Fear

Fear

The feeling is deep. It is there. I have to feel it because it is inside me. It is overpowering, like a fire spreading, quickly, very quickly. I remember how it was for another person, someone that I loved very dearly, over 25 years ago. She never recovered from the experience and here I am, going through something very similar. It is horrible, the feeling of not having a home, knowing that perhaps I never will again, not in this country anyway. I think about it day and night, night and day. I want to get rid of it as if it were a bug, one of those pesky bugs and cockroaches that I have been living with for the past 9 months.

 

 

 

You

You

I cannot help it. When I see a German shepherd my mind and my heart get me back to you. I see you, my beloved German shepherd, and not the dog on the street walking with his or her owner. You are the dog that matters to me. It is as if you had never died. I feel like you are somewhere not very far from me.

 

Touching

She touched the dog, the 14 year old German Shepherd. So much like my dog, she thought. So much like him and he’ll never come back to life.

That Day

That Day

It was early in the morning. She got up and went out of the house without even drinking a cup of coffee to wake up. There was no need for that that day. She had not been able to sleep all night. The house, the house she had been living in for so many years was going to be taken away from her. She didn’t care about food, about anything. All she wanted was for the clock to roll back, for things to be different, the way she had known them. This was an unsafe and unsettled situation. As she took the bus to the court house she wondered how long the judge would let her stay in the house, in her neighborhood. She had always paid her rent on time and lately she had been paying 3 times what the house was worth. Would the judge take that into account? Would he care about the way she looked, more than 10 years older than her actual age? She didn’t know. All she knew was that this was a nightmare. She didn’t like nightmares.

 

The Lights

The Lights

I remember the lights, the bright yellow lights burning the top of my head. We were in a room, your parochial office, and there were people all around us. They didn’t know what was going on. All I wanted was to talk to you. All I wanted was to ask you if you had read the letter I had sent you. I loved you more than any man I had known. You brought out the woman in me and I didn’t want to let go without a fight. I knew how rare what I felt for you was and I thought that deserved a chance, maybe more than a chance. Later, days after that evening, I found out that you were in a bad mood, that you were getting mad at people for no apparent reason. Someone asked me if you had ever made any sort of promises to me, promises that now you didn’t want to keep. No, I said. But I know I will ever love like that again.

 

The Woman’s Hat

The Hat

A crowded public library: She was wearing a large hat, like the ones in a 50s film. It had been raining hard, but the hat was dry. The woman came towards me. She tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around and she handed me a piece of paper. This is bad, I said to myself as I looked at it. It isn’t right. The paper was all legal stuff, something about having to appear in court for eviction. I have been evicted ever since I came back to the U.S. I have been foreclosed on again, just like I was in Atlanta in 2005. I don’t have a home. I don’t have anything.

 

 

 

 

 

Latino Stereotypes

No one will ever get it right unless they realize that not everyone in Latin America comes from Mexico, Puerto Rico or Central America. Each a nd every country, including my native Argentina is different, with different ways of speaking, thinking and feeling. I watch novelas or soap operas from Mexico on Telemundo and Univision because that’s all they import. Some of them, like Una Maid en Manhattan, are pretty good, with god actors and a great female antagonist. Una Maid works because it’s a basic Cinderella story based on the movie starring Jennifer Lopez and Ralph Fiennes. The writers changed a lot of it, and it was a pleasure for me to watch because the poor, hardworking single mother at the end marries her billionaire. I did not identify with the single mother but I did pull for her.

As a person who came to this country from Buenos Aires at the age of 10, I am fully Americanized. Still, I would like to see Telemundo and Univision show novelas from Argentina. I would like to see Argentina and its actors and writers become more visible in the Hispanic world.  But I fear that many years will pass before this happens.

Sofia Vergara was 20 something blonde when I saw her in the mid- 1990s on a show with a man who is now a sportscaster on Univision. I read somewhere that in order to conform, she had to dye her hair dark. Conforming brought her fame and fortune. Still, I don’t think it’s right. She deserves her fame and all that comes with it, but the stereotypes remain, making it harder for other actresses and actors. I suggest that television executives travel to Latin and South America to see and observe first -hand the diversity.