Chuck Palahniuk once said, “I am the combined effort of everyone I have ever known.”
I don’t know how accurately that statement fits me, but I do know this to be true: I am the lovechild of the nation that birthed me and the nation that raised me, and neither wants to claim me.
My identity swings like a pendulum, which is to say that I am Australian and Salvadoran, whichever side I am forced into. When the opportunity presents itself I am one, and when it doesn’t, I am the other.
This conflict coming to a head is one of my earliest memories. I am four, and I have just said goodbye to my grandparents in Spanish as my parents and I leave their house. With looks of shame my uncles declared:
“Sí, ya sos Australiana.”
“No I’m not!” I yelled, in English. I understood at a young age that the comment about my nationality was an insult.
I have devoted a great deal of my energy proving my Hispanic-ness to them since then. I can speak, read and write the language, albeit with an accent that gets worse as I grow older. I am devoted to learning the history of my people and my family. This history rests permanently on my skin—Citlalique, the goddess of the moon and the stars, but also of darkness and death.
But for each day I have spent proving to my family that I am an apple from the same tree, I have also spent an equal number of days proving to my peers that the tree grew in their backyard.
My education is fixed in the English language, as are my aspirations. While I admire the work of people like Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez, I do not want to be them. Call it counterintuitive, or perhaps a consequence of my Western education and having only white role models, but the influence of my ancestry stops at whom I want to be “when I grow up”.
But this in itself is a shortcoming—a flaw my family has never allowed me to forget; that while I have been granted a life far more privileged than the one that they had, I am still limited to the borders my ethnicity bounds me to.
I am, ironically, stuck behind a wall.
♦
In 1983 the Labor Government increased its emphasis on the Special Humanitarian Program, including family reunion migration. El Salvador citizens were encouraged to apply as they were subject to discrimination due to the gross violation of human rights and corruption caused by U.S. intervention (most official documents neither confirm nor deny that last part).[i]
Within the 10 years of this open-door policy, which also included citizens of countries in the Middle East and South America, close to 130,000 immigrants arrived on these shores; nearly 8% were from El Salvador alone. Another 1.5 million moved to the U.S., 40,000 moved to Canada, and over 10,000 to Italy.[ii] 10 years, and El Salvador’s biggest export became its people.
My father always tells me the story of the first day he arrived in Australia. A translator asked him: “What do you do? What have you been educated in?” and at 19 years of age, as someone who had no choice but to drop out of medical school and leave his country because of a civil war, his experiences only allowed him to answer back: “Nothing.”
To which the translator responded, after rolling her eyes, “I don’t know why you people come here.”
Racism aside, it’s the intergenerational trauma caused not only by invasion and colonisation but also by displacement that makes it crueller than imagined.
“You have to work twice as hard to get half as far” is an adage I have lived with my whole life. Is that not what we’re all told as children of parents who had half the opportunities we had? Parents who gave up their own prospects to provide us with ‘more’?
I say ‘more’ as though it’s a lie because sometimes—a lot of the time—it feels that way. We were forced to leave home by a government that caused a war then promised us better elsewhere. From start to finish, the whole experience is propaganda to suit someone else’s agenda.
And now it’s something hung over my head: a reminder, and at times a threat. I must do more and be more. This ‘more’ I have been given may be more than what my mother had, yet it’s not enough to be what they ask. And it is too much more than what this country and its people want to give.
♦
Us vs. them. Me vs. you. Majority vs. minority.
However you want to put it, it’s a concept that’s hard to shake off even now, 30 years after my parents first arrived here. The perpetual binary view of the world and its citizens. I’ve sat at the same table with people well-established within their field—most not working in the Arts, most white Australians—all of whom wince either a) when my education is revealed to be something they presumed non-existent, or b) when informed that I have been to university and it appears wasted, as I’m still working low-level jobs.
It’s in these kinds of situations that I struggle to define my identity. It is the unfailing “Where are you really from?” that prevents me from saying “Australian” from the get-go. Just give them the answer they want, I think, and shut this conversation down as quickly as possible.
But saying “Salvadoran” feels like an invitation for judgment. ‘I don’t know why you people come here’ rings in my ears.
I remember the first time my father told me his story; it broke my heart, but propelled me forward all the same. I used to think, I am the reason he came here. I have to show him that the prejudice and the struggle he endured had some purpose.
But on some days, when I’m at my desk or eating a stale sandwich, or at dinner surrounded by well-off privileged intellectuals, it’s easier to stop and think: today is not that day.
♦
Perhaps I am not the combined effort of every single person I have met in my life as Chuck Palahnuik is, but the fact that my mind thinks in Spanish and my tongue speaks words in English is a testament to my parents most of all. It is a reminder, with every word that escapes my mouth, that I can articulate my thoughts in a foreign language on foreign soil because they gave up the opportunity to do the same for themselves.
But every once in a while, when I stop and question my identity because of that baggage that comes with saying one or the other, my tongue bleeds from biting down a little too hard. And I am reminded that my gratitude for my parents’ struggle can be situational, and not universal.
I just don’t know that this is the ‘more’ they wanted for me.
♦
I was at a café yesterday. The barista asked where I was from, just as the sun disappeared behind the clouds and rain began to fall. I grabbed my flat white and said, “Guess.” I walked away before he could reply. The rain fell heavier.
Australiana. Salvadoran. I am what you decide, aren’t I?
[i] Australian Multiculturalism: A Documentary History and Critique
By E. Foster, L (1988)
[ii] From El Salvador to Australia: A 20th century exodus to a promised land
By Santos, B. (2006)
Cover image via Fotose Imagenes
About the author
Vanessa Giron is a Latinx freelance writer based in Naarm. She primarily writes on identity and culture, and how these things have shaped her as a woman in country that is not her own. She is a member of the West Writers Group with Footscray Community Arts Centre as well as a critic for The Big Issue. You can find Vanessa on Twitter @vanesssagiron or on her website vanessagiron.com