The American Dream

There are almost two million Salvadorans living in the United States. Immigration and life in the USA is one of the first things many people talk to me about when they meet me. Salvadorans started moving to the United States in large numbers during the country’s civil war (which lasted from 1980-92) to flee the massacres and persecution, and many more left the country in following years to escape severe poverty or to avoid the new wave of gang violence that currently plagues the region.

Niña Morena is an old lady with light brown skin covered in wrinkles. She always has a lot to say and usually conveys just as much with her exaggerated facial expressions as she does with her words. She reaches out and touches my arm when she stops to chat. Talking about her son in the United States, she smiles proudly though she hasn't seen him in six years. He sent money, little by little, to build her a house made from cinder block and later sent more to buy a couch and a television. Nearly 10 members of her extended family live in the house, including her grandchildren, who also haven’t seen their father in six years. I don’t have to ask to know that their previous house was made of sheet metal, thick tree branches, and tarps. Many of her neighbors' homes still are.

Mauricio is in his second year of college. He lives in a small house with his older brother and his pit bull just around the corner from me. He hasn't seen his mom in person since she left for the United States when he was 10. He never knew his father. He and his older sister don’t talk anymore, ever since a fight they had when he was a lonely 12 year old who needed someone to comfort him and she was an overburdened teenager who didn't want to raise her little brother and had plenty worries of her own. It was hard growing up without his mom, but he knows he wouldn't be in school right now if she hadn't left him to look for work in the United States. Before long he’ll have a bachelor’s degree, thanks to the money his mom sends him from every paycheck she gets working as a maid in New Jersey. He doesn't know how long it will be until he sees her again.

Lupita works at a clothing store in the city. A few years ago, when she was about 20, she and her cousin borrowed money and paid a known coyote, or human trafficker, several thousand dollars each to help them make the journey to the United States; first into Guatemala, then the long journey through Mexico, and finally across the Río Grande and on to American soil. The Mexican police caught her before she’d made it very far and put her in jail for a few days before sending her home. She showed up back in El Salvador with a broken nose and no desire to tell anyone the details of how or why it happened.

Roberto is the owner of a popular bar and restaurant where I like to go to eat fresh mangoes, tender pork ribs, and crunchy, fried tortillas. He grew up selling fruit at the outdoor market in town and was too poor to afford shoes as a kid. After immigrating to Los Angeles during the civil war and working in construction for 25 years, he saved up enough money to buy a ranch and build the restaurant- a two-story building with an open balcony that has views of the mountains in the distance. His kids work on the ranch during the day and sing karaoke loudly and off-key at their dad’s bar in the evenings. Sometimes when they're singing, Roberto will take a swig of beer and then lift his bottle high into the humid, evening air and yell, "Esos son mis hijos!"

Those are just a few of the dozens of stories that my friends and neighbors have shared with me about their families’ experiences with immigration. Money sent to El Salvador from immigrants living abroad accounted for 17% of the country’s GDP in 2011.

It’s an oversimplification to say that immigration is good or that it’s bad. Immigration is broken families and living alone in a foreign country. Immigration is kids having enough to eat and earning college degrees instead of dropping out of school in 8th grade to work picking coffee. Immigration is suffering through the deserts of Mexico and Arizona, facing kidnapping, sexual assault, and death. Immigration is escaping war and indiscriminate violence when it invades your hometown.

At its core, immigration is about people taking risks and making sacrifices in hope of finding something better. I’m not wise enough to know if all of these trade-offs end up being a net positive or negative for each individual immigrant and his or her family. I don’t know if the things they gain make up for the things they lose. That’s for the people who live those choices to decide. But I do know that after seeing the other side of the story, the side we don’t see in the States, that I’ll always stand up for the rights of immigrants who have made such a difficult choice. I’ll always be on the side of people who are in pursuit of happiness and dignity for their families and themselves; people who are willing to sweat and sacrifice to improve their lives.

*names were changed to protect the privacy of those mentioned in this post*

Letters to myself

There I was in my cubicle, counting the minutes until my next break and the hours until the end of the day, earning more money than I had ever made in my life, yet finding myself bored, restless, and unfulfilled.

My Peace Corps service had been over for 6 months. I went to a few returned volunteer happy hours, kept in touch with Salvadoran friends and occasionally ate pupusas at a restaurant named after one of El Salvador's 14 departments.

I was working at a company whose mission I didn't believe in and whose leadership I knew to be dishonest and immoral. I looked for other jobs and put on a fake smile for 45 hours a week. Okay, so I put on a fake smile for about 25 hours a week and probably had more of an emotionless, empty gaze for the other 20 hours. Selling your soul isn't easy. Sometimes you just can't muster a smile.

I had ignored the advice of my most idealistic self. Advice from that version of yourself shouldn't be followed blindly, but it can't be ignored either.

