The Ghosts of Gloria Lara

Before that year, I knew nothing about Colombia—nothing real. I was eleven and too focussed on the Dominican Republic I’d left behind and on my own immigrant bullshit to worry about anywhere else

- Junot Díaz

If I’d had my way, I wouldn’t ever have thought about the D.R., but in my household there was no escaping it. Those were the early years of our immigration, when my mother still kept up with the news back home. Every morning without fail, before I even had a chance to brush my teeth, she had me tune my father’s beloved radio to the Spanish stations. And, because I was the curious kid I was, I listened, and, because I couldn’t help myself, I learned.

Maybe it was the stations we were tuning in to, but they made it sound like the D.R. was on a rocket to hell. Nothing was going right: nobody had jobs and there were strikes every day and food shortages and super-sensational murders and politicians accusing one another of all sorts of lunacies. As if that weren’t apocalypse enough, this was a few months after Hurricane David more or less dropped the island on its fucking head, leaving thousands dead, hundreds of thousands homeless, and entire neighborhoods blown to splinters. Forty-plus years later and you still have Domos who can’t hear the name David without breaking out in hives.

Here was the weirdness: it didn’t matter whether the radio was talking about the annihilation of David or some grisly-ass twenty-person bus collision, my mother never reacted. Not with her face or with her words. Just kept folding clothes or washing peas, her thin I-starved-throughout-my-childhood face pinched inward. It was a kind of passivity that I didn’t understand. Why was she listening to the news if she wasn’t going to react?