American Like Me

by America Ferrera

  America Ferrera

  I’M STANDING ON MY father’s grave. It’s twenty years since the last time I saw him. I’m here on accident, or by chance; maybe it’s a coincidence, or perhaps it’s fate. I can’t decide because my body is numb, and my head is blurry, and my hearing is growing duller by the moment. I’m trying to grasp on to one single thought, but my focus is split between the tombstone with my estranged father’s name on it and the dozens of tombstones that surround his, which also bear the last name Ferrera. I vaguely recognize the name of my father’s father on the gravesite next to his. The rest of the names are brand-new to me. The birth and death dates reaching further back in time, but the name Ferrera stubbornly sticking to all the headstones that seem to be surrounded by the same rectangular mound of dirt. “There used to be an iron gate around your family, but in this country everyone steals everything for money,” the old woman says to me. This country she speaks of is Honduras. This country is where I am from, and also where I have never been, until now.

  I did not come here to find my father’s grave nestled between generations of his family. I did not come looking for this small mountain village called La Esperanza, the village in which he was raised and where he died. I did not come in search of a connection to my Honduran identity. I am in Honduras with an organization that funds US programs to empower women and their children. It is a trip like many others I have taken through Africa, India, Australia, and the United States to educate myself on the struggles, solutions, and deep resilience that reside in women living under disempowering and oppressive systems. I am living out my childhood dream to know more about the world and to understand my role in making it better. Except this time, I’m doing it in my parents’ homeland. I spend the day with some incredible women in the stunningly gorgeous and lush green mountains of La Esperanza, marveling at the physical beauty of this country. Even though I did not come looking for my father, or his childhood, or his history, I do wonder to myself whether he ever walked these same paths in these gorgeous mountains. So when the head of our Honduran security team pulls me aside to tell me that he grew up with my father in this village, and that he’s contacted the woman who cared for him while he was dying, and that she wants to take me to his gravesite, I say, “Okay.”

  We only have forty-five minutes to visit the cemetery and meet back up with our crew. We have to start driving back to the capital city of Tegucigalpa before the sun goes down and the cartels get on the roads. First we stop to pick up the woman who nursed my father while he was dying. She is about eighty years old. Not what I expect. She is holding fresh flowers and immediately hands me a program from my father’s funeral and says, “I always bring him flowers on the anniversary.” I look down at the funeral program and realize that today is the exact two-year anniversary of his burial. It is also the two-year anniversary of when I stopped looking for him.

  * * *

  I was eight years old when he left the United States to return to Honduras. My mother told my five siblings and me that he was gone and that he wasn’t coming back and that we were better off without him. We didn’t ask questions or speak much about him after he left. I can’t say it was a surprise that he left. I was well aware of the tensions in my parents’ marriage. My mother worked multiple jobs, while my father had trouble holding down a single one. He was home a lot and spent a lot of time closed up in his bedroom. He was a slow, gentle, overweight man, while my mother was an energetic and tireless fighter. The six of us kids were never shielded from the frustrations that would sometimes erupt in argument and at times trigger long periods of silence between them. There’s nowhere to hide from your parents’ unhappy marriage when you’re a family of eight in a two-bedroom apartment.

  While the divorce wasn’t so much a surprise, I had a very hard time understanding why my dad would go back to Honduras. I had heard my whole life just how lucky I was to be American-born. How my parents had left everything they’d known in Honduras to come to the United States and give me and my siblings opportunity, a good education, and the chance to live out our dreams. Occasionally, I would overhear my mother reminiscing and laughing with my aunt and grandmother about the life, friends, and family they had left behind, but that was mostly when they thought none of the kids were listening. Conversations about Honduras usually centered on how hard life was there, how corrupt and dangerous it was becoming, and how little opportunity there was for anyone there to live a good life. My mother would often remind me of this reality when I’d complain about things like how boring the long summer days were and how unfair it was that my friends were all off at camp or traveling to adventurous places with their families. “In Honduras you’d be working to help support the family, so be grateful for boring,” she’d say. I would often wonder about the life I narrowly escaped living in Honduras—no college, no acting, no Saturday-morning cartoons. I’d thank whatever universal force made sure that I was born an American, and I would stop complaining about my long, boring, camp-less, travel-less summer days.

  Honduras was my phantom limb. I always felt its presence, but I couldn’t see it, or touch it, or wave it in the air to prove “this right here is a part of me!” I could barely picture it for that matter. Whenever I tried to imagine Honduras as a child, my mind would flash to an improbable collage of images I snatched up from the adults’ conversations or made up altogether. The Honduras in my mind had Catholic schools and school uniforms. It was green and lush and hot with pink and green and yellow buildings that were faded, not from neglect, just from time. In my imagination, Honduras was an old place with important buildings that soldiers stood outside of with big guns to protect the powerful men inside. Girls and boys would arrive to school in straight lines and quietly wait to be dismissed at the end of the day before they skipped home down sidewalks lined with fruit trees. My mom and dad were always children in my picture of Honduras. To me, it was a country that existed in the past. It remained elusive, unknowable, and frankly, a bit terrifying, since I had come to think of Honduras as the fate I had been spared from. When my father went back, he too became like a phantom. He now belonged to Honduras, and therefore to the version of my life I would never live. I never thought to mourn that life. I was taught only to celebrate the one I had in the United States; the one in which I had freedom, school, abundance, wild dreams, and opportunity. When my father chose Honduras over the United States, over his family, over me, I came to believe my mother’s words: he left me, he’s not coming back, and I’m better off without him.

