For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts Read online

  After the United States put the first Somoza in place to rule over my country, Nicaraguans lived through two more Somoza men as our dictators. These men from this family were corrupt and were able to amass one of the biggest fortunes in Latin America due to their pillaging of our natural resources.

  The Somozas sold rights to cattle and land to anyone with a robust pocketbook. The Somozas never cared about Nicaragüenses because they were too busy getting rich. When Tachito—the last of the Somoza dictators, also known as Anastasio Somoza Debayle—came into power, he continued the horrible Somoza reign, which overall lasted forty years. Tachito attended West Point, and he was the only graduate of that school with his own personal army. That army was a graduation gift. Tachito was never loyal to us pinolerxs because he barely was one. As the heir to the Nicaraguan “throne,” he was raised very differently than many Nicaraguans. He had no allegiance to us, only to our money.

  Tachito was raised in the United States and spoke better English than Spanish. He grew up wealthy. The locals referred to him as the “last marine,” precisely because he was understood to be an outsider, and because it was common knowledge that the Somoza men and the United States were in bed together. The United Nations cited Tachito in the seventies with numerous violations, and his national guard did monstrosities to our citizens. By that time, much of the Nicaraguan population could not deny the terrors occurring, and a powerful revolution was afoot. Somoza attempted to fight back with the help and training of US soldiers who equipped the national guard with everything they needed to stop the revolution from taking place.

  Still our revolution succeeded. Sandinistas overthrew Tachito, but before the dictator fled to the United States he was able to get his hands on all our money. My country’s government was left with only $3 million, total. The Somozas had left us in ruins, and we had to rebuild a country from scraps. After the revolution, guerrilla fighters and leaders were vetted for loyalty. They tried to bring us back to the days before dictators had robbed us of our rights.

  Mi papi’s older brother, my uncle, served in the national guard under one of these tyrannous presidents. My tio served under a dictator, Tachito, because he was promised a scholarship for college. Tio José served as one of the president’s personal bodyguards and henchmen. The national guards, at that time, were known to be ruthless killers and would all eventually be charged for their crimes. Against my family’s adamant protests, my uncle went ahead and joined the Guardia Nacional toward the end of Tachito’s reign. When the Sandinistas won, all of Tachito’s soldiers were thrown in jail.

  Mi tio only served the dictator for a few months, but when Tachito fled the country, my uncle was sentenced to serve twenty-three years in jail. Mi papi risked his life to save him. Mi papi had a sit-down with the new Sandinista president, Daniel Ortega. Mi papi and his band were invited to play at a presidential party, and that night he made his way toward Ortega to request that he intervene and free my tio. Because of this plea by mi papi, my tio was then freed. I should note that my family does not come from a long line of soldiers; our heritage is in generations upon generations of musicians. But American interventions make soldiers out of everyone.

  What I remember of mi tio was that he was an alcoholic. Mi tio would drink until he passed out, and that could occur anywhere. If he passed out on the front porch of his mami’s home, then at least we knew he was safe. God forbid he pass out on the street somewhere, which occurred often, and then we would hear of it through children who played in the streets. The kids would come up to mi abuela’s portón and tell her where my uncle was seen last.

  Whenever we visited my paternal abuelita, which was often enough, Tio José came. The children, my cousins and I, were usually escorted as far away as the adults could take us from him. It was not because they thought he was dangerous, but maybe because he was a remnant of a past everyone wanted to forget. We were no longer at war, but the echoes of war were felt and they were with us even when we were all actively trying to forget.

  And while they wanted to forget, it seems he could not. I will never know what that tio saw and what that tio lived through while helping to keep the dictator Tachito alive. As a kid I did not understand his alcoholism, but as an adult I always wonder what he was trying to escape. I wonder what demons he wrestled with. I wonder what he was trying to silence within himself.

  That tio died a few years ago. The story goes that he got so drunk he passed out on a road and a car ran over his body and kept driving. Alas, he passed out somewhere nobody could protect him.

  I have only seen mi papi cry a handful of times, and when he heard about his big brother’s death, I saw him sob. I will never know what mi papi knew, what mi papi shielded me from, but I will never forget those tears. Trauma is inherited.

  He had another brother who had joined the army, but he was on the other side. Mi tio was a teenager and a singer at our church when he was forced into the Sandinista army to fight the US-backed Tachito dictatorship. This uncle was a pacifist. He did not believe in violence, and because of this his commander shot him in the head in front of his entire platoon. These were tense times, and compassion was not what it would take to keep the United States at bay.

  Mi tio’s death is dark stain on the Sandinista revolution for my entire family. But for me his death signifies a dark stain on the United States. My tio was killed because the United States insisted on keeping its grip on our country; the Americans wanted to keep control of our lands and they wanted to secure their investments.

