Wednesday, October 16, 2024

Humble brag

I can't sleep.

Tomorrow's a big day and for the first time in 4 years I've been able to finally think about something else other than social work (what I'm currently studying) or the mastery of French. As for the former, tomorrow I find out if I managed to get my degree and can accept a job that will hire me on the condition of getting it, or if I didn't and have to figure out what that next step is. And as for the latter, this one's a constant and I don't know if I'll ever stop learning (not to mention that I truly started learning at the age of 32, junior high school only taught me the numbers and basic greetings).

I can't sleep because tomorrow I'll know my fate. I'm afraid that it wasn't enough, that my last-ditch effort to write my thesis or to do a last-minute presentation to lift my grade was all for naught. I'm afraid that I'll have to tell my loved ones that I failed again. I hate failing. As your standard overachiever as a kid, good grades came easily. I never had to make much of an effort and it was only until college that I really learned what it meant to study, to figure out ways of retaining knowledge for the exams, to make effort. During my time in school now, I've gotten the lowest grades I've ever gotten in my life. I got a 3 out of 20, 10 is passing, I've never gotten such a low grade while actually making a genuine effort. This experience has been humbling and maybe I needed that to remind me that I'm not perfect, I'm not as intelligent as I think I am, I still have a long way to go. I also learned that what I've done, even just getting to this point, is still an accomplishment. It's nothing to be ashamed of, I'm studying in a language I didn't speak at all 10 years ago and I'm at a point where I might get my degree here in France. 

Spoiler alert: I got my degree and the job I wanted.

Thursday, August 24, 2023

Life is an Alanis Morissette song

 It was my old man's birthday a couple of days ago, he would've been 93. Grief is a strange thing, for me in particular. It's rare for me to cry or lose control of my emotions but I do think about my dad and try to make sense of him as a man, as my father, and the impact he had on me (whether for better or for worse). Part of the reason why I rarely cry was because he beat it out of me, repeating what his father had done with him. I remember getting hit with the belt, tears running down my cheeks, trying helplessly to protect myself and he would yell, "Stop crying!" in Spanish. From an early age, I learned that you have to control your emotions in any situation, it was the harsh reality of not only my household but also the world that awaited outside. I suppose it's part of the reason why I seem cool under pressure but that's a lie, I simply don't show what I'm feeling on the inside. The problem with this approach, as I've learned time and again, is that you keep these feelings stored away until one day you can't anymore and you burst like a volcano. I guess it's fitting considering that El Salvador, a country two-thirds the size of Belgium, has 23 active volcanoes.

Instead of crying, I think. I analyze my memories, play them back in my head. As violent as my dad could be, he was loving too. He used to take me everywhere with him, first in that classic Buick station wagon with the wood panels on the side and later in the '79 and '78 Ford Thunderbirds. I was his sidekick, riding shotgun and helping him navigate from an early age, a human GPS before the term existed. He would ask me what's the best way to get to so-and-so's house and I'd pull up the route in my head. I was familiar with all the major expressways in Queens, the Van Wyck, the GCP, the Belt, the Clearview, the Jackie Rob, and some that take you to parts of Long Island, in particular to Hempstead (where there's a sizeable Salvadoran community). 

He'd pick me up from school and we'd go pick up my mom from her job at the Duty-Free warehouse near the airport and, if we had arrived early, he'd take out a tennis ball or handball and we'd play catch until she came out. We used to play catch inside the house too, with a basketball during breaks while watching games. We watched so many games! When it was baseball season, you're talking about over a hundred games in a single season, and all the Yankee games he could catch, he'd watch! That's from late spring to early fall, you've also got a lot of tennis around that time and we watched all the greats of the time, McEnroe with all his swearing and fits, Boris Becker, Sampras, Agassi, Navratilova, Graf, Sabatini, Monica Seles, Hingis. When it started to get colder, we'd watch basketball, the Knicks, of course, I remember the '94 and '99 seasons in particular when they made it to the final. I also recall all the playoff games against the Indiana Pacers and Reggie Miller, I hated that guy (yet I admired him so much, so clutch). There were NFL games, mainly the Giants and Jets but since at the time neither of us knew how the sport was played, it was less interesting though I do recall watching the Super Bowl, you couldn't miss that. Now I know a lot more about American football since I used to play in a fantasy league and my cousin Uli broke down the rules to me. We watched hockey, another sport we were a bit clueless about, and lots of boxing fights at my tio Luis' house (because they had that famed pirated "black cable box", so they had all the channels). 

