When I reached the car, I burst into tears, he held back his, and we went to the beach. Ale, full of friends, had gone on a play date. We collected shells and felt the wind in our hair.
Papi stared out at the ocean and said, “I took Jaime to the beach once in La Serena on a day like today. The seaweed was red there, though, and the tide had brought in scores of jellyfish.”
My uncle Jaime was my father’s best friend in the world. They’d shared a room for five years while studying at Santiago’s Pedagogical University, a hotbed of MIR organizing, and where Mami and Papi had met. Although all three came from low-income families, they’d been able to attend, live in residence, and eat three full meals a day free of charge because university education—top-notch in Chile—had always been state funded until it was privatized under Pinochet. During their student days, they’d visit Pablo Neruda at La Chascona, his Bellavista home, always open to young people, and go to La Peña de los Parra, the concert café run by Violeta Parra. A full-blooded Aymara Indian from a family of miners in the north, Jaime had been shot by the firing squad at Chacabuco concentration camp in the Atacama Desert a few months earlier. But first they’d tortured him almost to death. He’d been twenty-nine.
Since the honey-coloured girl was now my comrade in the struggle—we had been punished together, after all—I decided to be her clown. She’d clearly loved my bathroom shenanigans—the pointing, the waving my arms around, the silly gibberish sounds that were my attempt at English—so I’d continue in the same vein. She began to seek me out, even going so far as to pull her desk next to mine and leave it there. I couldn’t believe my luck. I was her monkey, for all she had to do at recess was point to me in front of the other kids and I’d do the bathroom spiel she loved so much.
Her name was Lassie, like the gorgeous dog whose mane shone in the sun. Lassie was indeed a pet, the first one I’d ever seen, even if it had only been on Chilean TV. Lassie the dog was so special she glowed like a diamond, so it made perfect sense that the honey-coloured girl was named after her. The first English word I spoke out loud, even before hello or goodbye, was my new friend’s name: Lassie. I wrote a letter to my abuelita Carmen and abuelito Armando bragging about how the children in the States were named after the brilliant, radiant dog and that, actually, my best friend was called Lassie. Years later, when my grasp of English was that of a native speaker, I bolted up in bed one night and yelled out, “Leslie!” to the pitch-black room. I wasn’t conjuring her memory in deepest, darkest Canadian winter. My utterance was the sound of a penny dropping. Of course her name wasn’t Lassie, it was Leslie! I now understood why she’d repeated her name over and over again, making me watch the sounds her mouth was making, which I was sure had amounted to “Lassie.”
One day, when my mother came to pick me up, Lassie talked to her for a little while. After the impromptu meeting of their minds, Mami announced with a big smile on her face:
“Leslie wants you to go over to her house!”
My first solo outing in North America was to be to Lassie’s abode. Her mother waited in a shiny yellow Mustang convertible, a Virginia Slim between her fingers. Lassie and I got in, and we pulled away from the curb. It was evident that Barbie was modelled after her mom, her waist-length blond hair flying all over her face as we manoeuvred the curves that hugged the La Jolla hills, the Pacific glistening below us, Blue Suede’s “Hooked on a Feeling” blasting from the speakers. Enormous gold-rimmed tinted shades covered her eyes, and she bobbed her head to the music. I did the same in my spot in the back seat. Her manicured hand reached for the dial and raised the volume to max, and I smiled wider, for she was my kind of lady.
We pulled up to a house that overlooked the beach. The garage door opened all on its own, and we pulled in. “Hooked on a Feeling” was cut abruptly and the only sound was that of the garage door whirring shut behind us. She got out of the car and I was able to admire her in all her glory. Six feet tall, thin as a rake, she wore platforms and flared lime-green polyester pants with matching halter top. She disappeared through a door into the house and Lassie and I got out of the car.
The house created the illusion of being suspended in the air, commanding an impressive view of the ocean with its vast windows. Entranced with the wraparound white leather couches, white shag rugs, white spiral staircase, and entertainment centre with a big set of headphones hanging from the record player cabinet and the biggest TV set I’d ever laid eyes on, I was shocked to hear a lady’s voice greet me in Spanish. I turned around and saw what I now knew was referred to as another Latina. About twenty-five, my mother’s age, she was wearing a black dress and white apron.