  After the devastation of burying one of her youngest sons, my abuelita stood in front of the gates of her home in her neighborhood of Las Brisas and refused to let the Sandinistas take another son. She said they would have to kill her before she would let another son go. No other son was taken from her home. Trauma is inherited.

  The Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza regime, but the removal of a puppet does not remove the puppeteers. Our revolution threatened the reach of US power. The embargo in 1985 was just another American strategy to get the country back in line.

  I have seen my country struggle since the day I was born. I was born in 1985, after the revolution and just a few months after the United States placed its embargo. This was a time when even diapers were hard to come by, formula also. I grew up hearing about our revolution and the tension that it created for everyone. I grew up understanding that my parents had lived through a war, and they survived despite the very many people who did not. Mi mami gave birth to my brother and I while also surviving the distress of giving birth in a war-torn country. Trauma is inherited.

  I cannot fully blame them for how their trauma has impacted them and thus impacted me. But what I can do is hold the United States and its voluntourists accountable for upholding a narrative where they think of themselves as “helping” people in countries that Americans actually helped destroy. But it took me learning my history and understanding white supremacy to find the words for the generational trauma that has always impacted me. For a long time, I had aspirations to become American—until I learned what America has meant for me directly, and how it has changed the course of my entire family line. Knowledge gave me the power to lift the veil that covered my eyes; knowledge allowed me to see it all clearly.

  And still, we have been tasked with welcoming these colonizers to our lands with our arms wide open, as though their country had no role in causing our distress. So, the real question is: What have these voluntourists done, and what can they do instead in their own communities?

  Nicaragua is not a special case; Nicaragua has not been ransacked more than any other country in the Global South. Nicaragua is just one in a long list of countries that have lived through similar terrorist acts by the United States and European powers. It takes one simple Google search to find out what has happened in Iraq, Honduras, Puerto Rico, Thailand, the entire continent of Africa—literally every country with Black and Brown citizens. None of what I have shared in this chapter is news, but still there exists
an outright dismissal of this information, which remains striking to me.

  I am angry that my picture was taken without my consent when these missionaries came to plant some trees at our church orphanage. But in a deeper sense, I am angry that missionaries visit our countries at all. What I require is for missionaries to stop visiting our countries. What I require is that they do something to significantly change the grave situation in our countries by advocating that their government stop pillaging them.

  True generosity lies in striving so that these hands—whether individual or entire peoples—need be extended less and less in supplication.

  —Paulo Freire

  In my twenties, I attended one of the few elite theological institutions in America that lauds itself in churning out progressive movers and shakers: Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, Tennessee. VDS is a wonderfully utopian place where I was challenged and pushed to learn more than I ever thought I could handle, and quite frankly it changed me for the better. However, such progressive liberal havens like these also breed a particular type of white student.

  The white people I met there were well-meaning, well-read liberal folks who happened to know all the ins and outs of racism and colonialism, but somehow positioned those problems outside of themselves rather than taking ownership of them. They did not understand themselves to be part of the problem, and they did not see themselves as benefitting from these systems of oppression. Many saw themselves as strictly allies.

  It was in this program that I first encountered the term voluntourism. I had finally obtained the word to validate my unsettling experiences and feelings of dissonance. And in dealing with that dissonance as I had experienced it growing up, a new type of dissonance was rearing its head. I found myself surrounded by people who knew the terminology and still found ways to justify their actions as different or better.

  I was a typical graduate student, meaning I read all day and drank all night. One day, while drinking and chatting with one of my white peers, we stumbled into his dorm room. We lived in the same building, and he had to get something before we headed out to the bars for the evening. I had never been to his room before, so I started looking around. He had typical pictures and trinkets strewn about, and then something caught my eye.

  I was stunned. On his IKEA bookshelf he had a framed picture of himself, a very white man, hugging a group of Brown kids.

  You see, VDS talks openly about the problems with white saviorism and the ways that it manifests through consumption of Black and Brown trauma. I guess I had assumed we had all been paying attention in class, or maybe I assumed people knew better. I remember this moment vividly, because it taught me a lot about myself in relationship to the program I was attending.

  I squinted and leaned in, and he saw me looking and said something along the lines of, “That picture is from when I went to Guatemala.” He mentioned that he had been traveling with either a church group or a college Christian group. I remember him trying to do a justification dance—this dance of, I am not like those white people who do not respect other cultures. I am different. Back then, I didn’t know how to push back against a friend. I didn’t know how to challenge him for doing what he thought was a good deed.

  We headed out, but I could not shake that photograph from my mind. Those children in that picture, those smiling Brown kids, looked just like I had. I kept wondering how many of the missionaries had framed the pictures they had taken with me, of me. I wondered if, when they spoke of their trips, they talked about me or if they centered themselves. I wondered in what context it would be appropriate and in what context would it be inappropriate to have pictures of anonymous kids in your room.

