Tag: Immigration

Posted on

YWCA, by Gillian

It was October 20th 1964 when I arrived at the door of the YWCA.

My friends and I were delivered there, so my diary tells me, by a very chatty driver of a huge orange and yellow taxi. We did not, my past self informs my present self, understand a single word he said the entire way from the pier where the Queen Elizabeth liner had docked that morning, to the ‘Y’ in mid-town Manhattan. I knew at that moment exactly what Sir Winston Churchill meant when he said that Britain and the U.S. were two countries divided by a common language.

My tattered old diary pages tell me little of the ‘Y’ itself – I record the address at 610 Lexington Avenue, and dismiss it as ‘dark, dirty and dingy’. In the event, we stayed there for only five nights. Immediately we all had jobs, we rented a cramped furnished apartment at 161 Madison Avenue. I say little of this place in my diary; I imagine I was suppressing it. As I recall, it well surpassed the ‘Y’ for dark, dirty and dingy. From this apartment we began the daily grind of American everyday life. But the first four days I spent in this country, wandering out in ever expanding circles from the ‘Y’ to explore my new country, everything was as exotic and constantly astonishing to me as if I had landed on mars.

I had rarely experienced central heating constantly blasting into every nook and cranny. The buildings all seemed dreadfully overheated and stuffy, to me. The UK was then, and to a large extent still is, a country of open windows no matter the weather. I found so many permanently closed, and in fact physically un-openable, windows to be very claustrophobic. The next weekend, when we went looking for somewhere to rent, one of the few pre-requisites we all agreed on was – windows that can be opened. That one thing considerable narrowed our choices.

Food was a source of never-ending amazement. On the first night, wandering around Washington Square with four young men we had met on the ship, we stumbled upon a dark, airless, overheated little cafe where they served one item. Steak and baked potato for one dollar. With a Ballentine’s beer, $1.25. No variations, no additions. It was smoky and loud. The tables were sticky. Who cared?? Non of us, all from Britain, had eaten much steak; two of the men, and I, had never had it. The man at the counter asked, we gathered after his third attempt, if we wanted medium or rare. We hadn’t a clue what that meant. Honestly, talk about ‘right off a da boat’!

In our homes you got whatever it was as it came. On the rare occasions we had eaten out, fish of various kinds took up most of the menu. Mutton and pork was sometimes available, with no choice of how it was cooked, roast beef possibly, especially for the Grand Occasion of Sunday Lunch, but steak was available only to the rich. And here it was, before our very eyes and almost in our hungry mouths, for a dollar. We ate there every night until we all had jobs, and quite often after that.

Another huge surprise was coffee shops. By that time we had them in Britain; for some reason they were mostly Italian and they all served what these days we would probably call lattes, with little consideration for anyone who might prefer their coffee black. If you wanted your cup refilled, you paid the same again. Small sidewalk coffee shops abounded in Manhattan. For a nickel you got a cup of black coffee; indeed a bottomless cup, as some almost disembodied hand kept re-filling it. It came with a little glass milk-bottle-shaped container of cream, languishing in the saucer. Cups, even those which were vaguely more mug-shaped, still came with saucers in those days.

So, we discovered, we could satisfy our hunger for $1.30 a day: endless cups of coffee in the morning, skip lunch, steak and potato and a beer for dinner.

But, when we ranged a little further afield on our third day, we found the most incredible gastronomic emporium yet – the Horn and Hardart Automat. None of us had conceived of such an establishment in our wildest dreams. We watched, silently, as by then we had learned to do, to avoid the fools rushing in mode of operation. Perhaps some of you remember these places, the last one of which closed down in 1991, Wikipedia informs me. This one was one big room with small tables with chairs, and a long counter with stools. The walls seemed to be made of many many little glass panels. Behind each pane was displayed an item of pecuniary delight: slices of pie, sandwiches, cookies, cold cuts, salads, cheese, cooked meats and vegetables. Cafeterias I was very familiar with, but not of this style. First you exchanged your cash for Horn and Hardart tokens, small brass objects with H & H stamped on them, to insert in the required slots. Many doors opened at the drop of a nickel or dime, some more luxurious items required a quarter. We loved it! The surroundings were insalubrious, to say the least, but there were many choices available and you could eat well, if plainly, for less than a buck. And we were broke. We alternated the Automat and the $1.25 steak and potato for a week or two – at least until our first paychecks.