“Hola!” she repeated, a big smile on her lips. “Soy Adriana.”
She knelt down, gave me a big hug, and asked me what part of Mexico I was from. I told her I was from Chile. She explained that Lassie had told her all about the new Mexican girl in class and that that was why she had brought me over, so the two of us could meet. (Mami thought she’d arranged a play date with Lassie, not an introduction to the help.) Her assertion levelled me. I was flattened like Wile E. Coyote, mere roadkill for flies to feast on once the gravity of her statement hit me like the ton of bricks it was: I would never be like Lassie. For Lassie and all the others like her, I was a poor brown girl who reminded her of her maid. I swallowed hard, reeling. Everything in me froze—my face, my tongue, my heart, my skin, the tips of my fingers.
She kept talking to me, but I couldn’t register any of it. I tried to focus on her, this Mexican. Although I’d met Mexicans since our arrival in the States, most notably in my grade one class in San Francisco (oddly, some of them didn’t speak Spanish and referred to themselves as Chicanos), this was the first time I realized that we—we Chileans, we Chicanos, we Mexicans, alas, even we black people, and perhaps even poor white people—were one. Her accent was different, but she touched me, she held me, she smelled me and put her face in mine. I understood that in this new life I would forever have more in common with her than with the Lassies of North America. This fresh consciousness gave me the urge to simultaneously hug Adriana and blow her away with a submachine gun, to remove her and all she stood for from the face of the earth.
She spoke of her faraway children, back in Chihuahua—wasn’t that a type of dog? I was only now hearing that it was also a place!—as she caressed my cheeks and the deep freeze took over my core, an iceberg floating in my solar plexus, a painful knot forming in my throat. Hyper-aware of Lassie looking on, pleased as punch with herself, I was embarrassed to have all this Latinoness on display, to have Lassie of all people be witness to my moment of concession, the moment of letting Adriana touch me and see me, recognize me—the moment I swallowed the bitter pill of having much more in common with Adriana than I could ever have with Lassie. We were both uprooted Latinas in a place that rendered us either invisible or, conversely, visible only as the degraded, despised, pitied, exploited, exoticized, feared inferior “other.”
Lassie started climbing the spiral staircase. I followed and landed smack in the middle of Barbie’s dream townhouse. Lassie’s pink room was not only a replica of the famous doll’s living quarters—as seen on TV during Saturday morning cartoons—it was filled with Barbie herself. There were dozens of her, all blond. They wore bikinis and lay on their own towels, sported evening gowns with heels on their diminutive arched feet and mini-clutches in their tiny hands, showed off sailor outfits complete with caps, and tailored suits with briefcases. Some of them were stewardesses, others nurses, still others gold-medalist Olympians. There was a Barbie bride holding a bouquet of flowers, and a Miss America Barbie with a sash and tiara. Barbie cars, jeeps, campers, yachts, and airplanes, and a Barbie swimming pool. A Barbie fashion plaza. Barbie purses, shoes, jackets, and jewellery. These Barbies even had their own makeup kits and bubble baths.
Had I known that the spiral staircase led to heaven, I wouldn’t have wasted a single minute talking to Adriana. The knot in my throat dissolved, the iceberg melted.
I ran around and grabbed as many Barbies as I could, studying them closely, holding them to my chest, trying to decide which one I would play with first. If we were in Chile or Mexico, or maybe even the brown, black, or poor white parts of the States, my friend would have given me one to keep, but I somehow knew that wouldn’t be the case with Lassie.
Adriana served us pink milk and cookies at the glass dining room table, and then Lassie led me downstairs to a rec room, as seen on a Kool cigarette commercial. There was a pool table, a Ping-Pong table, a dart game, and a whole other humongous TV set. Lassie opened the mini-fridge in the small kitchen, stacked with pop. The only other time I’d seen so much pop in one place was at the supermarket. She pointed and talked and I figured she was offering me one, so I opened it and took a sip. It was the worst pop I’d ever tasted, but I kept drinking it out of politeness. She gasped and laughed as I forced myself to down more of the hideous thing, murmuring, “Mmm!” with a fake smile and a thumbs-up between each tiny sip.
