By José Gandue @Gandour
My closest friends know it. I was born in Tegucigalpa, Honduras and when I was seven years old, along with my brothers, we moved to Colombia, the place where my mother's second husband was originally from. On my father's side, I am the grandson of an Arab born in Jaffa during the Ottoman rule of Palestine, who married a woman of Iberian origin. On my mother's side, my grandparents were Lithuanian, from the city of Vilnius, a Baltic city with a large and prosperous Jewish community, decimated by the Nazi Holocaust. At eighteen I crossed the Atlantic Ocean to live for a year in Israel and then study my Political Science degree in Madrid. During that time, I witnessed the last great influx of Ethiopian Jews fleeing famine, traveling on Hercules aircraft to Israeli military bases, only to be promptly rejected by extremist Orthodox rabbis who considered them incomplete in their faith and unworthy of living in the Holy Land. I also saw the faces of certain Spaniards looking with disdain at the Latin Americans walking along Gran Vía, and I sensed more than one of them subtly uttering the epithet "sudaca" in my presence, only to then, unbelievably, claim that the insult wasn't directed at me, that they were referring to those who engaged in street vending or had darker skin than what they were accustomed to seeing in their daily lives.
I remember a university classmate asking me what I was going to do in the summer, if I was going back to "my homeland," always reminding me with that phrase of the presentation of Little House on the Prairie and imagining a caveman scene in the meeting with my school friends. I replied, in an ironic tone, that I was going on a photographic safari to Africa. Then she asked me if I didn't think that journey was dangerous, and then, to be more offensively specific, if he wasn't afraid of black people. Her observation was so stupid, yet so naive, that instead of scolding her, I told her I wasn't afraid, since one of my relatives was Nelson Mandela, adding that the soon-to-be South African president's second surname was Pordominsky, like my mother's. Yes, my colleague believed it.
I live in Colombia, one of the countries with the highest rates of internal displacement in recent human history, due to political violence. From the 1940s to the present, it is estimated that millions of people have been forced to flee their homes to avoid being massacred by the actors in the armed conflict. Seventy years ago, Bogotá had approximately 300,000 inhabitants. Today it has between eight and nine million people, many of them first, second or third generation immigrants. This is a city that, counting only from 1973, when my family came to live here, until the present moment, has had an impressive, chaotic, shocking and, it must be said, exciting evolution., going from being a fairly conservative population, gray in its ways, social-climbing in its customs, to become a metropolis that is, yes, unbearable at many times, but with a constantly growing cultural life, a hotbed of new artistic movements, A meeting point for many social and economic projects, and, fortunately, much more progressive than half a century ago. Yes, all of that, I'm sure, is thanks, in large part, to the immigration received during all this time.
Still, it seems some haven't learned their lesson And they look down on the new wave of expatriates with great contempt. Colombians (as well as Chileans, Peruvians, and Ecuadorians) were used to being the visitors in foreign lands. We were the ones who carried the stigma of being foreigners, the ones who received suspicious glances, the ones who quickly landed on lists of potential drug traffickers, thieves, rapists, "bad hombres." When we traveled, it was us who were accused of stealing their jobs, seducing their daughters, swindling their grandmothers, and disbelieving in their gods. But now the time for revenge has come with the Venezuelan crisis. Now, every fool who shares the street with us thinks he is superior to the newcomers, resorting to lineages that never existed.
Yes, it must be said: The Venezuelan migration phenomenon is overwhelming and, surely, among all the people arriving at our borders, there is more than one thug. Sure. Furthermore, our countries weren't prepared for this mess. This is the consequence of a clear failure of a model., the clumsiness and negligence of a tyrant in power And the unfortunate inconsistency of most opposition leaders, who seem more interested in profiting from the conflict than in finding real solutions. We have already heard testimonies about how many of those who left lived before making the decision to flee. Almost all of the millions of Venezuelans who have left their country in recent times have done so out of necessity, as a last resort., Carrying nostalgia in their hearts, they are willing to endure the hatred of the most foolish in order to survive and have decent working and living conditions. I ask you (and put your hand on your heart), haven't you heard that same speech before from some of your relatives? From those who went to the United States, Europe, or among those who arrived home before you?
Why are we talking about this if Zonagirante.com is primarily a cultural journalism outlet? During our twenty years of online history, we have reported on a great number of great moments in Venezuelan music, The one we saw growing in Caracas and its surroundings, and the one that is now expanding throughout the continent, with its exceptional freshness and distinctive sound. They had, at one time, many of the best tropical orchestras on the continent, exceptional periods of Ska expression, and incredible examples of rock, pop, and electronic music. From then on, and from the moment they became part of our lives, I'm sure we'll soon see amazing sound mixes created collaboratively by locals and new immigrants., generating new artistic directions, as we have seen throughout history. Fortunately, Humanity, its knowledge and its feelings, were always in motion. We will see it this way, with certain setbacks and ups and downs, in all the social processes that we will experience together in the coming years.
Remember, my friend, even if it makes you uncomfortable: We are all immigrants, or descendants in the first, second, third or nth generation. So, when you feel animosity towards a foreigner, be quiet and think for a moment that someone close to you might have experienced the same fate at some point in their life. You, like them, are human, and no human being should be illegal or rejected, no matter where they are.
