To celebrate the one year
anniversary of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez's death, a man from the mayor's
office came to give a speech to the students in Las Palomas. The gist of the
speech was that Chavez had helped forge an alternative to Yanqui Imperialism,
Capitalism, Materialism, and that the students needed to be solidary with each
other to help this legacy to continue. It was a pretty good speech, albeit
overtly political. However, I couldn't help but smirk, HERE I AM!! You found
me! Blatant green eyed white person from Estados Unidos, at your
service. Imperialismo en carne viva! I need to work at controlling my face.
By the way, I hate I/C/M, in
their pure form. Shopping sucks. My country spending money bombing shit instead
of bothering to educate or make sure people aren't ill is the worst. And
capitalism yeah, not always awesome, in the results or the process.
I think my students may have
noticed my expression. So then the man said, "Except for the American
people, who we love deeply" This was somehow worse. I can't stand quite a
lot of the American people if we're been brutally honest, and I wouldn't expect
Nicas to like us. I felt uncomfortably pandered to. I also kept coughing during
all of this, which was kind of funny because it made me extra obvious. I was
actually choking practically on all the dust from the
probably-horse-poop-filled-dust everywhere on my kilometer walk to the school.
But I think the conclusion everyone else took is that obviously my lungs hate
socialism.
Chavez is a difficult figure
to process. Construct a counterweight to US hegemony, build new economic
alliances, help the poor? All nice in theory. Repress massively in the process?
Give benefits only to supporters? Out of control violence and inflation?
Completely not diversified economy. Not.
Yet the children get
speeches. They don't brainstorm ways to practice solidarity, or write an essay
about Chavez's life, or find Venezuela on a map, or debate his legacy. They
merely listen passively as they are told one version of the truth.
Peace Corps makes you
realize the most obvious things about yourself. I will always be from where I
am from, will always be white, cis gender, straight woman from the most
powerful country in the world. But despite the realization, I've gotten crazy
defensive about it lately. I'm either constantly apologizing or trying to make
people understand que "no es asi" (it's not like that), precisamente.
It's not as easy to live in the US as you think it is, even though
"ganamos bien" (we earn well). We don't all through out perfectly
good clothes to buy new ones. We don't have chips in our heads. We don't all
eat meat every day. We don't all have tons of money to travel when we retire.
Ad naseum defensiveness party.
I want people to rail at me
about underdevelopment, the technology gap, global warming, the golden
straightjacket that is our world order. I want people to rail against that,
confront me about it, engage with the present, rather than just pontificating
about the grievances of imperialism in the mode of the past, gunboat diplomacy
and banana republicans and you-funded-the-contras. It pains me to think that the
best that my English speaking students who go on to study can realistically
hope at best to get a job at a call center, a low paying difficult job as a
teacher, maybe a tour guide, if the canal doesn't throw everything to hell. Is that better than nothing? I think so, but
can't there be "algo mas (something more)?" I so was sure in college
that there was a most just world that we could imagine into being. I'm not sure if there is any more.
No comments:
Post a Comment