Out of curiosity, while writing this, I googled my first two addresses on American soil. I couldn’t find out much about that particular YWCA, but it is still at the same address. In the only street-view photo I could find, it still looks dark, dirty, and dingy! The old Warrington Hotel, however, at 161 Madison Avenue, appears to be significantly gentrified. It now appears to be a mix of small businesses and medical offices. The only one I could find for sale is 1200 square feet and described as a ‘medical business condo’ for lease Monday – Friday at $8000/month.

I’m assuming it becomes an ‘airbnb’ or something similar on weekends. I did not record the size of our apartment there, but I wrote that it had a kitchen, dining room and two bedrooms. We paid $178/month. For the extra $7,822, without weekends, I hope it’s a whole lot less dark, dirty, and dingy now!

© June 2016

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.

Posted on

The Invisible Line of Cigar Store Wooden Indian, by Carlos Castillo

The Plaza Theater in El Paso is one of those 1930’s iconic theaters built to immortalize cinematography. Entering into the Spanish colonial building festooned with ornate furnishings, red velvet curtains and ornate plasterwork propelled me to a world I could only imagine. After all, I lived in a 3-room adobe with no indoor plumbing. As I sat marveling at the ornate proscenium arch before me and the overhead ceiling with astronomically correct twinkling stars and projected gauzy clouds, I felt the awe of peasants in the Middle Ages when they walked into Gothic cathedrals radiating light through stained glass rose windows. I was on a school-sponsored trip to watch John Wayne’s rendition of Texas’ war of independence at the Alamo. When the camera panned the battlefield depicting Mexican soldiers falling in a barrage of bullets, my peers applauded and yelled enthusiastically at the carnage. After all, we were fellow Texans, disdainful of the Mexican hoard. It did not matter that the Mexicans spoke our language and looked like most of us. During the climactic scene when the small band of Texas insurgents were overwhelmed by the formidable Mexican army of Santa Ana, I felt strangely uncomfortable although I did not really understand why. Later, when I asked mi papá who at that time had not yet become a naturalized citizen to explain, he replied that films do not always depict history accurately, thereby challenging my vision of truth.

Throughout the years, being a child of immigrant parents had thrust me into a spiral of doubt. Although I ate beans and tortillas at every meal and considered La Virgen de Guadalupe my spiritual benefactress, the last thing I wanted to be labeled as was Mexican. Being accused of being one invariable resulted in angry words and school yard brawls. After all, the Hollywood stock character of Mexicans as poor and uneducated at best, corrupt and violent at worst, nettled my consciousness. I did not question this perception until years later when mis padres took me back to their native Jalisco in an effort to show me another facet of my identity. They, the Mexican people I encountered, did not fit the cartoonish stereotypes of sarape-draped men leading donkeys by the halter nor rebozo-cocooned women selling calla lilies at the marketplace. The relatives and human beings I met were poetic, cosmopolitan, and generous in their affection for me. My Tía Concha slaughter a hen from her garden and prepared a mole redolent with spices that left me lapping up the bowl with delight that evening. Noting my gustatory seduction, she again prepared the same complex dish the following day. Years later, I would recall a similar awe when after being legally deaf for years, I again heard after the advancement of deaf technology. Thus, I returned back home with a new-found appreciation for being Latino. Endlessly I played the rancheros/ bolero recordings of Javier Solís with his liquid brown eyes, bronze face, and moustache draping his pouting lips. I sat at the edge of my seat watching movies of Cantinflas, internalizing his typical we-live-to-laugh Mexican philosophy. I immersed myself in the national consciousness of my parents’ homeland while simultaneously remaining firmly rooted in my pride of the red, white and blue. I became a scion of two cultures, recognizing that my soul was forged of the silver of Taxco as well as in the coal of West Virginia. Thus, I started to reject the stereotypes that had calcified in me over a lifetime, to reject the scurrilous labels and images I had internalized, as a Mexican, as an American, and as an American of Mexican descent, and to drink water made sweet in earthenware cantaros even as I indulged in Oscar Mayer hotdogs.

