Immigrating Without Borders

     I immigrated from Albuquerque’s city life to a quieter Santa Fe.  Santa Fe is 50 some odd miles north of Albuquerque along the Camino Rael; the same byways of the original Spanish colonizers.  This is the town of my formative years.  The place where I walked lonesome afternoons on the beaten paths through its arroyos.  The place where I would rush my homework after school to maximize the day light I had to play pick up basketball, baseball, and football with the barrio kids.  The desert mountain refuge that allowed me to ride my tank of a street bike on seemingly endless dirt trails, winding through chamisa fields and piñon tree mazes.  It was in hind sight a major blessing because it shrunk my bad influences.

    Santa Fe is the mountain town that can move, when necessary, with a city’s pace.  Santa Fe in the 1980’s was a place that gave me an expanded understanding of New Mexico’s lifestyles.  It also opened my eyes to people of different cultures.  Santa Fe gave me more opportunities to see integrated spaces than Albuquerque.  It is also a city that has lived up to its slogan, “the city different”, and is even more different now as I see through middled age eyes.  The streets are nearly the same.  The buildings mostly familiar.  The smells resurrect youthful memories.  The people, the ambiance, the attitude are all impactfully different.  The most accurate way of describing this feeling is to say that I am an outsider in a place I once felt I belonged to. 

    I don’t want to write with a victim mindset, and I want to honor the observations I feel now.  The home I knew is tainted.  And I understand that what I may find tainted, others obviously find evolved.  As I walk through the plaza area, I recognize how it is no longer functional.  It isn’t a downtown as much as it is a historic Disney-like playground for touring Texans.  I have to be more accurate and share that Santa Fe’s tourists are clearly comprised of so many more populations than Texans, but this hurt I feel resonates through that mild prejudice towards Texans.  I think it points to the privileged hypocrisy of legislating against Brown culture in its impoverished form but romanticizing its Southwestern spin.  It might be disgust for the best of both worlds they epitomize where they get to despise most immigrant Mexican people and vacation in New Mexican quaint culture sanitized of anything truely New Mexican other than a traditional meal here or there.  Santa Fe has grown into a tourist destination.  

    Of course it is both and.  Many state government offices are nearby and the national hot spot is a gold mine for tourist dollars.  I am talking about New Mexican functional.  I am talking about the New Mexico Rael not the New Mexico True.  I cannot see New Mexican faces.  Even when I think I am seeing New Mexican faces they are really Mexicano faces.  I am writing about this evolution as a way of understanding that the culture and conditions I have aren’t anything I should think I can persist.  The New Mexico I was raised in is going away.  I am proud of belonging to this fading flavor of humankind.  

    I come to this conclusion after some small experiences as an adult.  I can’t know what Santa Fe was like for adults when I was a child and so maybe New Mexico as I know it isn’t going away, it is possible that I am going away.  Regardless I recall this itchy event that sits in my mind.  I walk into a distillery.  This distillery is in a renovated part of the city that used to be an empty Rail area.  It used to be a shortcut into downtown at the furthest part of south downtown Santa Fe.  This place is trendy.  It looks like what I remember Denver being.  It is decorated with modern  everything.  The place is nearly empty and I enjoy a pour of a craft gin.  After around 2.5 hours of work, I don’t need another gin, but I also find it surprising how I have not been asked if I needed anything.  I let this observation simmer as coincidence and chalk up the poor service to bad timing.  I rationalize away my typical feelings of being discriminated.  And some of it is that a part of me appreciated being left alone.

    Then my girlfriend arrives and I note the place has filled with happy hour customers.  The wait staff that I encountered are the same people, but entirely different personalities.  I walk to get some water from a water station and look around noticing the people who have filled the front area.  I stand curiously and scan each face.  I gradually have an awareness and some level of feeling stunned.  I am socially disoriented because every patron is Anglo.  I have a surreal feeling of being a visitor.  Not only a visitor but a nuisance because now I have that long lingering self-doubt that lies to me and says mentally that I don’t fit in here.

