As he started to speak Gilberto leaned forward toward the recorder, concerned that the machine would not pick up his words. But after the first sentence he forgot the recorder, sat back in the booth with his head against the padded vinyl and gazed past me, past the counters and the neon signs and the green glass of toothpicks by the cash register to his memories of the battered children in a mountain village of Colombia.
"My main memory as a child is of one day being gathered all together with my brothers and sisters and being put into two boxes that were tied on the sides of a donkey. We were all very small and we were being taken somewhere. My father led the donkey. I don't know where my mother was, but she was not with us. From time to time we were moved around in the boxes and once my father took me out of the box and put me on the rump of the donkey. I can see myself on top of the donkey, at the back, and not being able to hold on and sliding from the rump and my father picking me up and trying to make me go back up on the donkey again. I kept falling off because I did not know how to hold on. We crossed a big river and rode this way a long time, traveling from Trujillo to Tulua to Sevilla until we finally got to Cali.
"When we arrived in Cali my father took us children to the central market place and put us on display-like an exhibit. We sat on the ground in the center of a group of people who were looking at us as if we were a curiosity of some kind. We huddled together and were very frightened. I later learned that my father had arranged to have some papers drawn up so that he could give us away. People walked around us and looked at us and then one would come up and say, 'I want that little boy,' or 'I want that little girl.' "
Gilberto fell silent as a waitress approached. The charge in the air between us must have been apparent because the waitress gave us a curious look as she refilled our coffee cups. We had both stopped talking as she approached and the silence hung like a cloud over the booth as we waited for her to leave. She stood over us a moment longer than necessary, her eyes fixed on the black box of the tape recorder where it sat on the table, precisely equidistant between the two of us, the tape reels turning slowly. We waited, as silent as the recorder. The diner smelled of reheated bitter coffee, cigarettes and drugstore cologne. Plates clattered on the plastic coated table in the booth behind us. Then the moment passed and the waitress spun away, her coffee pot held before her like a flag.
It was the winter of 1978 and I was sitting in a booth of an all-night diner in Kansas City, Missouri. Across from me sat Gilberto Alzate, a man who, though he had once been an employee of mine in Cali, Colombia, South America, I had not seen, nor seldom thought about, for a quarter of a century. It was not by chance that we were meeting. My meeting with Gilberto had been prompted, in part, by my interest in how immigrants adjust to life in the United States. It seemed to me that the experiences of immigrants from Latin America, both legal and illegal, had been largely ignored. Through mutual friends, who had brought me up-to-date on his life, I had located Gilberto in Kansas City and had driven from my home in St. Paul, Minnesota to talk with him.
Gilberto had been the office boy and janitor in a school I had founded and directed in Cali, Colombia, while still in my twenties-a period so long ago and distant from my present life that it felt as if it had occurred to another person on another planet. Yet, it had not. Twenty five years before our meeting in Kansas City, Gilberto's and my life had been joined, and sitting in the booth with him I could feel memories of the past rushing up in a great wave that threatened to engulf me or break on the sharp edges of the table at which we sat.I remembered how, from my desk in the school I was directing, I would call out "Gilberto" and he would reply, "Si Senora" and with a willingness that bordered on devotion would do whatever I needed to have done. Though he had not been my office boy for two decades, I had the feeling as I looked into his face across the table in the booth that if I ever needed him again I had only to call "Gilberto" and he would answer from wherever he was.
Gazing into the banked fires behind his dark eyes, reminded me of the passion of Gilberto's personality and I grew embarrassed to remember the indifference with which I had once regarded him. I turned back to Gilberto, sitting opposite me in the booth. "Go on," I prompted. "What else do you remember?"
"I cannot picture myself ever being in a household as a child with a father and a mother and all of us working together toward some common goal. My first memories are really nightmares of either being alone in places or else of being chased and running away. My mother was always chasing me and she would beat us. My memory of my real mother, Elena, is of me running away from her in great fear. She beat us children very severely.
"Many times other people had to take us kids out of her hands because she was about to kill us. Once my older brother Enrique, when he was just a tiny little fellow, was being beaten with a hammer and he went a little crazy and picked up a rock, and tried to hit her back with it. It was in self-defense. I had nightmares of running away from her or from a bull that was chasing me. I remember going into a butcher shop in our village and being afraid I was going to be butchered and cut up like the animals. We children lived in fear and we were always hungry.
