From the diaspora, a professor of Spanish observes in astonishment how the glamorous image of the United States disappears, giving way to harsh realities of marginalization and violence, in areas like Ward 8 in Washington, D.C. He questions the concept of progress in the face of grave problems like poverty and lack of opportunity, thus painting a tragicomic landscape that challenges conventional perceptions of how the U.S. really is.
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I was going to talk about writing from the diaspora, but yesterday, here, a seventeen-year-old kid got killed in the parking lot of his high school. I say “here,” but it was on the other side of the city, in Ward 4, way up north and far away from this side of the river. Here, in Ward 8, shootings are an everyday occurrence—sometimes, an every half-day occurrence. A few months ago, before class, some of my students met up a few blocks away from the school and hung out, as teenagers do (loud noise, bad words, smoke…). An angry local came out to send them packing. He pointed a gun at one of the kids; he shot another of them twice. Once in the hip, once in the chest. Days later, a counselor came to my classroom to give his classmates (and me) the news. Then there was silence, a spatter of whispers, someone laughed, the half-answered questions started coming. At one point in the conversation, this question came up: Who here has a loved one who’s been shot? The whole class raised their hands.
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…But you go back to Colombia over break and, just like that, people say things like, “this is my cousin, the one who lives in Washington,” and that’s where the (bad) jokes start: “So you’re next-door neighbors with Biden?” And unexpected comments, like: “Well, congrats on living there,” or, “Have you seen House of Cards?”
Year after year, they come out with another TV show, another movie, another documentary about the wheeling and dealing of power in the Capitol and the White House, but little is said about what’s happening across the river. Literally. The District of Columbia, as many will be aware (I wasn’t), is shaped like a diamond with a bite taken out of the lower left corner, where the Potomac River acts as a natural border between the capital city and the state of Virginia. This is not the river I’m talking about; I mean the other one. On the southeastern side, the Anacostia River splits the city (almost) like a knife. On one side is the interior: where you see the D.C. you see on TV, mostly affluent, well organized, stuffed with patriotic monuments—Lincoln on his throne; Jefferson, the slave-owner—diverse (it seems), but whiter. On the other side is the southeast…
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I came to this little piece of this huge country in the middle of the 2016 campaign season, three months before the presidential election: Donald versus Joe. Two months later, on January 6, the stampede of enraged Trumpists (Spanish spell check suggests trampistas) entered the Capitol at 12:49pm, while I was on a Zoom meeting with my fellow teachers. It was the time of the pandemic, and I, as I still do now, was playing the part of “Spanish and Culture Instructor” at a school in southeast D.C. Not six months had passed since my arrival, and already some pretty nasty morons were trying to claim power for themselves and destroy the world and freedom along with it: like on TV or at the movies. The meeting was swiftly paused, of course, and many of us waited eagerly for someone to put a stop to these evildoers—especially the one with his top off, as we all saw on our smartphones: the “QAnon Shaman” (ayayay…), so unconvincingly disguised as Jamiroquai (in case anyone still remembers him).
The news exploded on social media (and on the TV news, I imagine). God help us! One of my most recurring nightmares was coming true. This was Independence Day, this was G.I. Joe: Retaliation and Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon, this was 2012 and Olympus Has Fallen and Mars Attacks! and The Day After Tomorrow and (exhaustingly) so, so many others: a mob takes the sacred fortress of American democracy by force (the Capitol or the White House, either works). Also exploding all over every corner of the internet, of course, were the tweets and the memes. I recall two. First: “If the United States saw what the United States is doing in the United States, the United States would invade the United States”; second: “Due to travel restrictions [because of the pandemic], this year the United States had to stage the coup at home.” Ha.
Some journalists, outraged, summed it up thusly: “Things that only happen in third-world countries.” Such a debacle could only be compared to those that take place in other parts of the planet where chaos and disorder are the norm. It was unbelievable that something like this should happen in the United States of America. As if the District of Columbia were a district of Colombia. As if we were in Baghdad or Benghazi, or in Bolivia, or in “Chili”: on the other side of the río (Grande). ¡Increíble!
“…the world-famous Capital of the World, where Spider-Man swung through the buildings alongside countless other superheroes, is just one little piece, by no means the whole. Something should be made very clear: the vast majority of this chunk of North American soil between Mexico and Canada is a rural country.”
And, nonetheless, up to today’s date there have been more mass shootings than days this year (day 136, mass shooting 157), and a seventeen-year-old kid was just murdered in his school’s parking lot, and all my teenage students have at least one loved one in their short lives who has been shot, and there’s a bullet hole in the art room they haven’t got around to fixing, and a month ago a student’s mother wrote me asking for an extension on her son’s late assignments, and can you please help him, I hope you can understand, his dad was just killed by the police.
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On this side of the river, the people have dark skin.
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They say D.C. was a very different city, in racial terms, a few decades ago. Around 1970, they tell you, more than sixty percent of the population was black. But things have changed a lot since then, and, to put it plain and simple, a (white) majority, in the guise of progress, has been displacing these black communities, pushing them further and further—through questionable public policy, ever-higher rent, and an astronomical price of living—toward the other side of the river, where I teach, where so many shots are fired. (Although black people represent forty-seven percent of the overall population in D.C., they also represent eighty-seven percent of the homeless population and ninety-six percent of victims and suspects of shootings and homicides, and have the highest poverty rate in the city at over twenty-one percent, etc…).
