I reckon the reason I posted my long description of Monday's events to begin with was to try to make sense of things. I used to want to be a writer way back when. Suppose I still do, really.
Life always seems to get in the way of what I want, versus what I must do to provide for family. Not at all unusual in life, I know! I've managed to balance that fairly well I suppose, a lot better than many I've known in my life, at least. Being a programmer allows my creative side to come out quite a bit and it's something that I enjoy; and yet, while writing code is very structured, much like language, it doesn't offer the flexibility that language does to express oneself, particularly to explore inner issues. I find that writing things out often helps me make sense of what I'm feeling, much better than talking person-to-person ever has. I've never been good with shrinks, for example
Therefore, many wordy posts on this forum from me, including the one that started off this thread. And, I reckon, this one as well.
I wanted to thank everyone for their support related to the incident I described. The truth is, it was a fairly small incident in terms of life experience, thankfully so. However, it made a fairly big impact on me, at least in the short term.
I've worked all over the world. Scotland, Holland, India, Italy, Tunisia, Abidjan, Angola, Singapore, Venezuela, Trinidad-Tobago and Brasil, just to name the places that come to mind easily from a distance of more than 15 years of travel and work. I never spent enough time in one place, except maybe close in Scotland and Brasil, to really get to know the culture and the people as deeply as I have here in Argentina.
I have so many mixed feelings about Argentina. I've met some good people here. Including my wife, who is from Paraguay and immigrated here more than 7 years ago to help her poor family build a house in one of the poorest "departmentos" (Paraguay's name for state or province) in Paraguay (and that's saying quite a bit about the level of poverty).
I've also met some of the worst people I've ever known here.
I used to live in the 5th Ward in Houston, when I was going to school, for about two years. I was attending the University of Houston at the time. Two others of us students got together and rented a house right on the outskirts of the "ward." The house was actually pretty nice, although very old, and therefore cheap.
This was 1984/85. There were not such bad race relations as, say, in the 50s, 60s and 70s but it was close to that time. Most residents of the area were African-American. I got along well with all of them. Two white guys and a white girl, we never had any problems, never felt threatened. We made friends.
At times I feel close to that here. Not exactly belonging, perhaps, but accepted. At other times, I feel like an African-American must have felt in the 60s and 70s and probably many still do.
I've never in my life understood why people think that because people are different in appearance, that they are somehow lesser as human beings and should be accorded a different respect, or lack thereof. I try to keep my respect and personal feelings toward people geared only to how they treat myself and others.
I do believe that cultural differences can make people lesser or greater in their humanity. I've done a little half-assed research on feral children and tried to sort the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. One thing that seems to be clear is that a true feral child, someone who spent their formative years (mentally, as in speech development and human behaviors learned at a very early time in a child's life) in the absence of human contact, never quite develop properly as fully-functioning members of society. Some never learn to speak, or if they do, with a limited vocabulary.
Society is learned. Really, how to be human is learned. Genetically, aside from differences of race which don't have anything to do with the ability to learn and be intelligent, but rather affect such things as skin color and susceptibility to certain diseases, or the ability to survive and/or at least feel better in certain climates than other humans; we are all the same within a range that makes us all, whether some like it or not, members of the human race.
It is how we are raised that has the biggest difference on how we see the world, and those are things, like our native languages, that tend to stay with us for our entire lives.
I'm used to being treated like a foreigner in most situations. It never has really bothered me to a huge extent. I understand I'm a foreigner in someone else's country and certainly the people will react to things I do differently, as I expect to react similarly myself when I encounter differences.
Even when I came here at first, I felt the usual differences, but not outright discrimination. I came to feel that here, afterward, however, when I married my wife.
Things changed quite a bit when she and I were together, at least in some instances.
At first, it wasn't too bad. She was relatively unsophisticated, having been extremely poor, lacking in education and experience when she came to Argentina. She's extremely smart and a very hard worker, and never had a problem supporting herself and saving enough money to send back to Paraguay. She brought her older sister with her later, taught her the ropes of surviving here. She has since brought her younger sister, three cousins and two brothers (there are a total of 12 brothers and sisters, and hundreds of close cousins!). She went through the residency process with each of them, got them legalized and working in the white, everything.
