One of my earliest memories, second only to the day Marco was born, is of my father’s naturalization as a US citizen. We have a couple pictures from that frigid winter day, but no reason to bring them up much. Similarly, my parents have little reason to discuss this—the fact of the matter is that it doesn’t strongly affect our daily life.. But when I asked them, my recollection lined up, suspicious though it is that I have distinct yet fleeting memories from the age of two and a half. After the proceedings, I sat on Papi’s lap while he pinned an American flag to his lapel. The woman in the adjacent chair waved at me with a smile, and I buried my head in his shoulder.
That was probably more out of toddler shyness than pausing during an important moment, but sometimes I still close my eyes in the middle of events that stand out, as if to photograph my surroundings. My parents have evidently moved past this day, evidently long having grown accustomed to the final legal transition it represents, after the stops along the way at J-1 student visa, its Occupational Practical Training extension, H-1B technological employment visa, and Green Card. But being so young at the time, throughout my childhood I’ve seen ripples emanating outward from this day, and heard pieces of the patchwork stories that brought us here. This singular moment was just as far from the beginning of his story as the end.
My father likes to portray his migration in a mundane light, but others tend to assign it more weight. From the time he was very young, he wanted to move to the US—away from the volatility that accompanied life in Argentina. He started learning English at six years old and has been fluent for nearly as long.
I’ve heard stories from Abuela that Papi wasn’t allowed to play at public parks for a time out of fear of bombs planted there. She is prone to exaggeration, and the news record offers no support for this fear. But in a military dictatorship, what might those in power “forget” to report, and what might get “left behind” when news records are digitized? Growing up with a backdrop of military dictatorship fading in and out with democracy must have been chaotic. For decades, Las Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo demanded justice for children abducted during the Dirty War. Maybe her fears weren’t so far-fetched.
He’d already been gone for several years by then, but in 1994 the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, only blocks from his parents’ apartment, was bombed. This coincided with a trip home, and he volunteered for weeks in a grassroots effort to preserve records and unite in the face of such violence. Without minimizing tragedy, it is still safe to say that Argentina still stood out as an unwelcoming place to establish one’s life—as a young person and as a Jewish person—at that time.
Even before these events came to light, a sense of impending danger permeated everyday life. My dad has told me how during periods of hyperinflation when he was very young, the peso depreciated so quickly that price changes were broadcast over PA systems at grocery stores because it would have taken too long to change all the display labels before they became hopelessly out of date. When his parents were paid, they’d immediately go to the grocery store or on other errands to salvage what value they could out of a plummeting peso.
Incessant strikes by unionized professors seeking better pay and working conditions amidst national political and economic turmoil during his first year of university were the last straw. But he set the record straight and stated that despite this, faint memories of political turmoil during childhood, and harmful politicians who never seemed to leave, the 1990s weren’t all that bad of a decade in Argentina, all things considered. But then the stars aligned. His friend Diego, who had left a year previously to study in the United States thanks to a generous science scholarship for international students at a liberal arts college in New York, had an overwhelmingly positive report. This was enough motivation to apply. On top of the general violence and turmoil, fleeing the country was a long-held goal of his.
But even with the scholarship, it wasn’t that simple. Plane ticket money had to come from somewhere. Papi used to frequent the Lincoln Center, a now-obsolete library sponsored by the US Embassy that also included a US cultural center. In the days before widespread access to the internet, he tells me, he virtually lived there. Doing research and browsing American tech magazines that were otherwise expensive or hard to come by were easily achieved there. But in a moment of serendipity, he stumbled across mention of a UN organization that gave grants to international migrants—sure enough, he earned one, and getting a fresh start was that much more feasible.
Also, Abuela harbored the standard mother’s worries that she’d never hear from her son again, but after she got over the initial shock of such a change, they kept lines of communications first with letters and phone calls, then emails. To this day, he calls his parents several times a week.