  I remember white people taking pictures of me in Nicaragua, but I do not remember ever being asked for my permission. I do not remember ever thinking that those pictures would become trophies of good deeds in dorm rooms across the country.

  On that day in Nashville, I felt violated, and that feeling was hard to accept. I felt protective of the kids in that framed picture in that white man’s dorm. I felt angry. I kept thinking about consent, and if those kids had been asked for consent for him to take their picture, frame it, and display it in his dorm room. I wanted to ask my friend to name each and every one of those kids. Who are these kids to you? I wanted to ask. Who do you think you are, to visit a significantly poorer country and claim your visit as an act of benevolence?

  Things changed between that friend and me after I saw that picture, and things changed between me and a lot of my white peers in the program. I stayed defensive; I suddenly saw myself as I feared others saw me. To them, perhaps I wasn’t just another graduate student trying to survive midterms, papers, readings, and finals. I began to see myself as someone whose humanity was not valued. Those Brown kids looked more like me than anyone else in my graduate program. It occurred to me that my white peers might not truly see me as one of them.

  Most people in my program probably did not know I had been a recipient of missionary aid. Most people in my program probably did not know that I was like those nameless kids displayed on fridges and mantels, on IKEA dressers and bookshelves. I realized we had little in common because they saw themselves as saviors while I was seen as someone who needed to be saved. I realized in that instant that we were not friends, and that I would forever be their token Brown friend. I was just there to fill a role in legitimizing their allyship.

  Voluntourism is not a conservative person’s problem. It’s still voluntourism if it’s a liberal person doing it. Voluntourism is a product of white supremacy and is a form of virtue signaling that still centers the assumed goodness of whiteness.

  If white people are truly looking to permanently free people, to permanently help people, then only real and tangible actions toward liberation can be effective. The path forward requires society to stop rewarding these voluntourists with scholarships, likes on social media, and admiration for their supposed life-changing experiences. To begin healing the generations of trauma white people have inflicted on Brown and Black people, white people first have to hold themselves accountable.

  Demanding open borders is how we begin to repair those relationships with people whose countries have become almost unlivable. Demanding and ensuring health care for everyone in this country, including mental health care, is how we can begin to cut away the trauma. Many immigrants have not even begun to heal from war and displacement but still have to live in a capitalist society that demands financial contribution as a justification for their migration. Making the visa process less impossible is a great start. We need to stop teaching one-sided history in our schools. Let people have all the information needed to do better and be better global citizens. We need to ensure that the United States changes how it treats foreign countries, especially those poorer, “shithole” countries. Because these countries are still feeling the effects of globalization, and we have to do better by them.

  Most of my family still lives in Nicaragua; it was only my immediate family who got to leave. Visas are hard to come by, and while some of my family has migrated, our hearts are back home.

  Through them, I am constantly reminded that I am not free, and I owe it to them to speak up. In 2018, after a few uprisings and protests in Nicaragua, my cousin was kidnapped by the Nicaraguan government under suspicions that he was part of the uprising. Sometimes out of fear of regressing to a previous dictatorship, revolutionary leaders become assassins. Conclusions were made about my cousin’s involvement in the uprisings, based on his age, which, as a young college student, matched the age of most protestors. When he was kidnapped, he was working his job as a custodial worker at his college. That is how he paid for school and helped his family. He was tortured for almost an entire year, and we thought he had died several times because we knew so little of his whereabouts. My aunt would hear about unmarked graves, and she would drive there and would try to identify his body. At one point, we heard that he was at El Chipote, an old, abandoned jail that was used to to
rture people back in my parents’ time. They were using it to torture a new flock of young boys who were suspected to have information. Eventually that jail was closed off as investigations were being made by the United Nations about the human rights violations that were occurring. Almost one year after my cousin went missing, we got word that he was somewhere unknown and to get him back his parents had to pay a ransom. After paying off some police officers, they got him back and my family had to smuggle him to another country for his safety. Last time I saw pictures of him days after he was released, I could tell something inside him had changed. His eyes were sunken in; his beautiful smile was gone.

  All this makes me angry, and sometimes I get so angry I cannot even see solutions. But I know that I can begin to heal by naming that anger and finding the true culprit. I live with my eyes wide open, no veil covering them and no admiration for America despite the nationalist propaganda that is prevalent always but especially during election time. I have fallen in love with my people now that I know what we have survived to be alive today. I have healed through knowing, and by knowing I can move toward possible solutions. I am no longer stuck in the trauma and the confusion that trauma creates. Rather, I have learned to exist and resist. I work hard, on a daily basis, to find joy despite everything that was made to take that joy away.