But when she and I started going to restaurants, shows, doing things that she would normally never have done (mostly through lack of money, as well through a feeling of "verguenza", a word which I hate in some of its uses as it can go beyond it's literal meaning of shame or embarrasment like many of us would think of the word, to mean such things as "know your place in society") I started seeing that people here can be extremely prejudiced. Mostly in snide comments, different treatment than I had seen previously, so on.
It came to a head when we moved out to the suburbs. We lived in a closed neighborhood a little past Tortuguitas, which is about 12 kilometers closer to the city than Pilar out on the Panamericana highway. My intention in making the move was to get out of the city and have air to breathe, room to move, a pool to swim in, etc. We found all of those things. But we also found a good amount of real prejudice.
Of course, we were living among the "rich."
I remember the first overt act of prejudice against Paraguayans in general out there. It was actually the day we moved in. The guards that watched the neighborhood paid us a visit.
At that time, we had her younger sister living with us (she was 12 at the time) and an aunt that was going to stay with us for awhile. We brought with us her two younger brothers, her older sister and some various friends to help us move in, unpack, all that good stuff. All Paraguayans.
The guards (there were two of them) came to the door and welcomed us. Then one of the guards says that the lady next door had noticed there were a lot of Paraguayans in the house and was wondering if this was going to be a common occurrence (I suppose they probably heard the music they were playing on the stereo, which was not overly loud yet clearly Paraguayan, probably audible next door with the windows open, not to mention they could probably hear the Guarani that was being spoken as we shuffled in and out of the house arranging things). He told us that the lady wanted us to make sure that we understood this was a quiet neighborhood and they didn't expect to see wild parties all the time. I don't remember the wording, but it seemed to all of us that it was a clear reference to Paraguayans specifically. The guard asked me where I was from and when I told him the States, his face actually showed an obviously relieved expression.
We were quite taken aback at all this. You have to understand, we were not in any fashion making a ruckus. And indeed, I came to find out that what that cretin next door was supposedly cautioning us about was a load of crap - we had the noisiest neighbors I'd ever had, with the exception of being near a nightclub in the city that goes on until 5 AM or something. Nearly half of the houses there (the neighborhood had 50 lots and there were a few vacant lots, so maybe 47 houses total) were only populated on the weekends during the summer, and there were many, many loud parties that would go on well into the wee hours. Even during spring and autumn there was a lot going on. Winter was about the only respite.
We never made a single friend in that neighborhood, at least from the Argentinos that lived thee. Everyone was very stand-offish and would barely grunt a word to us or even wave when we waved in passing.
After awhile, the neighbor next door made some overtures to my wife that seemed of the friendly sort. We thought that things had changed, that it had just been the newness of things that had caused the intial reaction, and being in a foreign country we had taken things too seriously.
The neighbor invited my wife over for a tea. Some three or four other friends of the neighbor were invited over as well. It turned out that it wasn't a tea, but rather a sales event where tea was served. The woman sold women's accessories and clothes out of her house.
My wife was invited a number of times for "tea," but never a social event. We watched her have other people over at other times, obviously friends, for real teas, dinners and other events, but never once were we invited.
My wife made friends with some of the maids in the neighborhood after awhile because, of course, they were almost all Paraguayan. Including the maid who worked for our neighbors. We heard rumors from them of some of the horrible things that supposedly the people of the neighborhood were saying about us.
One of the things that the maid next door told my wife was that the only reason she was invited over for the "teas" was that because she was married to an American who was obviously rich (which is hilarious - I'm far from it, but apparently only rich people are "allowed" to live in such places!) and my wife could therefore afford to buy what she offered.
That was the closest we came to making new friends in that neighborhood.