A few weeks into my Peace Corps training in El Salvador, when my Spanish was offensively bad, my eyes wide open and my mind naive to all the charms and the warts of Salvadoran culture, I wrote a letter to myself. I can't take credit for the idea. Our program managers sat all 36 of us down and told us to write letters to ourselves; letters we wouldn't open until the end of our service. Some people wrote song lyrics. Others scribbled down jokes. Most of us jumped right in with an eager idealism typical of new Peace Corps volunteers. Most of my letter was uninteresting and rather naive, and I laughed out loud at myself a few times when I read it two years later. I had no idea what I was getting into and no realistic expectations of what I was going to achieve. But the last line of the letter stuck with me. "Whatever you do, don't sell out just yet!"

A few months after returning home and frantically searching for a job as my welcome wore out living in my Dad's guest room, I had just been invited for a second interview with an advocacy organization doing community organizing when I received a job offer from a company conveniently located in downtown Denver that would pay a nice salary with attractive benefits, room for growth and a CEO recently recognized as the greediest in the country. I politely cancelled my second interview, moved into a one bedroom apartment and started toiling away for the man shortly after.

I was enjoying all of the luxuries I'd gone without for two years and had a great new group of friends in Denver. I was sampling the local breweries and trying Vietnamese Pho and hanging out in Washington Park, but my decision to sell out for a bit more money and a nice health insurance plan was not sitting well with my conscience. Going against my gut, ignoring the advice from the idealistic place I was in when I wrote that letter; it had come back to haunt me.

I'd had jobs I didn't like before, but I'd never worked for an employer that I so thoroughly disagreed with philosophically. Every day wore me out mentally and emotionally. The company was built on deceit, dishonesty and greed. I began looking for another job before I had finished my first month working there and arrived home exhausted from the cognitive dissonance of it all.

I watched every movie I could find in Spanish on Netflix and downloaded many more. I listened to Calle 13 and Tego Calderon and Ricardo Arjona and made friends with some Spanish speaking immigrants that I met at a Peruvian restaurant in downtown Denver. I missed my friends in El Palmital and San Salvador and I missed my girlfriend, Krysia. I missed working for something I believed in, even if it meant coming up short sometimes, and I missed the unsanitized, unpredictable nature of life in El Salvador.

I missed the crazy, contradictory things people said sometimes and the way they sort of made sense once I understood the context and the culture.

I missed taking a bus with chickens and piglets and 60 strangers, knowing that any sort of madness could take place at any moment.

I missed the beaches and the mountains and carrying around a machete instead of a smartphone. I missed campesinos and capitaleños, and I missed mangoes and I missed flor de caña.

Sometimes people get crazy ideas about dropping everything and following a dream. I've had a million of them. Anyone with a bit of imagination and adventure inside them has. Usually the phone rings or the stoplight turns green and the daydream ends and we go back to the daily hustle, and eventually reality grinds that dream down, just a little bit more each time, until finally it's just a grain of sand being washed away by the undertow.

Maybe I'd already torn down some invisible filter in my mind regarding crazy ideas when I joined Peace Corps and ended up sticking with it for the whole two years. Maybe the universe knew I didn't really mean it when I ignored my own advice and was trying to give me a second chance.

Whatever it was, when one of those crazy ideas crawled into my mind during a video chat with Krysia, I knew right away it wasn't going away like so many of them do.

I was going back to El Salvador.

The next morning I sent out three emails to three different people asking if they knew how I might be able to get a job in El Salvador. Less than an hour later I got an answer. A job that was supposed to have been filled months ago had just re-opened and I was an ideal candidate. Less than a month later I stepped off of a plane, snaked through a long customs line surrounded by surfers and Salvadorans, and walked out the door into a dark, humid night just like I had two and a half years before.

The universe has continued to conspire in my favor during nine months that I've been back in this little country in Central America. A nagging leg injury that had been bothering me for years began to heal little by little and I started playing basketball again, rediscovering my love for the sport that defined my childhood. I've made so many new friends and had the chance to reconnect with people who made my first two years in the country such a rich and rewarding experience. I've helped train the newest group of Peace Corps volunteers in El Salvador, the first new volunteers to arrive in the country after the program was nearly cancelled due to security concerns.

I've had amazing times with my girlfriend, Krysia, moments I'll remember for as long as I live. Walking on the beach at night in Barra de Santiago. Talking about Dylan and picking out our favorite street dogs in the park in Chalatenango. Laying on the couch with her and laughing hysterically with tears running down my face as she demands that I stop laughing or tell her what I'm laughing about or just, at least, stop laughing!

I've been accepted to grad school almost everywhere I applied, been awarded a fellowship, and am in the process of arranging an internship with an organization whose mission I strongly believe in, a place I would be proud to work at.

In some ways this is another letter I'm writing to myself. I always thought it sounded corny when people said to follow your heart. I didn't really know what it meant, and I don't think you can really know what it means until you've done something illogical, kind of crazy even, because you knew in your heart it was what you had to do.