"We lived in the very small town of Trujillo, a coffee town of maybe a thousand people up in the mountains of Colombia. My father, Rafael, was a laborer and he worked other people's land, traveling from place to place, farm to farm, picking coffee beans and doing chores. My parents were very poor. My mother told me that when they were married Rafael was barefoot because he did not have any shoes. There was no permanent home for the family. Rafael was a man who, after he finished his work, would go out to drink and gamble with his friends and if the opportunity was there, he would go and make love to other women. I only saw him once in awhile, about four or five times in my lifetime. I remember once sitting on his knees and touching his face, feeling his wiry beard. Of his family, I do not know anything as there is nobody to talk about it.
"I remember him as being a very good-natured person but my mother was a nightmarish person. She had come from a family of twenty children and there were so many children around that each one had to take care of himself. If her mother had not died young, the family would have been larger. They did not live as brothers and sisters but each one was totally independent from the time they were little children. That is why I never got to meet my grandparents from either side of my family, nor did I ever have the chance to meet a single relative-an aunt, uncle, or cousin. There was no clannish family togetherness in her family. Elena's temper was very bad. We kids had to hide and Rafael came to the house just to procreate and then disappear.
"I was the second child. My brother, Enrique, was the oldest, then me, Gilberto. My sister Inez was third, then came my brother Fabio and the last was my sister Faviola. I can remember seeing a little baby but I don't remember anything more about the baby and I don't know what happened to it."
Listening to Gilberto brought back sharp recollections of the five years my husband, George, and I had lived in Colombia. I remembered well the Central Market in Cali where Gilberto and his siblings had been given away. It covered an entire city block between Calles 11 and 12 and Carreras 9 and 10. The market building was a vast open shed covered by a high ceiling made of sheets of zinc between which water drained when it rained. The area was divided into aisles with hundreds of small stands from which every kind of merchandise consumed in the city was sold. At one end was the meat market where meats butchered the previous midnight were hung, still bleeding, from tall racks. Whole carcasses of animals, covered with dirt and straw from the barnyard, hung from the hooks. Smaller cuts, such as tenderloins, ragged and looking as if they had been hacked off with a dull hatchet, hung from rows of hooks over the counters. Skinny, short-haired dogs, their tails between their legs, slunk from stall to stall, lapping up the blood and growling at each other over the scraps that fell from the chopping blocks.
In the center of the market was the fruit and vegetable area. Here market men and women presided over the produce, trimming the cabbages and cauliflower heads, throwing the leavings into the aisles where the feet of shoppers squashed them into a green and brown mush. Buyers, cooks from the restaurants and from the big houses on the hills, boys carrying baskets and mesh bags, argued in loud voices with the vendors, pinched the fruit and slowly filled up their containers.
Youth selling handfuls of lemons and limes jostled in the aisles seeking customers. Men bent double by the weight of huge sacks of produce on their backs lurched through the market, calling out to those in their path to give way. The buyers and vendors in the aisles parted like waves as porters with stalks of platano on their shoulders shouted "va la mancha!" as they passed. As the day wore on the market women nursed their babies under their shawls, flies buzzed over the meat and fruit vendors sorted their remaining produce, tossing bruised and spoiling mangoes and papayas into the slime in the slippery aisles.
In another part of the market long wood tables and crude benches were set up in front of pots of soup simmering over charcoal braziers. These were the restaurants of the area and the truckers of produce, vendors and the crowds of hangers-on in the market gathered here.
Near the restaurant area was the section called the "thieves market" where rusted farm implements, tarnished silver and old pieces of brass and copper were displayed on rough wooden tables. This was the part of the market I knew as I came here a few times a year to look for old copper bowls, used to make panela-the local brown sugar, and estribos-the brass and copper stirrups used by the first generations of Spanish conquerors.
Around the outside of the market, on the sidewalk and spilling into the streets outside the zinc-roofed building, stood the push-cart vendors, sellers of goods who could not get permanent spaces inside the market. They shared the sidewalk with the salesmen further down the scale of poverty who had only a wood crate for a table. Finally, there were the vendors who simply knelt on the ground spreading a dirty cloth before them to display their wares. Among them squatted the Indians from Silvia in their powder blue ruanas and black felt hats, selling trinkets and powders.