My father’s voice drifted down the stairs, talking in Spanish to Adriana, punctuating the conversation with his signature word, “Fantastico!” He was here to get me.
Years later, I realized I’d tasted my first—and last, because I became a teetotaller—beer.
The night before we left San Diego in late June 1974, we dressed in our best and Mami and Papi took us out for dinner in a fancy part of town where restaurants lined the beach. We stood at the door of the first restaurant and were ignored. As we made our way down the row, we continued to be ignored or to be told point-blank that all the tables were taken at restaurants that were half empty. In the end, our one and only outing during our six-month stay in San Diego found us back at home eating homemade burgers, Mami trying to make light of the situation by joking that the little bit of money they’d managed to save for a special occasion would now be for something more useful, not a bourgeois farewell meal.
All our belongings fit easily into the trunk of our Chevrolet Malibu when we began our trip up the coast to Canada the following morning. We camped along the way, stopping at waterfalls and forests of towering redwood trees. Ale and I even petted a fawn at one of our campsites. At the final rest stop south of Blaine, Washington, we pulled over and made ourselves presentable before arriving at the Canadian border. My mother scrubbed our faces clean, re-braided our hair, and changed our clothes. We rid the car of any garbage, and when we pulled up to the border wicket, Mami stated clearly that we were Chileans fleeing the Pinochet dictatorship. An hour later, we were accepted as refugees. Ten months had passed since the coup, Pinochet didn’t seem to be stepping down any time soon, and if we had been turned away at the border, we would have found ourselves in deep undocumented shit. My parents’ student visas were about to expire, and the United States had refused them work permits.
My uncle Boris, aunt Tita, and cousins Gonzalo and Macarena awaited us in Vancouver. They’d arrived only a few months earlier. Uncle Boris was the first Chilean refugee there, along with family friend David, a survivor of Dawson Island, a concentration camp on a remote island close to Antarctica. David’s Hungarian Jewish father had sought refuge in Chile at the start of the Second World War, when Chile had offered asylum to Jews fleeing persecution in Europe. Now his son had been arrested and expelled from the country that had taken him in. Boris and David arrived at the same time and met at the English Bay Apartment Hotel, later christened the Refugee Hotel by the Chilean community. Their families had joined them later.
After my uncle had been freed from jail in Valparaíso with strict orders to make himself scarce, he had approached the Canadian embassy in Santiago when he heard that Trudeau had agreed to open Canada’s doors to Chileans needing asylum. A group of Canadians had camped out on Parliament Hill and refused to move until Trudeau, who had voiced support for the coup, agreed to accept refugees. My future stepfather Bob had been at the helm of these efforts. He had been held at Santiago’s national soccer stadium, turned into a concentration camp, along with tens of thousands of other prisoners, including foreigners from thirty-eight countries. Bob had been one of three Canadians there, all in Chile to support Allende. After the cultural attaché at the Canadian embassy took it upon himself to convince the dictatorship to release Bob and the other two on condition they never set foot in Chile again, Bob returned to Canada. If it hadn’t been for the cultural attaché’s intervention, the Canadians would have met the same fate as their American counterparts being held at the stadium; they would have been murdered. Bob made solidarity work his mission when he arrived back home, and he was the first Canadian we met when he showed up at the Refugee Hotel. Thanks to his and many others’ tireless work, it was the first time in Canadian history that doors were opened to political refugees from the so-called Third World fleeing a right-wing dictatorship.
We drove down Oak Street on that sunny day in 1974, our first day in Canada. Ale inquired from the back seat what country we now found ourselves in, we turned right on 20th Avenue, parked the car, and got out, I admired the burgundy crowns of the trees, and heard a voice yell out:
“Carmencita’s here!”
