The United States and Latin America

My childhood in Brazil was steeped in French culture. I studied at Catholic French schools, and in my home, we listened to French music and read French poetry. My mother loved to sing La Marseillaise. The United States only came into my life when I was an adolescent.

I have a few clear memories of my childhood in Punta Arenas, Chile (at the time the southernmost city of the world), but none as clear as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963. I heard the news on the radio, just like a previous generation had heard and panicked listening to “The War of the Worlds.” The event in Dallas, however, was terribly real. It was a jolt, a moment of heightened awareness that something big had happened well beyond the confines of my remote city. It hit me with enormous velocity and power. I probably ceased to be a child at that very moment (I was born in 1954) because I internalized, in a deeply personal way, an event that, until then was only discernible to adults. Then came the sorrow, the empathy with another child, Caroline Kennedy, closer to my own age. It was a shock that crossed the boundaries of time and space. It was my first encounter with the United States.

When I was a little girl, my mother owned a bookstore in the Sopocachi neighborhood in La Paz and Disney comic books were among the assortment of magazines. Young and old alike read them, and we knew all the characters by heart: Micky Mouse and his friend Minnie, Scrooge and Goofy, Donald Duck and his three nephews. Many of us wanted to go to the United States and encounter this magical world where they lived. In my case, it was only a distant dream because my parents did not have the money to travel.

I am a Cuban woman born in the 70s. This means that my childhood and adolescence were shaped by the Cold War and a vision of a bipolar world.

One September night in 1927, a U.S. Marine patrol attached to the military forces stationed in Nicaragua burst into a hotel in the city of León and detained General José Ramón Téllez, one of the Liberal leaders of the  Constitutionalist Army, later driving him to Managua, the country’s capital, and sending him into exile in neighboring Costa Rica. 

I was born in Santa María Quiegolani, in Oaxaca’s southern mountains, where the sun measured time and darkness was the queen of the night.

I arrived in Los Angeles when I was ten in the midst of two crises: the armed conflict in my country, Guatemala, and my parents’ divorce. I didn’t have any inkling of the atrocity of the first war; I would find out about that later. The second conflict devoured my family; it was a fierce battle. My Aunt Lucy—who had emigrated to California at the end of the 60s— offered to take my sister and me during our vacations in 1979 to provide some relief to my mother, at least for a while.

Act I. The Spanish poet Antonio Machado once wrote, “My childhood memories are of a patio in Seville and a sunny garden where lemon trees ripened;…” Since I am not from Seville nor am I a poet, and have neither a garden nor a lemon tree, my childhood was a lot less lyrical: a soccer ball, homework, a loyal dog, a vacant lot and a group of friends. One of them was the son of a top executive of the International Oil Company in Colombia and his name was Billy. His family wanted him to study in a Bogotá school and with schoolmates from Bogotá, instead of confining him to the usual “ghettos” where the children of diplomats and foreign business executives usually end up. There, they grow up speaking their native tongue, surrounded by other pasteurized kids and, like them, homogenized and protected from dangerous childhood adventures like organizing beetle races on a track of sand or sneaking into an empty house in search of ghosts.

In Caacupé, Paraguay, where I lived part of my childhood, only the pilgrimage on the day of the Virgin Mary broke up the routine. It was in the plaza of this town, some 30 miles to the east of the capital, Asunción, where, in 1966, I heard the U.S. Marine Band on tour through Latin America for the first time. It was marvelous: the musical selections, the Marines with their white uniforms and a group of people who oozed happiness and enthusiasm. It was my first contact with the United States in the times of the Alliance for Progress.

During my childhood and youth in Ecuador, I watched movies such as “Tarzan of the Apes,” in which the actor communicated with the jungle animals.

I write these lines not with bitterness, but with affection and concern. The United States shaped part of my outlook on life, its energy, entrepreneurship, civic spirit, and sense of community.

My first inkling about the United States came from a faroff voice I heard over the telephone. She had left El Salvador when I was only eleven months old and, years later, this voice appeared as if from another world, repeating, “I am your mother. I live in the United States.”

This story takes place between two boats, at a distance of 40 years and a great contradiction. It is, to a great extent, the story of this writer, that of his country and its complex, intense relations with the United States—sometimes traumatic (see the postscript at the bottom of this article) and sometimes happy.

I grew up in Mexico with a very clear —and very simplistic—image of the United States. It was the empire. The country that overthrew governments, invaded nations, spied on its allies and decided the destiny of the world without asking permission. In school, at home, in the media, this vision appeared over and over again: that of a powerful giant, egotistical and dangerous. Ronald Reagan was the planetary villain and “Rambo,” his military arm, glorified on the screen. One didn’t have to think much about it: the United States was the “other.” The threat.

“Yankees go home.” The slogan still echoes in my ears. I was born in 1965. During my childhood, Uruguayan democracy collapsed. My adolescence unfolded under a dictatorship, and I was far more exposed to French culture—since I studied at the Lycée Français—than to the American world, which felt distant to me. Although both my parents were deeply interested in Uruguayan politics, public affairs only became a central concern in my own life around 1980, when I was fifteen, after the Uruguayan dictatorship unsuccessfully attempted a constitutional reform inspired by the doctrine of National Security. As I became increasingly involved in politics, I absorbed the dominant beliefs of Uruguay’s leftist middle class at the time. One of the most powerful ideas—nurtured especially by widely read authors such as Eduardo Galeano and Mario Benedetti—was the notion of the imperialist drive of the United States.