La Gringuita

Last year when I was preparing to come to Ecuador I wrote for the following in preparation for Peace Corps service.

"No matter how much I prepare, I suspect that the impact of a transition of this magnitude will be huge. With respect to my own cultural background, I presume that being a North American will have an enormous impact on how people interact with me. I’m a fair-skinned, single woman in her thirties. For better and worse, I will surely encounter people with stereotypes about white women from the United States. It will be important to try to not take anything too seriously, especially at the beginning. Communicating respect and openness to people in my community with help me establish my own uniqueness."

Um. Yeah. This, as you might imagine turned out to be the understatement of the decade. This is my life here. As a norteamericana, I realize that I am always under a certain level of scrutiny. What do I think about Bush? What do I think about Iraq? What do I think about Hollywood? Why are they building that wretched wall on the Texas border? How much do I pay for my apartment? What do my parents think about me being here? Where on earth are all the children I should have at age 34?

And, I came in trying to have a tough skin, especially where the image of the United States in the world. I can´t defend that vast majority of US foreign policy, especially in Latin America, much less in the Middle East these days. I can´t defend that fact that right has been systematically chipping away at the safety net in my country for twenty years and that no one in the states has any guarantee of being seen by a doctor unless they cash on hand or an insurance card. I wouldn´t presume to argue with my friends who grew up on the left in various countries in and whose families or they themselves were persecuted by regimes that were either tacitly or explicitely supported by the United States. I came prepared to absorb some of the shock of criticism of mi tierra.

It gets complicated though. On at least two occasions, I´ve still gotten my back up about blanket criticisms of the United States. Not because there aren´t legitimate critiques to be made, but it gets under my skin when people make across the board statements about how it must feel to be norteameriana, or how things came to be this way, because invariably people from outside the States do not get that part. Be it bad or good, I find myself wanting to have the last word on how things came to be this way and what must be done about it. I don´t get bent out of shape when people criticize my country. I get bent out of shape when people think they understand how we got to be this way.

James Baldwin said it better, and think this is from The Fire Next Time.

"I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."

I grew up in a resolutely Democratic home and was raised with the attending ideology: the US has made some errors from time to time (Vietnam, Jim Crow, genocide of the the Indians, what have you) but we have been working on all of that and are on a resolutely upwards paths towards being a force for good in the world. The good things would include the Constitution, the 14th amendment, the New Deal, storming the beach at Normandy, and Stonewall, to name a couple. And I want all of it to be true. But like all myths, I am confronted all the time with evidence that its not. And people here who look at me appraisingly and say, now what exactly do you make of the war in Iraq, are ultimately not the ones who have to live with the disonnance. Its people from the United States who have to live with the ambivalence, the reality that for all its potential, the U.S. has been responsible for some dreadful things both at home and in the world and what means for us who benefit and stand to lose the most from it. The potential exists that instead of being a flawed system which a lot of the time works for a lot of people, its a rotten system, designed to only work for those with money, education, and access to power.

I´m still mulling over a lot of this stuff, but will say close this bit with another James Baldwin quote, though its still not the one I was looking for.

"American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it. "