My dad loved sports, he'd watch anything and everything. If the Olympics were on we'd watch whatever was on, it didn't have to be a "masculine" sport. I recall watching figure skating and all the greats, Nancy Kerrigan, Tonya Harding, Kristi Yamaguchi, and Michelle Kwan, he'd marvel at the spinning moves like the triple lutz or a well-performed set. Later on in life, I remember noticing that he was watching golf and asked him why, what the heck does he know about golf to which he replied, "Ah, just leave me alone!". During my adolescence, I started to hate traditional sports, I stopped watching sports with him and went outside to skate with my friends and cousins. One sport that I particularly hated was football or soccer, for starters, I was dreadful at it, and since I didn't understand the rules, I found it boring. All of my cousins and brothers played on football teams, my dad was even a coach for an amateur team at one point and yet, I hated it with every fiber of my being. 

Life is full of irony, though. I spent a good decade hating sports, wondering why people would waste time on such a fruitless endeavor when they could read a book, watch a movie, enrich their minds. Now, I've become my dad, to a lesser degree but nonetheless, life has come full circle. FC Barcelona is my love, though I try not to let football take over my life, as in life events take importance over sporting events. I still watch tons of matches, read articles, and watch YouTube videos to stay up to date. What I was trying to avoid, unconsciously as a teen, I've become as an adult. I became my dad.

Now as I start thinking about what kind of dad I want to be to my future child, I'm thinking about what worked and what didn't. Corporal punishment was something that for a long time I thought could work as long as you didn't go too far, hitting the hand or a spanking, could be fine but definitely not a belt. I've talked about it with Armelle and she was and is vehemently against any type of corporal punishment. This was the cause of so many arguments but now that parenthood is on the horizon we both are on the same page. You can discipline your kids without hitting them, I do it all the time in my line of work as an educator, raising other people's kids. I don't want my children to feel the way I felt, the pain I felt physically and emotionally, and the rage and resentment I held towards my dad as a result. 

Some things come full circle and some cycles are meant to be broken.

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

Meditations in Transit

I started at some point meditating while on the subway. The subway, how many hours have I wasted staring away into the nothingness of an ad, or at a subway map, my head resting on the car's walls where a grease stain had developed from so many riders. Staring at other straphangers, guessing what they'd been through, were they coming from work, a night out or were they just floating around from bench to bench. All the different shoes, the latest basketball kicks or speckled Red Wings, does the devil wear Prada or Payless? 

When I was at Art & Design (HS), I had to take the E every day at rush hour to 53rd & Lexington. That wasn't fun, lemme tell ya. I'd get on Jamaica Van Wyck and pray there was an empty seat. I'd scan the adjacent train cars, ready to leap into action. I once jumped into a desolate train car during rush hour at 53rd & Lex, a half-second before I entered wondering why it was so empty, how could that be? That was a half-second before I was hit in the face with the wicked waft of fermented bum on a humid train in mid-June. You would think I'd follow the rest of the folks that made a bee line for the doors at the end of the cars. Nope. I stayed on a full 45 minutes until Jamaica Van Wyck, happy to have a seat. 

Nowadays, I sometimes ride the tram here in Strasbourg. There are characters; the drunkard winding in with a beer can of 8,5% alcohol, the geriatric Alsatian couple shuffling onto seats, the young Arab kid with his fake Gucci murse and skinny Bayern Munich track pants. Le Ried the train stop, I think I'm in the hood (if I'm not mistaken, this hood is next to le Marais), this is supposed to the equivalent of East New York, where money and herb exchange hands like the Rastas used to do it by the McDonald's on Queens Bully and Jamaica Ave. And yet here I am, wearing my rojiblanco jersey, still rocking some Lululemon shorts from my stint there and blue flip-flops and I'm chillin', not a care in the world. Life here is easier, simpler, you can still get stuck up at knifepoint or assaulted but it doesn't happen with the same frequency. I also hardly take the tram, I have a bike and to get from one end of the city to the other can take 20 minutes, 30 if you're really on the outskirts. And so it's hard to meditate while riding my bike, my commute was a mere 10 min. So now those moments come when I travel, when I'm on a train heading to Paris or a bus on the way to Frankfurt. I have my writing book, a liner (because I hate ballpoint pens), a book to read and headphones. I think I'm ready for my journey.