  For a very long time I believed that I had no curiosity about my father. I even came to believe that being abandoned by my father had absolutely zero impact on my life; that who I was had absolutely nothing to do with who my father had been, or not been, to me. Sure, some surges of emotion would overcome me now and then, like during the father-daughter dance at the thirty bat mitzvahs I attended in my thirteenth year of life. But I chalked that up to the dim lighting and corny lyrics about butterfly kisses that made it all seem much more magical than it probably really was. Whenever I needed to cry in a scene for drama class, thinking about my father would often get the job done, and I thought that was a useful trick to have up my sleeve as an actor, but I definitely didn’t think it was a sign of deeper, unexplored feelings about my dad abandoning me.

  When I was twenty years old and filming the first Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants movie, I had to do a scene where my character, Carmen, calls her dad to confront him about feeling abandoned by him. For twelve takes I tried to act my way through the scene, to do my best impersonation of a child who was angry and confused and deeply hurt, but my director wasn’t buying it. Take after take I would pray that I had acted well enough so we could move on to another, less uncomfortable scene, but take after take my director would gently ask me to stop holding back the emotion he could tell I was not letting through. On lucky take number thirteen, the dam broke. I felt the truth of my character’s pain hit me in the gut. “Just tell me, Dad, what did I do wrong? Wh
y did you leave? Why did you have to go?” I said the words as Carmen for the thirteenth time, but it was the first time that I had ever spoken those words out loud for myself. Whenever I watch that scene I see the waves of pain crashing over me and taking me completely by surprise, but other people just see acting, and that was why I felt safe and free performing. In everyday life, my big emotions made me a “drama queen” at home. I was told all the time to “save it for the stage.” I was a small kid with very big feelings that were often dismissed or ridiculed whenever I did things like sob through my sister’s class performance of “We Are the World” when I was five years old, or declare in the first grade that I was going to grow up to be an actress and a civil rights lawyer. Onstage, my tears and passion were applauded and rewarded. And the best part was that the emotions were accepted as make-believe, so I didn’t really have to own them as my own or deal with them. It was an arrangement that for quite a long time allowed me to believe I didn’t want or need to think about my dad’s role in my life.

  Then suddenly one night, when I was twenty-six years old, a switch flipped in my head. I had spent my whole childhood avoiding thoughts about my dad, and then like a flash, the thought entered my mind: I don’t have forever to get to know my dad. I should start now. It surprised and scared me. I didn’t know where this sudden urge had come from, but I decided I would follow it. I spent time talking to my close friends and therapist to figure out why I wanted to contact my father and what I expected to get out of it. I wanted to understand my feelings before taking the plunge, or maybe I was just terrified and stalling. It’s not like I knew how to start looking for my long-lost father who lived in a country I had never been to.

  I had never spoken to my siblings about my father, and I wasn’t going to start now, so instead I reached out to an aunt who I thought might be in touch with him. She sent me his direct phone number, and I almost had a heart attack. “No, no, no, I don’t actually want to call him! I just want to know if you know how he’s doing.” I was absolutely not ready to make contact.

  And it turns out I wasn’t quite prepared to find out how he was doing either. My aunt answered my question in a long email I received on my way to meet friends for dinner. The news that he was not doing very well was more than I could digest in the back seat of a New York City taxicab. He was obese and sick with complications from diabetes. He was living alone in a room he rented in his friend’s house. He couldn’t work and was struggling financially. The heaving sobs that were emanating from my body as I read this email were as surprising to me as they were to the cabdriver. I didn’t know where this grief was coming from. It felt like a hole had opened up beneath me and these emotions were flooding in from some underground storage unit I had lost the key to a long time ago.

  This involuntary wave of emotion terrified me. I was obviously opening up way more than I was prepared to deal with. So instead of reaching out to him, I spent more time thinking and talking about these newfound feelings I never realized I had toward my father.

  Weeks passed, but no matter how much I talked it out, I couldn’t imagine what I would actually say to him if I had him on the phone, so I decided to do a little exercise and write him a letter. It amazed me how easily the words came. After three months of processing my feelings and preparing myself, I actually knew what I wanted to say and why I wanted to say it. I decided that as soon as I was back home from my work travels I would pick up the phone and call my father.

  Two days later, I was boarding my flight home when my phone rang. It was the same aunt who I’d reached out to for info on my dad. She was calling to tell me my father passed away that morning. Thirty-six hours after I had resolved myself to making contact, he was uncontactable—for good this time.

