Socializing was impossible since I had been forbidden to speak to the only group of happy young adults that hung out by my Tia’s apartment in Elizabeth, I would stare at them from the window and was fascinated by them: their lose clothes, their loudness, the color of their skin (you don’t see a lot of black people in El Salvador), how bravely they endured the conditions in order to spend some outdoor time with each other, Cool! I thought. But I couldn’t talk to them.

I wanted to practice my English but everyone around me spoke Spanish and watched Spanish television. I could have talked to my cousins but they were in school most of the time so that left me with the only person who sort of paid attention to me at the time: my brother. We didn’t talk much really, we still don’t, but we both knew how amazing it was to be who we were, to be able to travel into the United States! to see the snow for the first time and play in it! to speak a little bit of English and be able to use it, to be in an apartment with heat and hot water, Oh my God, there was so much hot water! There was so much of everything and we loved it. So what, if we had to help our parents carry the heavy boxes with Salvadoran cheese, crabs and other delicacies through the latin neighborhoods of northen New Jersey and Long Island, we loved every minute of it: the train rides and the bus rides, the lights in Manhattan, the skyline of Manhattan, the speed of Manhattan, the different colors and languages of the people… and my favorite of all: The Museum of Natural History.

We knew then, Ernie and I, that living anywhere else would be just an experiment, that despite the bitter cold and the forbidden accountancies, New York would be Home.

And so, ten years later, we came back to stay for good.