Saturday, August 1, 2020

Chip off the old blockhead

My dad, Filiberto Ramirez, was born August 22, 1930. He was born in a poor village outside the capital of San Salvador called Huizucar, he'd jokingly say, "Soy de la República Libre de Huizucar!"

He grew up poor, he'd tell me, he'd run around barefoot. Even though my grandfather Papa Marcos was a cop (supposedly a metermaid), they still struggled with the number of kids and expenses. My dad was the second-oldest of six, they were: Miguel (deceased, he died before I was born), my pops, tía Lola, tía Mila, tía Esperanza and tío Marcos. He said that he grew up in a house with many animals, lots of dogs and with an orchard with many different types of trees (mango, avocado, plantain, etc.) He was always talking about this orchard, he loved them! My dad had a green hand; our small, one-bedroom apartment on 144th resembled the Amazon. (Mom would complain about him ruining her bowls and plates with his damn plants.)

When he was young, he'd run around barefoot and bathe in the river. He used to walk 15 km (10 m) to get to the capital on foot . I know lots of people have heard these kinds of stories from their grandparents and felt like they were exaggerating, I know for a fact my dad wasn't. 

First of all, there's my dad's green toe. No, that's not a bad pun. No, it's not a typo. My dad's big toe, the right one, I think, had a nail split in two that grew from the corners and formed an X, not to mention it was this gnarly khaki color. The story goes that he was playing football (soccer) with the boys of his village in a local lot and he was barefoot. He went to kick the ball and there was something sharp and metallic jutting out from the ground that hooked his toenail, ripping it off in the motion. It got infected and didn't heal properly hence the X-Men toe, he didn't seem to care about it though.

Secondly, my dad, when he still had the will to shower, would do it with a bucket and bowl (in Salvi Spanish that's: bañarse con un guacal) and the water would be cold, even during the winter. I thought he was insane: why on Earth would you bathe with cold water when you can shower with hot water?! However, I noticed something when I visited El Salvador for the first time last summer, it's a luxury to shower with warm water. Maybe this is obvious to you, maybe not, it wasn't to me before visiting El Salvador. The first hotel we stayed at only had one temperature setting for the water and that was cold, in fact, many places we stayed at only had cold water (I was under the impression that tropical climate equals hot water, man, was I wrong!). Suffice it to say, I took some of the fastest showers of my life!

My dad used to tell me how he'd walk all those kilometers on the way to the capital in the wee hours of the morning, barefoot, accompanying the ladies of the village who were on their way to sell their wares at markets in Sivar (San Salvador). He said that each time they set off from the village a black dog would appear and keep them company until they got to the outskirts of the metropolis. This wasn't a known dog, just a random stray like the many you'll see any day of the week in El Salvador. Turns out there's an urban legend called "el cadejo", there's a black dog and a white dog and both are good in their own ways: the black one scares straight those that are going down the wrong path and the white one protects those in need. I've seen these street dogs accompany us, wild dogs that let me pet them and were super sweet, sweeter and nicer than some dogs owned by upstanding citizens with a leash. My dad was kinda like those strays, mi viejo era un chucho de la calle.

In his adolescence, he befriended a boy named Lorenzo, Lorenzo De Sola. (The De Sola were supposedly one of the 14 families that ruled El Salvador as an oligarchy.) He said that one day he was walking on his way to school when Lorenzo, driving his own car, recognized him from school and offered to give him a lift. He said that along with taking him to school from time to time he also invited him over to his mansion. He developed a crush on Lorenzo's sister (but nothing ever came of it). He also developed a love and admiration for Lorenzo for being so kind and generous despite the obvious difference between them. He made such an impression on him that he decided to name his fifth child after him, thing is, my mom wanted me to have an English name. So she asked one of the staff at the hospital where I was born, "How do you say 'Lorenzo' in English?" and they replied, "Lawrence". That's how I wound up being one of the first of my family to have an English-sounding name, my mom's thinking was that I'd have it easier this way (until they read my last name). Larry, being the shortened version of Lawrence (and probably easier for my folks to pronounce with their rolling R's), is what everyone calls me now but, every now and then, my dad would call me "Lorenzo!" in his gruff, joking tone. My siblings and I had our doubts because my dad had a penchant for telling anecdotes with improbable elements like they were the most natural thing in the world (see: cadejo story). He was like a walking, breathing Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. So we decided to look it up and he does exist, the De Sola family were a rich family that made their fortune in Curacao and later emigrated to El Salvador. A kid from an obscenely wealthy family and another from the sticks, the two friends, it sounds like The Prince and the Pauper.