  It did not escape me that during the final hours of his life, I had been writing my father a letter of all the things I wanted to say to him, all the things I wanted him to know. I wanted to believe that somehow he had received my letter, that some part of him was communicating with some part of me, that without knowing it, we had spent the last three months preparing for the end, saying goodbye. At times I believed that this whole journey had been some sort of divine soul communication, and then other times I was convinced it was nothing more than an unnecessarily cruel coincidence. But the hardest times were when I felt nothing, believed in nothing, did absolutely nothing. The numbing depression I fell into was more unexpected and surprising than anything else I’d experienced on this journey. I had barely thought of my father before the light switch moment three months before. How could it be that I was now in a full-on debilitated state from his death? Hadn’t I lost him when I was eight? Hadn’t he been gone essentially my whole life? Nothing on this journey had made any sense to me. But one thing I could know for sure was that he was dead now. Gone. And any hope I had of knowing him, or knowing more about myself through him, was gone too.

  * * *

  And yet, here I am, standing on his grave in La Esperanza, Honduras, two years to the day he was buried, by complete coincidence. I read his name over and over: gregorio ferrera, 13 jun. 1948–22 aug. 2010. I am also standing on what appears to be many graves belonging to generations of his family. The Carlos Ferrera who died in 1978 must have been my grandfather. The old woman points to another stone that also reads gregorio ferrera and declares “That’s the general,” which jogs some faint memory of my parents’ talking about a military man somewhere in my father’s lineage. There is no denying I am standing on the right family plot, communing with more Honduran relatives, and more of my own history, than I ever imagined possible.

  There are no tears, no sweaty palms, no racing-heart palpitations, at least not that I can feel, because my senses seem to be shutting down. My limbs are numb, my ears are plugging up, and I can’t hear what the old lady is saying to me. I am dizzy. I sit down for a moment to breathe. And then I remember my forty-five minutes are running out. I have to get back to my crew and on the road. We drop my cemetery companion off at her house, and she insists that I come in for some tea and a quick chat. She wants to show me some pictures. I don’t want to be rude, so I go in but tell her that I only have a few minutes.

  She pours me some tea and produces a picture of two young boys riding horses. One is my father and one is her son Rumi. “They were always inseparable. Brothers,” she says.

  “How long did you know my father?” I ask.

  “Oh, since I started breastfeeding him. Your grandparents lived next door and your grandmother couldn’t make milk. I had just had my daughter, so I breastfed both her and Goyito.” Goyito is short for Gregorio, and it’s what we used to call my brother as children. I try to picture my father as a Goyito. “Your father was like a son to me. When his mother left him, he was always at our house.” This is the first time I’m hearing that my father was abandoned by his mother. I am all of a sudden holding my breath. “His father would go in to the city to work for months at a time, and he would live here with us. When he came back to Honduras from the States he came back here. He spent his birthdays and all the holidays with us. All my grandchildren adored him.” I picture my father spending Christmas with kids who are not me and my siblings and feel a sting of pain. “Did he ever talk about us?” I ask. “Oh yes. He had a box filled with pictures and videotapes of you kids growing up. Occasionally he would sit down with that box and cry.”

  This is a lot to be learning in the final rushed minutes of our time together. My group is waiting, and I really have to go now. The old woman, whose name I’ve learned is Doña Maura, walks me to the car. I thank this woman who breastfed my father as an infant, who cared for him as a child, who nursed him while he was dying, who buried him in his grave. I give her a hug, this woman who mothered my father, and I try to imagine what she sees when she looks at me. Does she see him? There is no time to ask. I get back in the car. I didn’t come looking for my father. I didn’t think it was possible to find him. But as I drive away from Doña Maura, past the building that used to be his childhoo
d home, past the cemetery where he rests next to his father, and grandfather, I know there is more to discover. I know I will be back.

  * * *

  Two years later, I went back to Honduras with the explicit purpose of learning more about my father’s history. I was given the most amazing opportunity to be the subject of a TV show called Who Do You Think You Are? A show that takes people back through generations of their family history, a journey that would have been way too daunting and scary for me before my dad’s death.

  They took me back to La Esperanza. This time I got to spend more time with Doña Maura, and Rumi, who was my father’s lifelong best friend. It was wonderful to be back with people who knew and loved him. They shared more pictures and memories. But it wasn’t long before I realized that they couldn’t give me the answers I was really looking for: Why did he leave? Why didn’t he come back? Did he miss me? Had he loved me? It was dawning on me that only he could answer the questions I’d been holding my whole life, the questions I would probably be holding for the rest of my life. But there were other answers to be uncovered on the journey. Answers to questions I had never even thought to ask. Questions that would lead to unexpected and life-changing discoveries. Questions like, who exactly was that enigmatic military man my parents spoke about in my fuzzy childhood memories? A question that the producers of the show set out to ask and answer for me.