Nicaragua: Blunt Objects

Bluntness would seem to come naturally to Nicaraguans.  I once heard, on a bus, a passenger call out, “Hey, piggy,” to a plump vendor, who turned around unscathed and politely attended the customer.  Frank nicknames (apodos) are the norm and tend to completely replace one’s real name.  Baldy (Pelon), Fatty (Gordo), Shorty (Chaparro), and Big-Eared (Orejon) are such common nicknames that people normally have more than one friend that is referred to by the same apodo. (“I talked to the Big-Eared one.” “Which one? Ronald?” “No, man, Franklin.”) In the US, such nicknames, when used to address the person the nickname refers to, would result in either a severe reprimand, a lawsuit, or a beating (depending on the situation). But in Nicaragua, nicknames don’t seem to bother anyone.

So, based on these examples, a person might assume that Nicaraguans are inherently more crass and open than Americans.  I believe they are in terms of physical appearances.  I mean, social norms in the United States strictly prohibit using physical “flaws” as descriptors in public settings.  Just think of those situations when you are describing a common workplace acquaintance whose name you do not know or cannot remember.  The obvious strategy to get the others to realize who you are referring to would be to list the acquaintance’s most striking and distinguishing characteristics.  The problem is that distinguishing characteristics, when viewed as flaws, are taboo in American society.  You cannot say, “I am talking about the fat guy,” because it is viewed as insensitive and insulting.  So, people tend to go for the beat-around-the-bush strategy.  The, “Oh, the one who always listens to Sinatra. Oh, the one who likes to wear blue,” strategy.  Once it is clear that nobody knows who you are talking about, you drop the sensitivity act and say (displaying the appropriate amount of frustration at having to stoop so low), “You know…the fat guy.”  “Oh yeah! Ted!”

In the United States, this tendency towards non-judgment, this abhorrence of discrimination based on physical attributes, became the political correctness movement.  A movement of compassionate judges and executioners, eager to crucify one in the name of the few.  Inevitably, as the PC movement has become more entrenched in American society, it has engendered a counter-movement.  This counter-movement is characterized by people making shocking and uncouth remarks in a deliberate attempt to offend others, with the ultimate goal of mocking the oversensitivity (and perceived hypocrisy) of the PC movement.  Essentially, they say the unsayable, because they know they aren’t supposed to say it, and those offended know that they know that they aren’t supposed to say it.  It’s an easy way to be the “cool rebel,” challenging authority.  Examples of this counter-movement in American popular culture abound; from right-wing shock-jock talk radio stars (Rush Limbaugh), to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, to Sasha Baron Cohen. (You’ll notice it also spans the ideological spectrum.)  More importantly, you see it in every day life, in educated friends who spout off sexist clichés for the sake of irony (supposedly lampooning both people who really are sexist, and people who don’t get the irony).

Crossing the Border: The Welcoming Party

This is the fifth installment in a six part series on a Nicaraguan's journey to the United States. You can find the series in its entirety here.

As Choco ran he didn’t reflect on his journey, on its purpose, on whether or not it had been worth it; all he felt was adrenaline elbowing his chest cavity with all its weight.  He didn’t even realize he was running hand in hand with the pregnant Honduran, until she started to drag.

The others had approached the SUV as it got closer, but Choco had remained suspicious, and the Honduran had stayed with him.  By the time the letters on the SUV became legible, it was already too late for the others.

The Honduran was not keeping up, and they attempted to hide in a private ranch.  Upon reaching the barbed wire, a man appeared out in the distance and aimed his rifle at them.  The shots echoed everywhere, further disorienting them, but also providing a new boost of frantic energy.

As Choco looked around desperately, the Honduran watched their shadows run alongside them, like an inside-out mirror.  They bobbed and panted for another twenty minutes, reaching a group of grazing cattle.  “You see those cows, they have to belong to someone.  Lets hide out here until the owner comes.”

Crossing the Border: Exodus

This is the fourth installment in a six part series on a Nicaraguan's journey to the United States. You can find the series in its entirety here.

They drove up to the Mexican-American border, hidden under the bed-cover of the Coyote’s pick-up.

It was a moonless night, and the milky way, a large violet streak, like the tracks left behind by a jetliner, divided the sky down the middle.  The Coyote pointed the way: “Walk towards that star.  An SUV will be waiting on the other side.”

Day broke a few hours later.  The sun’s heat was oppressive, indifferent…cold.  The sand seemed to conspire with its ruthless ruler.  The days of traveling on nothing but canned food caught up to them.  They began to carry each other in an ill-conceived attempt to save energy.  They kept walking.  There was no SUV.

Choco climbed up a tree to see if there was life anywhere near.  The sight of an endless bare landscape made him dizzy, and he fell to the ground and lost consciousness for a minute.

Partially buried bones--bird, dog and human remains--littered the trail.  “That fucking guy, he screwed us.  He left us out here to die.” “No, come on, let’s keep walking.  He said to just keep walking straight and they would come pick us up.”

The sun was standing right over them, at his most despotic.  The Honduran started to cry, a dry sob.

In the distance, they saw a dust cloud.  A wind storm?  It got closer and closer.  Choco shaded his eyes and squinted.  Leading the storm was a white SUV.

Crossing the Border: A Long Drive

This is the third installment in a six part series on a Nicaraguan's journey to the United States. You can find the series in its entirety here.

The Coyote was a heavy-set Mexican, with a welcoming smile, and an ability to turn a “No” into an “Alright” with a simple look and a “Come on…”

Choco met him, along with his five traveling companions, outside a fried chicken restaurant on an unusually dry night in Guatemala City.  Getting to Guatemala had been simple enough; nobody even asked him for his Nicaraguan identification card.