I really don't know how much stock to put into some of the things my wife heard from many of the people in the neighborhood through their maids. If even a tenth was true, it was horrifying. Also, it would show, if true, that some people are so high-horsed that even in this day and age they still talk in front of their "servants" as if they are not there, or are dumb, deaf and blind to anything they would have to say about people of their own country.
It could have been envy on the part of the maids as well, I don't know. But one thing that fit with a lot of what we heard from the maids, was how we were treated - basically as non-entities.
The funny thing is, going around outside the closed neighborhood, where these people were terrified to go by the way, it was quite different. People were much friendlier, and also poorer. When we went to shopping malls and such, where the poorer people rarely went, it became the same again.
I'd never move into a closed neighborhood again, I think. I'd consider a house in a neighborhood that is open, in a decent area, but it seemed that most houses that were not too small for us (I'm talking maybe 80 sm was way too small - the house we were in was 260 sm, we now live in an apartment 160 sm and barely fit, to my standards at least) were walled in. That would be ok maybe, but I don't know if it's because of the extreme paranoia that most people with money here have, or if it was really dangerous enough to warrant walls, some even with razor wire or broken glass cemented in a the top.
The feeling living there gave us was one of the main reasons we moved back into the city. At least in the city, one is a bit more anonymous. To an extent. It was also the rising costs - while we were there, we went from 600 pesos a month for neighborhood expenses to 1800 a month! And everything else out there seemed to skyrocket right along as well.
Our portero in our current building is of German decent and talks with a pronounced German accent, although his father was the one who emigrated, to Entre Rios. Our portero came to Buenos Aires sometime in the early 70s. I call him portero, but he's actually the encardo who also runs a portero shift during the afternoon. His son is the morning portero. He talks all the time about how bad Argentinos are in general, even to the point of making me uncomfortable at times.
Yet it was he who told us some of the people in our building were voicing concern that too many Paraguayans were coming and going to and from our apartment.
We don't make a lot of noise. Four of us live here, with two that visit us a lot, and about 4 or 5 others who come over on the weekends every once in a while and have dinner or sit around and talk.
But at least I don't have to put up with a whole neighborhood of people who ignore us - in the city, it's often that way anyway, and we haven't received any complaints in the last year or so about the number of Paraguayans coming in.
We have never received a single complaint from the owners, nor concerns from them about people in the building complaining. Of course, the owners live in Switzerland...the gentlemen being part of the Argentina diplomatic corps in some fashion and his wife is from Bolivia. His wife's mother, a sweet old lady, is the one who we deal with directly when we have issues with the apartment. She's never mentioned anything at all and is very happy with our occupation of her daughter and son-in-law's apartment.
My poor younger sister-in-law has had to put up with so much more than I or my wife have had to, attending a private Catholic school here in the city. In fact, I was just talking with her a few moments ago about the incident with the kids jeering at me because I was foreigner. Her exact words were "todos los Argentinos son re racistas. Cada uno. Sin excepcion." "All Argentinos are very racist. Every one. Without exception."
I think she's exaggerating, but based on her more limited, concentrated experiences. I don't believe all Argentinos are, probably not even a majority. I don't even know if racist is the right word. I'm searching for a better way to describe it and it just doesn't come out.
Also, I should qualify a lot of what I'm saying when I use the word "Argentino" or "Argentina." Our experiences have been in Buenos Aires and Gran Buenos Aires in particular. I have been to Cordoba a few times and have visted the folks of a couple of my Argentine friends who are from Cordoba and it really does seem like a completely different world there.
My sister-in-law is a bit tall for her age, but not overly, so that she doesn't seem awkwardly tall. She's slender, long black hair (curly - she hates it, always goes to the salon to have it straightened!), and a face that is beautiful and angelic at the same time. She's simple, yet extremely smart. she's writing a book, on which she has been working for more than two years and has over two hundred pages written. She has the biggest heart inside her of anyone I've known with the exception of my wife's, which is probably bigger but it may be a tie
She rarely argues, she studies, she's concerned about life on the planet, about not making enemies of people, the whole nine yards.