A tall, dark boy ran towards me. Six months earlier, I would have just seen a boy. Now I knew this was a brown boy. When he reached me, he threw his arms around me and an ancient, familiar smell assaulted my nostrils, the scent of my cousin Gonzalo, so big now, eight years old, I hadn’t recognized him. We held on to each other and although he was laughing, I had no idea how to explain—to myself or to anyone else—why all I wanted to do was break down and cry. How to find the words to make plain that in my six years on earth I had always thought that tears were for sad occasions. And this was definitely not a sad one. Our family awaited us at the end of that days-long road trip, only this time we weren’t disembarking from our yellow Citroën that took us to Valparaíso every summer to see my uncle, aunt, cousins, and grandparents. This time we were on the opposite end of the Americas, falling into their arms on a day that would mark the beginning of a lifetime of exile to be experienced together.
But that was yet to come, because this day was meant to be the first of only a short visit, after which we would cross Canada in our Chevrolet Malibu to the teaching assistant job that awaited my mother in Montreal, secured by Enrique, her linguistics professor from Santiago’s Pedagogical University. Recently released from Chile stadium, built for basketball games and now also turned into a concentration camp, Enrique had got asylum in Canada and been offered a position at Concordia University upon his arrival. He spoke perfect French and English and possessed a stunning resumé that included having been on the faculty with Nobel Prize-nominated poet and physicist Nicanor Parra, renowned author and future international award-winning playwright Ariel Dorfman, and visiting Brazilian professor Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, all of whom had taught my parents. Enrique had been tortured and was one of the few living witnesses to legendary singer Víctor Jara’s final hours. He, like Victor, had been arrested on the day of the coup, when the universities where they each taught, the Pedagogical and the Technical, had been raided. Both institutions remained shut down.
Next thing I knew, my cousin Macarena, five like my sister, was running down the street towards us all, as were Uncle Boris and Aunt Tita. Mami and her brother embraced for a long while, holding each other’s faces and hugging again. We were led to their house, shared with another Chilean family and a single Chilean woman. Later that day we made our way to the nearby Queen Elizabeth Park. We kids rolled down the grassy knolls and our parents talked about the epic journeys that had brought us all here. The last time we’d seen each other was eighteen months earlier, in January 1973, when the coup and its bloodiness seemed far-fetched possibilities. We’d spent that glorious summer together in the house on the Valparaíso hill, watching the Pacific swallow the sun whole every evening, waiting for the stars of the Southern Cone to light up the sky.
On the day that would kick off the second leg of our journey, the week-long trip throu
gh the province of British Columbia, over the Rocky Mountains (“Don’t worry, they’re not as tall as the Andes,” Uncle Boris, who had never crossed either range, reassured us), across the Prairies, and into Montreal, the Chevrolet Malibu made a decision that would change our destinies. It refused to start. Much time was spent with the hood up, the men fiddling with the motor while we kids looked on, my cousin Gonzalo under the body. There was nothing to be done. Fixing the thing was out of the question, due to a lack of funds.
Within a few days, it was decided that we would stay in Vancouver. The government moved us from my uncle and aunt’s home to the Refugee Hotel, until housing and work could be found for us. Once there, we met new Chileans arriving every day, some mere skin and bones from the concentration camps, wearing ponchos, a few with guitars or charangos over their shoulders, sharing gruesome stories of torture. They, the Chilean community in exile, became my new family, bestowed with the titles of Uncle, Aunt, and Cousin.
A few weeks later, we moved to the courts at UBC student housing. As soon as I found Cedar, I climbed him every day, always on the lookout for the witch and the beautiful stranger who had fed me the peanut butter and banana sandwich. One day, I saw her. I climbed down as quickly as I could and stood in her way as she rounded one of the corners of Salmo Court. Moments later, I was over at her house. Miracle of miracles, it happened to be directly across the way from ours, and I wondered why I hadn’t seen her sooner. Elton John’s “Crocodile Rock” was blaring from the turntable and her older sister, as glamorous as a screen goddess with her long, shiny, light-brown hair, sparkling eyes, enormous smile, and golden aura—I now understood why in Chile the Virgin Mary was depicted with a halo of light around her head, to denote that she was a goddess, just like this older sister—danced all out to the beat. She wore rolled-up jeans, striped knee-high toe socks, and a turtleneck. Taking up the whole living room, she kickball-changed her way around the floor, snapping her fingers, spinning around in the white plastic swivel chairs, flinging her hair in all directions while singing along to the full-blast music.
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