The Coyote instructed the voyagers to get into the back of his pickup, and so started the first leg of the trip, up to the Mexican border.  As they neared this first border, the pick-up veered off an abandoned stretch of the Pan-American, and the Coyote told the travelers they had to lay down, he was going to cover up the bed.  Choco remembers that after his eyes adjusted, he spent those hours hidden away under the bed-cover studying the feet that lay in front of him.  The red slip-ons, with a rose-like bow near the pinky toe.  The slight cleavage between the toes, the long skinny bones, the veins bulging through like cables under a carpet.  The slight scar near the ankle.  The ankle bone like the bulging eyes of a fish.  Their pungent smell.  Choco claims he would be able to recognize those feet immediately if he ever saw them again.

The Existential Development Worker

Scene: A development worker is lying on a hammock in an unspecified developing country.  The hammock is swinging slowly, and the worker is staring intently at the leaves of a mango tree above.

What am I doing here?  Is this just another form of tourism?  Is it poverty voyeurism?  What am I doing?  Am I just here for bragging rights?  To win some imaginary future argument, where I can reference being down in the trenches and seeing it first hand?  For their reaction?  The way their eyebrows jump up like a cat startled by its own reflection.

But no, I’m doing something.  People express sincere gratitude at the services I offer.  They bless the Lord.  They appreciate what I do.  I am doing something.  But…what am I doing? Am I some tool of a foreign power?  Am I a crusader?  Am I imposing alien values?  Am I a missionary?  No.  Not a missionary.  Not some Jehovah’s Witness sent to enlighten the people with nonsense.  I actually do something.  Build latrines for communities who still shit in bushes; build bridges for villages that are stranded in the rainy season; teach people computer skills to compete in the labor market.  Yeah, some missionaries might also do similar work, but their main goal is to convert.  And a poor Catholic is no different than a poor Mormon.

But, and here is where you start to see the cracks snaking up the pillars, maybe I am a missionary.  Maybe I am just a missionary of progress.  Whose to say my idea of self-improvement (based as it is on the promotion of a skilled labor force, on the diffusion of modern technology, and on certain dietary and health practices) isn’t just as much nonsense as Joseph Smith’s golden tablets?  Aren’t I proselytizing in the name of the modern socio-economic world order?  A world order shaped by the industrial revolution and spread by its powerful disciples.  I am spreading the gospel of the modern technological-industrial system.

Valparaíso

Valparaíso is an abandoned beach house.  A deserted mansion inhabited by young, bohemian squatters.

A late nineteenth century creation, haphazardly constructed, as if several architects had been fired in the process of its erection, the building is hexagonal, with varying angles and side lengths.  The numerous stairwells crisscross each other like a Escher painting; the hallways, varying innumerably in width, zigzag around the many floors, leading to other meandering passageways, or to endless stairwells that, like water wells, fade into darkness;  the antique elevators (the ones with the metal doors that open and close manually like an accordion), long ago out-of-service, at one time rose to unknown heights at a snail’s pace.  Pipes are always bursting, ceilings collapsing at the slightest tremor, and fires are constantly being sparked and charring entire wings.  But the building remains.

The squatters have given the building their personal flavor.  The hallways and stairwells are covered in elaborate street art, stencils, and graffiti.  There are hookah-smoking rooms, cafes, music rooms, bars, arts and crafts rooms.  Downstairs there is a projection screen that plays old Godard and Antonioni films.  The corridors are littered with book stacks.  Dogs roam free, and on some floors outnumber their human companions.

Crossing the Border: The Gold Rush

This is the second installment in a six part series on a Nicaraguan's journey to the United States.

In the United States, the standard caricature of an “illegal immigrant” is that of a desperate human being who cannot make ends meet in his or her poverty-stricken homeland, and therefore sets off on a grueling expedition into an unknown and mystical land of dreams.  The Hispanic immigrant is perceived as “fleeing” a bleak and arduous lifestyle for the opportunities and comforts of the “first world.”  He is the miserable Polish family being greeted by the Statue of Liberty and its “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”  He is an indigent who chooses to migrate for the sake of his or her own survival.  Why else would he cross deserts, dodge bullets, or be stuffed into suffocating cargo trucks?

The destitute immigrant image satisfies the needs of both the left and the right in the United States.  For the left, it creates a sympathetic character entitled to the economic advantages found in the US; for the right, it is a pitiful image of misery that, like a disease, threatens to infect the sacred homeland.

The truth, however, is that the current wave of Hispanic immigrants may be not be so much like the wretched Eastern Europeans passing through Ellis Island, but more like the Northeastern Americans rushing to California during the mid-nineteenth century gold rush.

In Nicaragua, the term for traveling to the United States illegally is to go mojado, or “wet.”  Rather than being destitute, the mojados I have spoken to, and the common Nicaraguan perception of a mojado, is that of an adventurous, ambitious lower-middle class entrepreneur.  The mojados I have met tend to have stable, at times arduous, jobs that afford them a wage that is good enough to get by.   The lower classes that struggle to maintain a healthy diet are far more preoccupied with their daily chores (and perhaps even satisfied by their life routine) to yearn and dream of other worlds.  The struggling middle class, on the other hand, earn enough to survive comfortably, and, in general, comfort can lead only to bored, apathetic dissatisfaction or to an insatiable, ambitious drive.  The mojado is the latter, part of the eager middle class, anxious to move up the income ladder at any cost.