Because The Alamo became a lesson for me about illusions, ultimately I recognized that even darkness can lead to vision. However, to see, it was important that I first embrace my blindness. Indigenous peoples have consistently been stereotyped. The oversimplified and inaccurate stereotypical depictions of identities run the gamut from noble savage to ignoble barbarian and from Indian princess and squaw pejorative to wise sage. The stereotypical influences are so pervasive many Native peoples today are actively pursuing a more accurate understanding of themselves and their cultures in an attempt to reject the internalized effects of these misconceptions and labels. Many are reclaiming their native identities, recognizing they are the people; they are human beings, not cigar store wooden Indian caricatures. Likewise, we gay and lesbian people struggle to define who we are as we confront the insidious stereotypes foisted about us by media even in this era of social progress. We struggle to reject the offensive humor and defamatory stereotypes. I weary of the sociopathic, effeminate and butch, dangerous and predatory, immortal, suicidal labels queer folk are subjected to. These stereotypes only foster hatred and prejudice. Like Native peoples, we too have become caricatures, metaphoric cigar store gays and lesbians. Of course, I understand that the media stigmatizes many groups from repressed Brits to evil Mexicans, and from racist white Southerners to doddering elders. After all, stereotypes are invaluable because audiences have been conditioned to expect certain behaviors from stock characters. The point is that audiences willingly accept established archetypes in place of genuine character development, thus freeing up remaining frames to more interesting and adrenaline-pumping scenes. Thus, unfortunately the cigar store wooden Indian, in its many manifestations, persists.

Over time, I have learned to savor the diversity and complexity of the human experience. Yet, false depictions continue to drift through the air like the stench of something unspeakable. Most recently, the vitriolic venom being spewed like explosive diarrhea by a “You’re fired” candidate and his followers about people who are like you and me angers me, but in my anger I find the courage to speak up and pull back the fog of blindness, the silence of deafness. I will not sanction cigar store wooden icons of any of God’s creations. I will not be a cigar store Latino or gay wooden icon.

The adage a picture is worth a thousand words is heartening. One balmy fall day in l960, I walked into a theater intent on immersing myself into a world I little understood. Several hours later, I emerged transfixed and transformed, pondering the implications of what I had witnessed. Although we have all been invited to attend a banquet in which all forms of delights, both sweet and savory, are ladled unto our bowls, unfortunately too often we pull back from the table because we fear the unknown. And in fearing, in withdrawing, and in condemning, we deny ourselves the wonders of an elaborately prepared spicy mole, made rich by old world and new world hands. Life is a journey in which we need not behold others nor ourselves reflected on the prism of cigar store wooden misrepresentations.

© August 19, 2016, Denver

Cervantes wrote, “I know who I am and who I may choose to be.”  In spite of my constant quest to live up to this proposition, I often falter.  I am a man who has been defined as sensitive, intuitive, and altruistic, but I have also been defined as being too shy, too retrospective, too pragmatic.  Something I know to be true. I am a survivor, a contradictory balance of a realist and a dreamer, and on occasions, quite charming.  Nevertheless, I often ask Spirit to keep His arms around my shoulder and His hand over my mouth.  My heroes range from Henry David Thoreau to Sheldon Cooper, and I always have time to watch Big Bang Theory or Under the Tuscan Sun.  I am a pragmatic romantic and a consummate lover of ideas and words, nature and time.  My beloved husband and our three rambunctious cocker spaniels are the souls that populate my heart. I could spend the rest of my life restoring our Victorian home, planting tomatoes, and lying under coconut palms on tropical sands.  I believe in Spirit, and have zero tolerance for irresponsibility, victim’s mentalities, political and religious orthodoxy, and intentional cruelty.  I am always on the look-out for friends, people who find that life just doesn’t get any better than breaking bread together and finding humor in the world around us.
Posted on

Here and There, by Gillian

Here and There 

(Or, as my mum would have said, hither and thither!)