In hindsight, the timing of his actions seem prescient. His choice fell exactly in a transitional period away from Argentina being seen as “the jewel of Latin America” according to its otherwise-predominant reputation for all but a decade or so of military dictatorship in all the time since its independence in 1816. Specifically, “Although emigration from Argentina has been on the rise since the early 1990s, a sharp upward spike of this type [as seen starting in the first decade of the 21st century] is uncharacteristic for the country.”
This trend has gradually established itself as the new norm, even if the world is turbulent enough that not everyone is aware of it in the front of their minds. Little apart from his name and bilingualism mark him as “other” in the ways people usually like to pigeonhole immigrants, yet his hobbies that set him apart include powerlifting, playing the electric bass, and perfecting loose-leaf tea blends. It also doesn’t hurt that he often quietly seems to fall a little farther up the polymath scale than many people.
His upbringing was in an intellectual environment, so maybe that’s where that comes from. But one specific instance of this is also the most concrete origin of his plan to leave. Abuela taught English literature for most of her career at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. Abuelo is a cardiologist, and once brought the family along while participating in an extended training workshop at a Palo Alto hospital. Situated in Mountain View and immersed in the whispers of an emerging Silicon Valley, Papi (a tech enthusiast, even at 13) was excited about a future in which he could live in the US for real. From the age of 12, he had been active in the Commodore Users’ Club and was recruited to serve as a representative at a trade show booth. In Argentina, as in this California junior high, the computer teacher was predictably from a past generation who hadn’t grown up among these machines. Little did he know that 30 years later, he’d work in the artificial intelligence division of a company with headquarters merely blocks away.
Their trip coincided with the end of the American school year—my dad still has a yearbook replete with the 1987 equivalents of “HAGS.” Some things apparently don’t change: even 30 years later, middle schoolers still find writing “have a good summer” in a yearbook in full to be time-consuming or passé. The funny part is that all the messages are addressed to “Steve.” This is at once a strange anachronism and a first appearance of the alter ego he still deploys in cases where American mouths find the syllables of “Esteban” difficult to process—although there are only three, and they are all phonetic. Today, he introduces himself that way only in situations as fleeting as providing a name for a coffee order, so it’s not really assimilation.
What is assimilation, really, when you’ve spoken your second language since kindergarten? Was it assimilation when you started to semi-ironically watch the Super Bowl, but only after twenty years? What is assimilation when your “home country” had been your mother’s home for a couple generations, but was your father’s parents’ second home? Abuelo spoke German before Spanish. You don’t call yourself Hispanic. Where do you say you’re from as an Atheist Jew once from Argentina, before that from Germany and Ukraine and Algeria, and after that from New York and New Hampshire?
Allergy season lasts longer here, and you’ve always hated the cold and dark that blanket the winter. That lifeless season now houses your birthday—January 26 used to be the middle of summer. You’ve joked about pretending you were born on July 26, but your late mother-in-law was born then, so it’s not quite right either. Taking Vitamin D supplements to ward off Seasonal Affective Disorder is a small price to pay for the chance to build the life you’d long dreamed of, but this is the only concession you let slide.
What does “where are you really from?” mean when you don’t have an Argentine accent but pronounce a couple words uniquely enough that people still assume you Aren’t From Here? Does saying “nyoo” instead of “new” have a homeland? Do you? You passed Spanish to your kids, but they don’t often use it. Knowing Spanish is a boon in this world but you seem to feel some shame in being Argentine, slurred “ll”s and “y”s and all. You still have friends there and you can’t stop checking La Nacion every so often—on pessimistic days, you say it’s like watching a car crash.
Maybe it’s fitting that the Correo Central from where you mailed your college application—your ticket out—today has been transformed into the Centro Cultural Kirchner: an imposing four-story monument to that unique brand of floundering populism. You sometimes scoff about how Argentine buildings like that are the ones that think they’re in Paris. Even Argentina doesn’t know who Argentina is.