    I had just come off the mountain and I was not matching the implied dress code.  I was in comfortable bottoms, a non-matching mid layer sweater, hat hair, and tennis shoes.  I made a second round of rationalization, and I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt.  Then a group of scraggly, un-groomed, tennis shoe and torn jean wearing anglos sat at the table next to me and my partner.  I note that they now get the attention of 2 servers.  Then I can no longer do the injustice to myself and realize that it may not be discrimination but the Santa Fe that embraced me is not on this side of town.  I could write another couple of hours taking some emotional ownership for what happened to me in this brief encounter with the city of my youth.  I save that for another day.  I think more importantly I have to continue to see these American refugees as finding a quieter and nourishing place, just like my mom and I back in the 80’s.

Santa Fe the landscape is not very different and Santa Fe the people are being inundated by the afflicted and possibly fatigued American Rat Racer.  I understand that being aware of the classism this has and continues to create will likely be something I can only write about because hanging on to a New Mexico that resembles me is my romance ready to be steamed rolled by modernization.  I don’t recognize this Santa Fe, and like its gin I am only a recipe derived from its local ingredients, and susceptible to mixing with a variety of ingredients from all over the globe.  I grieve the Santa Fe that raised me, and I learn to be hopeful despite the perceive expulsion. 

Feliz Dia del Doctor Rey

On my favorite holiday, I’d like to revisit some words from Saint King Jr.  Without getting into the details or context of this prompt, let me answer his simple question.  What is my life’s blueprint?   I have years of contemplation.  I have sat with plenty of emotions to stir the heart and force me to consider my constitution.  So as much as I want to get lost in this question I am going to try and keep it simple.

When building a structure most projects begin with a design.  The analogy implies we start life with a plan.  And I didn’t, that I know of.  The vision of my structure changes frequently.  My blueprint is not a design of what I hope my life can be, but who I have maintained to be.

 

Who I am maintaining is respectful of who I have been and who I still have an opportunity to shape.  The three core principles Dr King Jr mentions are belief in self, excellence through achievement, and being beautiful.  I cannot say that these qualities have always been apart of my design.  At times I have not had any of these.  These times are rare.  A majority of my life has been holding some of these in scope, and when the spirit finds me, I have all three. 

I am worthy of kindness.  I have learned to add self-valuation slowly.  I grew it out of a desperation to be extraordinary, with the paradoxical balance of knowing I can disappear.  I know the unit of measure here is dignity.  When I think about this quality in terms of who I am, I think it is in believing that I am worthy of kindness.  I think understanding that my appearance might default stereotypically as brown and suspicious; more as a young adult.  Now as I grey, I feel it is tapering and I might be seen more as older.  I have a history of vetting perceptions.  I have learned to function out of a self-concept that forces me to minimize comparison and rely on competency.  I don’t necessarily shine, but I am durable.  I am not invincible, but I will often be impactful.

 

I would like to thank Dr King for helping me to appreciate, once again, the need to achieve.  After an early childhood rooted in aspiration and accolades, in middle adulthood I resisted greatness.  I thought this was a vice.  I can now reframe the idea of achievement as a dignified excellence.  I have a grounding in a family filled with athletes who taught me to practice.  I had a grandpa who said, “measure 2 times, and cut once.”  When impatient he would bark with a New Mexican accent, “Do it right, or don’t do it all”.  Practice helped me understand that being good is only a doorway, stepping into the room and finding the next entrance is diligence.  Practice means learning something so that it can be repeated with quality.  I don’t mix in aspirations or trophies with this understanding of achievement . I think I measure my experiences with the unit of measure of dignity.  The accomplishment is what Dr king might describe as the beauty in my soul.  My blueprint helps me have an endearing appearance, or how I have learned to see my soul.  I don’t check my status as a human, and this helps me practice the first quality and have self-belief.

 

My faith has engrained a communal orientation.  My blueprint is for building a person that must contribute to the greater good of all.  This is key piece to my blueprint.  Dr King frames this as being beautiful. Throughout my life I had the Catholic voices of the profound in my minds ear.  This is a call to sow beauty.  Since the unit of measure is dignity, beauty is not aesthetic, it is nutritious.  The façade is unnecessary, in favor of a soul that inspires.  I was raised in a family that treated me as beautiful.  This allows me to understand how I can steward others.  

I am under construction.  I am still a work in progress.  I am remembering that during the project I must take my eye off the prize and look at the blueprints.

I am not as shiny as Saint Dr Martin Luther King Jr, and I am learning to be just as soundly constructed.