La Mariposa en la Pared

The everyday experiences of latino immigrants through the eyes of an outsider. Las vidas típicas de unos inmigrantes latinos a través de los ojos de una forastera.

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Location: Upstate NY, United States

"To me it’s always interesting when you get accepted somewhere you don’t really belong. It’s interesting when people open up and let you in their world." - Gilles Mingasson

Saturday, October 08, 2011

Home

"Esta gente aqui-" I let my eyes wander over the richly carved woodwork, and listened to the laughter from the gallery as artists with grey ponytails flirted with women wearing too much makeup, holding wine glasses. "Es que la gente aqui no son mi gente."

A couple walked in from the chilly evening, eyeing me suspiciously as if I were plotting something secret in my foreign tongue over the cell phone. I blinked and they glided by in a watery blur.

But how could it be? With my birth, my degree, my culture, by all means I should belong here. Only once in my life had I felt like I truly belonged anywhere. Not in high heels, not here. There. Among the big warm bodies with their earthy smells and whinneys, laboring and sweating, laboring and freezing, every day living alongside people who never failed to smile to me, to welcome me in a million different ways. Speaking the language that came to me like a gift. My learning it was a labor of love, my ultimate expression of the desire to understand and to be understood.

Now I'm home but I feel homesick. What is home? Is it a house? A city? My family is here but they have lives that have endured and changed while I was gone. My life is back there, abandoned back there along with the people who made that place feel like a home, of sorts. I feel like a ghost visiting where I once lived. I feel detached, like I'm floating near the ceiling, unable to get my feet under me.

Then I remember that I'm talking to someone who understands what it's like to be a stranger. For him, home is a confusing notion, too. The primos y amigos who surround him understand what he gave up, how hard it is to live day to day in a place where no one speaks your language, and that to go back home would mean to be among family, but family who don't know what his journey has been like. Family who feel hurt when you don't seem all that content to be home. Because you feel more at home among those who understand you best.

So many months away from home. So much effort to get back home. Only to find that home had changed from a location to a measure of belonging. And I belong with them.

1 Comments:

Blogger ArchaeoDan said...

Hey Ms Janna..
Home is where your heart makes it's nest.. I have lived in so many places - Long Island, Palo Alto, California Geneseo, Provincetown,Rochester,New Paltz, Johnson City/Bingo, Austin, Dallas, Perry Michigan.. Only some of these places have been home - based on the people, the friends family and community, the context in which I found myself... You can always go home again, just don't expect it to be the home you left,frozen in place... Facebook has provided way to put the disparate pieces of the puzzle that is ones life together, but the result sometimes f*cks with our preconceived notions of where we fit with those that fill the mental and emotional landscape of our lives... Interesting musings thanks for the inspiration (as always)...

11/09/2011 6:03 PM  

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