The world wants Spanish but you don’t want Argentina, so where does that leave your kids? You speak exclusively Spanish to them but evidently let them get away with understanding a lot of it and speaking it only a little. Your daughter has been known to write bad poetry about this legacy that she doesn’t share with anyone because it’s such a frivolous thing to ponder. These words hardly see the light of day, except on the SAT Subject Test because how else to leverage a liminal language than to place out of a college requirement? Your son, two years younger, never leaned into Spanish. He (pragmatically, as always) decided there was more trouble there than whatever clumsy Spanish lying within might be worth. Marco is a man of few words in English, too: always thinking twice and speaking once.
Together, are they one fluent speaker? Or was something lost in translation, in the balancing act of the pragmatic gift of bilingualism with the reality that it’s not so useful apart from while traveling and in nebulous allusions to its potential use in their future careers? Is this your way of saving a part of a life that you would never consciously admit to a complicated separation from?
My father sought employment and opportunity despite family separation; a bargain well worth the forgone dangers of fickle politics and antisemitism. But Abuela and Abuelo still lived there until earlier this year. Between Abuela being four and a half years clear of a double lung transplant and the general worry associated with having family remaining in Argentina, Papi has long wished they’d move. In 2018, his brother Guillermo and his family moved to Tarragona. Apparently Guillermo was always the one who couldn’t picture leaving Argentina, but with two kids under the age of 5, my tios saw a brighter future for their family in Catalonia. Only months later, the pandemic hit, and the government metronome virtually ticked back to Peronism. Abuela and Abuelo, who had long resisted the idea of moving, eventually had enough. The government was denying the pandemic. As my father puts it, the government was en route to becoming Venezuela. Isolation, spotty implementation of lockdowns that should have protected immunocompromised people like Abuela, and being thousands of miles away from any family were new challenges entirely. So they carried on the legacy of the diaspora and set new roots in Tarragona.
Throughout these final decades of my family in Argentina, not one part of life was simple. Moving away from one kind of economic, political, discrimination, family, or any of a myriad of other uncertainties invited another in the new place. Balancing the safety of an established life against the freedom from so many tangible concerns has been a common thread. Even with only a few months of distance from their move, Papi has begun to joke about how Argentina was only a mistake his family made for a couple generations. Of course it’s not that simple—he knows that better than anyone. Migration is complicated. It’s “just” moving, but it’s far more than that, too. Our family is always moving onward, even as pieces of this past stick with us.
My parents don’t know what my first word was, or even if it was in Spanish or English. It’s easy to forget the limitations of toddlers’ life experience. I couldn’t have understood what migration or visas or even countries were as a toddler, but I do remember the houndstooth pattern on the dress my parents put me in. No one in my family has ever been excessively preoccupied with clothes. I wasn’t then and I’m not now. My parents’ strategy for buying kids’ clothes was finding things that were durable, cotton, and cost-effective. But beyond the practical, maybe even back then I think I saw the mosaic of life—one of past and present, continents and oceans, goals and reality, misconceptions and living your own truth despite them—interconnecting like the jagged black-and-white polygons of that motif.
Works Cited
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www.britannica.com/story/argentina-celebrates-200-years-of-independence.
D’Agostino, Susan; Malamud, Delia; Rubens, Esteban; Rubens, Sophia. Family migration interview and
selected anecdotes. 23 May 2021.
“Historia.” Historia | Las Abuelas | Abuelas De Plaza De Mayo, abuelas.org.ar/abuelas/historia-9.
Laffrey, Anna. “Latin America, Caribbean No Longer Leading Sources of Emigration.” Buenos Aires Times,
BATimes Newspaper, 25 Jan. 2019,
www.batimes.com.ar/news/latin-america/latin-america-caribbean-no-longer-leading-sources-of-
migration.phtml.
Murillo, Maria Victoria, and Lucas Ronconi. “Teachers’ Strikes in Argentina: Partisan Alignments and
Public-Sector Labor Relations.” Studies in Comparative International Development, vol. 39, no. 1, 2004,
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Rubens, Esteban (owner). Visiting student yearbook with signatures. 1987.