My dad loved architecture. He was always talking about how he studied it in school, in uni, and how he was never able to fulfill his dream of being an architect. He graduated from college with his architecture degree and even completed some small projects but he fell into what would become his career, working as a foreman and later accountant at the International Railways of Central America (IRCA). He worked there for many years, rising through the ranks through hard work and charisma. It was during this time that he met my mom, Gloria Sanchez Chavez, who was working there as a secretary. My dad, smitten by her, decided to ask her out and so began their romance. (This story was much more romantic when I was younger and hearing it retold as an adult was bookended by insults like "ese imbécil" and "ese inútil" as well as introducing the notion that their marriage wasn't so Shakespearean.) They would go on dates chaperoned by my grandma and aunt Adela and if they were lucky they might hold hands (No touching!). 

Before getting married and all that, there were other stories. My dad had a child out of wedlock (my half-brother Pablo, he's the oldest) and the details surrounding his birth and sudden disappearance of his mom a few years later (she up and left, according to my parents, one day) are still murky to this day. It's a touchy subject for many involved, dad would never really talk about who she was, how they met, and I never thought to ask (or maybe I just wasn't brave enough).

My dad was the biggest pinkie liberal you could meet. He became politicized in college, railing against the right-wing, military government. El Salvador was prosperous for those in power yet increasingly unjust to the lower echelons: landless farm labor and tenant farmers. To give you an idea, read up on the 1932 Peasant Massacre. Peasants, aiming to pass through reforms which would give them a semblance of justice in dealing with the wealthy land barons, were massacred by government forces. They didn't stop at killing the leaders of the revolt, they indiscriminately killed anyone carrying a machete (a machete is a farm tool used to cut down crops, most peasant farmers could be seen carrying one not as a weapon but as a simple tool of the trade). The same reforms that the insurgents tried to push through in 1932 were the same that were being proposed as late as the late 70's when El Salvador entered another stage in its history. This was a time when there was a lot of political activity in Latin America and the US had a tentative grip on the situation. My dad became active by protesting, organizing and collaborating with leftist groups. This was a time marked by disappearances of dissidents by the infamous "death squads" (escuadrones de la muerte) who silently dispatched their victims. He was lucky enough to avoid detection during these years when a college education could equal a death sentence. It was this civic fervor that he brought to the US with him when he immigrated. Remember IRCA? IRCA is a North American company and my dad petitioned to get a work visa so he could work in the US, he wanted to follow in my aunt Esperanza's footsteps. Once in the US, he'd become an active and prominent member of the Centro Salvadoreño (which is now the Centro Cuzcatlán). 