She's been called "Paragaya Sucia" (Dirty Paraguayan) by many of her classmates. Not just out of the blue, but when she tries to stand up for herself, for example. One of the favorite things for the boys to do is to take her pouch that has her writing implements and other things and play keep away. She'd try to stand up for herself, get it back, and they'd start taunting her. They routinely take stuff out of her backpack, have broken many of her tools. I've tried to talk her into letting me go to the school and make a complaint, but as she's told me repeatedly, it won't make things better and would likely make things worse.
She's been told by almost all of them, even the few friends she's made, that she MUST get rid of her ridiculous accent and speak like an Argentina.
She's the target of vinidictive girls who call her "La Puta Paraguaya" because she attracts the boys. She's not had a single boyfriend because she considers the boys here to be extremely immature. But she does somethng like accept one of the boys as friends on Facebook and a group of girls in her school who are attracted to this guy call her these things and spread vicious rumors about her.
This is one of the reasons, by the way, why I have wanted her to get a taste of other foreigners as I mentioned in my thread asking about expats her own age with whom she could make friends.
I will say, she has four close friends who are all good kids. I like every one of them and she has them over for sleep overs, I take them all places when they need rides, we sit and have nice conversations, etc. Only one is male, and is a bit effeminate (the girls say he's gay but he won't admit it - I suspect he may be playing things smart and sees how to get in with a group of girls where his friends are not welcome!), which doesn't matter to me one bit but may explain why he doesn't act like an immature creep like the others!
But I've also had those immature boys, mentioned previously, over with her real friends and have had to kick them out of the apartment when they start (literally) jumping on the furniture, sticking her wooden paintbrush handles through keyholes in various doors and breaking them off, running around screaming like banshees, getting into everything they can possibly think of without permission, etc. I finally had to ban them because they are out of control and no amount of discussion, cajoling, yelling or threatening does any good until they are physically removed from the premises.
Anyway.
I guess all of this writing that I'm putting out here doesn't necessarily have a grand point. I don't know where it's going, really. Just some observations that I've made about something that has bothered me related to the incident I was involved with on Monday.
I've been in fights where I've lost, where I've taken damage, and there is always a matter of macho pride about this to deal with (particularly referring to Eclair's comments about the possible macho-ness of some of my actions) in terms of licking wounds and feeling like a wuss or something.
I've actually been a bit unconcentrated in the last couple of days. I can't focus. I have a hard time getting to sleep and three days in a row now I've overslept getting up with my sister-in-law to prepare her for school and drive her there. I don't even hear the alarm clock.
I'm not in much pain now. My lack of sensation in my lip and gums on that side of my face is no more than an irritation. The swelling has gone down to a slightly puffy bag under my eye, with a bloody bruise where the fracture is (I have always healed pretty fast). I feel a little self-concious when I leave the house because it's obvious that something happened to me, but that doesn't really seem to be a big deal. I still can't blow my nose for fear of air coming out agonizingly through my eyelid, but again, I've had physical wounds before and I'll get over them.
I just can't get the image out of my mind of those kids laughing and jeering at me like I was some kind of thing, deserving of what was happening to me. And the fact that I had to restrain myself to not make things even worse haunts me a bit. It shouldn't - I'm not a violent person normally, only when provoked, and then I can be a beserker. I guess I feel a bit of resentment and unclosedness to the whole thing that stings.
And I realized that this has brought out some of the feelings that I've compartmentalized over some of the treatment my family and I have received, none of it too serious, at the hands of some real asses here in Buenos Aires.
Well, I don't want anyone to think I'm being a wuss. I'm not sitting in my apartment quivering, afraid to go out, reliving that moment every waking second. I just feel an overwhelming sense of frustration and realized that a lot of what happened in that relatively short time brought home to me some other things that have happened while here and are probably all mixing around and messing with my head.
Maybe writing it out will help excavate the radioactivity that seems to be seething out from within. Thanks to you all for putting up with my long-windedness