In the spaces between the vendors barefoot children selling chiclets jostled with farmers carrying bundles of live chickens tied upside down by their feet. Propped in the corners of the buildings and lying along the gutters of the street were the inebriated, sleeping off the previous night's drunk.
From long before dawn until after dark the central market was the throbbing, noisome heart of the city, the destination of the honking trucks, the great smelly garbage heap from which came the sustenance of the city. It was also the home of the very poor, the desperate, the criminal and those who survived by selling six limes or their bodies every day. It was to this market that Rafael had brought his five children to give them away.
Despite the fact I had initiated our meeting I was not altogether certain, after all these years, how to begin our discussion. What I wanted to learn from Gilberto was how he had transformed himself from the obsequious office boy and janitor I remembered mopping the floors of the Instituto Colombo-Americano in Cali, Colombia, into the self-possessed and educated American citizen I saw before me. When I had last seen Gilberto, though he had been a grown man, I had thought of him as a "boy" because, to my mind, he was functionally illiterate. What had changed him? And more significant, why had he wanted to change? As I looked into the face of the man across the table from me I could see smoldering fires behind his dark eyes. Who had kindled that fire, I wondered, and what kept it burning?
Most Americans suffer from a kind of amnesia about their origins. Yet, buried in the past of most of us is an immigrant story-an ancestral account of a hero-forebearer who arrived on these shores bewildered and uncertain, frightened but filled with hope that in the United States life could be better. For some it was. For others, the American dream proved illusive. Could the pain of that passage be the reason that many Americans, the offspring of immigrants, are so quick to forget or deny their immigrant past? Our almost visceral rejection of immigrants may in some conflicted way sunk deep in the American psyche, be a denial of who we once were and a past we have abandoned in our rush to become someone else, a process that, for want of a better term, we call "becoming an American". For those who have been in the United States for generations, the stories of their forebearers have been lost, dissolved in the melting pot of America.
My husband George and I had spent our years in Colombia, not as immigrants, but as sojourners. Though there had never been any question in our minds about exchanging the culture of the United States for that of Colombia, I realized after we had returned home that my husband and I had been forever changed by that experience. When one has lived for a time in another land, I discovered, one never quite makes it all the way back to one's home country.
Did Gilberto now view Colombia through the eyes of a stranger? Whether one's vision is beclouded or made more clear by experiencing another culture is a matter of conjecture-all I knew for certain was that, for me, the view of the world had been forever altered.
How, I wondered, had Gilberto's vision been changed? What problems had he faced as he underwent the process of acculturation to the United States? Had he truly been assimilated into that culture-become a person who lived by the rules and values of his new home? And, if so, how had it all worked out for him?
Sitting with him in the booth of the diner, I became aware once again of the strength and passion of Gilberto's personality and grew embarrassed to remember the indifference with which I had once regarded him. I had driven from St. Paul to Kansas City because I wanted to learn all I could about his past life. What had happened to him, both in Colombia and in the United States, to turn him into the person that he now was? Gilberto, I realized, had become an articulate repository of information about a culture and a part of the world which, though I had once lived there, I discovered that I knew very little.
Here, smiling across the table at me with his frank gaze, was an immigrant-one whom I had known before the thought of leaving his homeland had ever occurred to him. He and his fellow immigrants from Latin America formed this country's fastest growing population, had the highest rate of male participation in the labor force, and the lowest use of public assistance. I determined, through Gilberto, to learn more about them and the adjustments they had made in coming to the United States.
Sitting across from him now, my former indifference to Gilberto's fate dissolved like mist before a morning sun. Growing within me was a desire, matching the intensity I sensed in him, to understand the great change that had taken place. To get us started and perhaps to ease us into the conversation, I had said, "Gilberto, tell me about your childhood in Colombia."
Gilberto had responded with an eagerness so familiar that I was at once transported back to the Colombo-Americano and the epoch of my life I had almost forgotten-the early years of my marriage when life had seemed a merry adventure that would never end and when, almost by chance, my husband had accepted a job in Cali, Colombia.