There was a lot at stake. El Salvador, a banana republic, was an industrial hub in the heart of Central America. Here's Salvadoran history (and some geography) in a nutshell: El Salvador was a vassal state or fringe Maya region in the pre-columbian era (before the 1500's). It's on a tiny, dense land filled with volcanoes, 23 to be exact, and tropical jungles. Civilizations would spring up, flourish and fall with the pulverizing force of an eruption. Wash, rinse, repeat. Cue the Spaniards, they thought that after defeating the Aztecs in Mexico that Central America would be a breeze but they were wrong, the first expedition into what is now El Salvador by Alvarado would end in failure (though the second, with a sizable force, were victorious in subjugating the local tribes. Under the Spanish, El Salvador's main crop initially was indigo but that later changed to coffee. To this day, El Salvador's main export is still coffee (due to the volcanoes; volcanic soil is extremely fertile and the high altitudes make for the best Arabica). When Central America gained its independence from the Spanish (it would later split into the countries we now know: Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica), it traded one imperial power for another; the US. The US exercised dominion over this region, and the rest of Latin America, through its economic interests by way of the United Fruit Company (the original UFC, which is now Chiquita Brands International). The United Fruit Company would buy huge swaths of land at bargain prices from the local governments and its these multinationals that helped install repressive regimes who helped the machine run smoothly. When a government decided to rein in these injustices with pesky reforms, CIA operatives and paramilitary forces were sent to protect American interests (check the 1954 coup of the democratically-elected president Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala which radicalized a young doctor named Che Guevara). In fact, IRCA was a US company started with the express purpose of transporting those United Fruit Company crops to shipping ports. It was during the sixties and seventies that more and more movements started empowering peasants and the poor into claiming their basic human rights. A powerful figure in this movement was Monseñor Romero. He was a catholic priest who spoke out against the inhuman conditions that Salvadorans were living in and for them to reclaim those rights. He was dubbed "the Voice of the Voiceless" by his followers and became a thorn in the side of the totalitarian government. So much so that, on March 24, 1980, armed gunmen entered the church where he was officiating and assassinated him on the altar while he was giving mass. His murder caused an uproar and his funeral drew thousands to the Cathedral in San Salvador. The government forces, it's unclear under what auspices, fired into the crowds, slaughtering hundreds of innocent people (my aunt Miriam recalled that day, she said she climbed over a construction site fence to save herself from the shower of bullets and huddled along with others in the sanctuary of the cathedral). This event, like the many cataclysmic eruptions in El Salvador's history, would lead to the Civil War, one of the bloodiest in human history and a reason why I and many of my brethren find themselves outside El Salvador, there are more Salvadorans abroad than there. It's this history that marked my dad in his political ideals and that marks us all as Salvadorans, whether or not you share with same idealogies you're affected nonetheless. 

I heard a lot about this history, my history, our history, at the protests, meetings and parties. And he would drag me to most of them, I was his sidekick by default. I remember when we went to DC to a national protest (and saw the White House and Lincoln Memorial for the first time). The parties, going to Hempstead for meetings, going to rallies. I remember walking around Far Rockaway in a parade to celebrate Central America's independence (Sept 15th). In my household, Castro was the Virgen de Guadalupe. Hugo Chavez was another member of the pantheon. I remember when I was 7 or 8 and I came home talking how I learned about this dude named Columbus who was a great man. My dad muttered under his breath, "ese criminal". I'll never forget it, it was the first time anything I learned was challenged. This had a profound impact on me, it taught me critical thinking at an early age.

I mostly saw my dad at night or on the weekends. He worked a lotta shit jobs; as a cook, a furniture mover, a messenger and as a factory worker among other things. He worked long hours for little pay and drank too much when he wasn't working. I resented him as a child, he used to be trigger happy with the belt after a couple "escrudraibers" in his belly. I didn't and couldn't understand the kind of work he was doing or the obstacles he was facing on a daily basis. As an immigrant myself now (I detest the term "expat"), I'm beginning to see to a small extent what he might've gone through. He lived in Hell's Kitchen when it deserved its moniker, fresh off the boat. 

For a time, I was a Spoken Word poet. I performed at various universities (including NYU, Yale, Amherst and CUNY) as well as poetry cafes around the city. I performed once at Queens College and mentioned it to my dad as I hustled out to catch the Q44. When I stepped up to the mic I could see my dad in the back of the room and we came back home in his car (I think it was the 1978 Ford Thunderbird, a beaut in her day and a relic by this point). There was the time my parents, along with my sis Evelyn, Ruddy and Eddie (Ruddy's boy), came to see me compete at the Friday night slam at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (a friend of mine was one of the MCs and would regularly offer me a spot). It was one of my fondest moments being able to perform in front of them, they were really supportive (even if half the shit I said probably went over their heads) and they both expressed how they were proud of me. Years went by, I used to religiously go to our writing workshop (Mindf*ck), facilitate my own and hit up as many open mics and slams as possible. One day my dad called me over to his room (as was his habit) and pulled a yellowed cutout from a newspaper. He unfolded it and began to explain how when he was a young man in his twenties he'd write poetry and a local newspaper would publish it. There it was on the cutout, "Celos por Filiberto Ramírez", a short poem about his envy of his partner's previous lovers. He never mentioned writing or poetry, this was news to me, and not only was he a writer but he was published. Despite trying to find my own path, to be my own person, our paths kept paralleling each others.

You could say I'm a chip off the old blockhead. 


Wednesday, June 3, 2020

Haiku: Outside

Outside is freedom
Outside was freedom
Outside will be freedom 

- Olga Garzón

Recently, we did a workshop on haikus and I told my students that the theme is "outside". Given the current situation, it really resonated with me.