Here in Ward 8, in the (severely wounded) heart of Congress Heights, all the students start their day going through a metal detector. They have to take off their belts and shoes and leave anything metal on a plastic tray that goes through an X-ray machine. Glass containers, anything too solid, and anything sharp or pointy are not allowed in. Suspicious juice and water bottles are subject to a strict sniffing from the security guard (a few weeks ago, they say someone tried to bring in a liter of whiskey).
For some people, this is all normal. Then comes class and the everyday shenanigans. Lord… No one is on time, almost no one. The students come and go from the classroom as they please. As calm as you like, they leave my class and go to another, surely more interesting than mine. Their classmates do the same: they come traipsing into my class as they would a fair, to talk at the top of their lungs with whomever, to drop off or pick up a pack of chips, to raucously hug, to insult one another with verve and affection, to see what’s going on here, oula, como ssstas, tacou, chicken buridou, chimichanga, cáiate puto, faliz navidad, faliz cumplianos, mi gustan los papas fridas, haha, fuck this shit. Outside, in the hallways, are dozens of students skipping class, some recording TikToks, piercing bursts of laughter, the smell of marijuana, classroom doors that never close, colleagues who, from a corner of their desk, attempt to explain an exercise to a select few pupils. Maybe later there’ll be a fight or two (the likelihood is high; the violence level, staggering). Some brave teacher might still dare to speak to a group of students in the corridor: let’s go, kids, he’ll say, you should be in class, please, get to your room. Plowing the sea, sowing the wind. Here, it’s a day like any other. Niagara Falls on a bicycle.
We also have some of the lowest literacy rates in the city here, some of the lowest scores in mathematics and also in humanities and sciences and, of course, in languages. Things that only happen in a different kind of country. Who’d have thought? Right here, in the capital city of Country Number One, the carnaval of the third world has crept in, the topsy-turvy life of the banana plantation, like in some corner of Bogotá or Caracas or Quito. Take it from me; I’m from (that “underdeveloped”) there: this land is (like) my land.
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I speak with migrant friends of mine about their lives in other cities of the north, places we’ve all seen on TV: Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, New York (of course New York, always New York, besieged by monsters and villains till the end of its days). Si por allá llueve, por aquí no escampa; if it’s raining there, it ain’t exactly clear skies here, they tell me in their way (I say it in Colombian). Does every great city of this land of the free have its southeast, its east side, its other side of the river? Maybe so, but there’s more.
It may be the case that, like me, many others have grown up seeing the United States on their TV screens on Sunday afternoons, on some action movie dubbed into Latino Spanish (which nobody speaks but all of us understand). That strange and fascinating country to the north was full of sky-high buildings and well-paved roads, high-speed cars and massive bridges and lights and shopping malls, subways and ships and taxi caps and umbrellas and, sometimes, beaches and perfect bodies that strolled around, no fat on them, no big deal. That’s the way it is there, I thought: big cities, top of the line, wherever you look. Money Train, but not The Simpsons (that was just absurd, and that’s why it was funny). But the world-famous Capital of the World, where Spider-Man swung through the buildings alongside countless other superheroes, is just one little piece, by no means the whole. Something should be made very clear: the vast majority of this chunk of North American soil between Mexico and Canada is a rural country.
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Head down the highways of, let’s say, Ohio or Kentucky (where I also spent a few years) and you’ll see with your own eyes the other side of this nation: land and fields and crops as far as the eye can see, old wooden barns, almost always red, and irrigation ponds, and billboards for fast food (only fast food) restaurants and drive-thrus with mounds of French fries and special deals on ultra-roasted coffee (bad, so bad), straws and lids of all colors and littered plastic bottles rolling through desolate parking lots, ads and signs for motels with and without swimming pool, with and without breakfast buffet, churches Methodist and Pentecostal and Lutheran and Presbyterian, billboards for gun shops, for candidates for sheriff, for lawyers who promise you justice and millions of dollars in damages, billboards with huge letters reading “Jesus is Coming” and “Hell is Real,” potholed highways that take you through tiny towns made up of houses and trailers that are forever falling down, inflatable pools with puddles of rainwater inside, A.C. window units about to conk out, children’s toys scattered all over the porch, remains of teddy bears, topless Barbies missing a limb or two, sun-bleached balls, yellow and yellowing frisbees, strollers with wounded stuffed animals, crumpled beer cans, grease-soaked paper bags, cracked stairsteps and muddy yards with little islands of grass, overgrowing weeds, some dirty-white dog, resigned to his fate and tied to a tree, some rusty old grill lying brained on the ground, the skeleton of a car becoming one with the undergrowth, and light-skinned people, white, with worn-out clothes and massive pickup trucks, and their flags bearing the stars-and-stripes all over, flag on the front door, flag in the window, flag on the ol’ truck’s license plate, flag sticker on the bumper, flag on the t-shirt, on the socks, on the shorts, flag on the delivery and garbage trucks, flag on the port-o-potties and flag on any packaging of any product made in their country, and flags on the coffins and flags in the graveyard, and huge, colossal, pristine flags, waving in the wind that blows the dust over every forgotten little town throughout the length and breadth of this state and the next.
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I came to this country years ago to study, as if not wanting to want to, and I am still here (writing about the diaspora? writing about writing in the diaspora?). I don’t know if I stayed or if I haven’t left yet. I have papers and a steady job: more (much more) than many. I miss my people and my city to tears, but when I go visit, I don’t understand how you can live that way. The disorder, the insecurity, the classism—our own way of being racist—is unbelievable. Political instability, gun violence, precarious education, endemic poverty… In short, things that only happen in the third world.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