The American doughboys marched off cheerily to World War One singing, over there, over there, the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming, and we won’t come back till it’s over, over there.

By the time it was over over there, 120,000 of them could not come back. Before long the Yanks were coming once more, for the second Big One, and by the time that one was over over there, almost half a million Americans could not come back. Over there can be deadly.

There was a saying in Britain at the end of World War Two. The only problem with the Yanks is, they’re over sexed, over paid, and over here. That seems almost incredibly unappreciative of men who, almost certainly, saved Britain from being invaded by Hitler and his Nazi thugs. It is understandable, though, that returning British men felt considerable resentment. Many returned to wives raising G.I. babies, or wives wanting a divorce because this poor embattled war weary Brit. could never measure up to that beautiful boy from Biloxi with his easy charm and an apparently endless supply of chocolate, American cigarets, and ready cash. They returned to girlfriends and fiancées who had their bags packed ready for an immediate escape to join that friendly fruit farmer in Florida, or some rugged Wyoming cowboy. There and here is not always an easy mix.

I, born in Britain in 1942, sometimes have to wonder what my life would have been, had the U.S. not joined the Allies in World War Two: different, for sure. Much shorter, perhaps. Having said that, it’s difficult for me to take the stand of an isolationist. But let’s face it, since World War Two, our military forays in foreign fields have not …. well, let’s be kind and simply say, not been all that we’d hoped for. Though exactly what we had hoped for, from Viet Nam to Iraq and Afghanistan, seems pitifully unclear. Over there can be confusing.

The United States, being an immigrant country, is peopled by those who, themselves or their not too distant ancestors, came from there to here – ‘there’ being just about anywhere in the world.

Some, tragically, came involuntarily, and experienced nothing good here. But for most of us who chose to come from over there to over here, it was a good move and we found the good life here, the life we wanted. People occasionally ask me if I would ever want to move back to England, and I surprise myself by thinking, not unless I can go back to the time of my youth there. I know that’s not an honest response, even silently in my own head. That was, after all, the Britain that I chose not to remain in. Nostalgia has been so aptly described as the longing for a place and time that never was. In my heart I know that if some magical time travel were possible, and I could return to the Britain of my youth, I would return happily to the here and now, saying, with that smugness we sometimes feel on returning home from vacation,

“Great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there!”

No, my life is here and now. I’m here to stay.

© May 2015

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

Posted on

Magic by Gillian

Tossing this topic around in my head, I consistently found myself humming that tune from West Side Story, I like to be in America, OK by me in America.

When it finally pushed into my consciousness, I realized that my subconscious was telling me something (as, of course, it always is!) Coming to, being in, America. That is magic. It has been for so many people for so many years. I am using the word America, here, the same way it was used in the movie, to mean the United States; politically incorrect, I was always taught, as America North and South encompasses many countries, but nevertheless that is how it was used in that particular song.

Now, almost half a century since I first set foot on American soil, I can still feel the magic I felt then. And I wasn’t a refugee escaping political persecution, or poverty, or violence. At worst, I was simply looking for a better life than was then on offer in a struggling, and still, in many ways war torn, Europe.

I stepped onto Pier 41, I think it was, off the ocean liner Queen Elisabeth, on a cold, drizzzly, October morning, and felt the magic. This was where I was supposed to be! Not where I wanted to be, I had no experience to tell me that, I had been here ten seconds, but where I was meant to be. I truly felt it in my inner self, as if my soul had somehow been misplaced in a body born elsewhere, when clearly my soul belonged here. I can’t explain that feeling, and I don’t know if all or most immigrants feel that way or if I am the only one. I only know that it was clear to me, and that I still feel it.
After fifty years, of course I recognize that there is much Black Magic abroad in the country; that all is not well, at least as I see it, with the good old U.S. of A. But I knew it then. President Kennedy had recently been assassinated. Oh yes, I knew there was a Dark Side. And since then, in my opinion, the Dark Side has become darker and more insidious; or perhaps I have just become more aware. But my place, my belonging, has nothing to do with intellectual processes. It is simply my soul, whatever that word may mean, knowing where I belong.

August 2013

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.