An Idiot, A Broad
I am Californian, and California is (Gavin Newsom voice) whether you like it or NOT! Mexico; as a result, I should be fluent in Spanish. I grew up around it; my friends’ parents spoke it; I took multiple semesters of it in high school and community college. La di fucking da, I thought whenever kids chose French or German, look who’s so xenophobic they’d rather waste their time learning a language they’ll never use than be able to communicate with a significant percentage of the population. How’s that crass-aunt tasting, Carol?
The last time I spoke Spanish with regularity, I was working behind the counter of a discount video store on Santa Monica Boulevard where roughly half the patrons were ESL; this means I haven’t spoken Spanish with regularity since the days before streaming media platforms existed. (How old am I, you ask? So old, I remember the days before Netflix was a joke!)
When I traveled to Colombia, however, I thought it would simply come back to me, like riding a, uh, bicicleta. It, of course, did not, and I was rightfully ashamed.
I felt bad about the mediocrity of my grasp of the language and the disrespect it connoted until I heard another American not try at all, simply externalize his internal monologue to a front desk clerk who was powerless to do anything but nod and smile along to the beats of the story of a guy probably named Gary who — you’ll never believe this — met a Canadian in a restaurant.
The hubris, the unmitigated gall, of not even attempting to know a lick of the dominant language in a country where every fucking sign, even the one outside Papa Johns, was written in it chapped my ass to no end. Making an effort to communicate in Spanish was, for me, an exercise in humility that my generally verbose, words-as-weapons self ultimately appreciated, as it is impossible to speak to the manager when the manager has no idea what you are speaking about. Interactions would often go like this: I’d try, miserably, to ask a question, usually in the wrong tense. When the person I was speaking to would respond at a pace faster than glacial, I’d stare at Anthony desperately until he, y’know, saved my dumb ass. It was infantilizing, it was isolating, and I, a gringa who had never before traveled internationally, needed it.
As Colombia is not as trending as other Latin American travel destinations like, say, Mexico City, there were no culottes clad white women wandering around with “I Like Big Books and I Cannot Lie” tote bags asking where they could get a good matcha and what the best ancient ruins were to pose in front of for the ‘gram. Anthony and I were, therefore, a proxy for the enemy, which resulted in assertive othering. It made sense that they hated us — I hate us and I am us.
In virtually every store we entered, the clerk would make their presence known — not by passively aggressively asking if we needed assistance but by simply standing and staring, stoically, waiting for the unspoken message that our presence is unwanted to be received. This, coupled with copious anti-capitalist graffiti in a country in which a former leftist guerrilla was the presidential frontrunner, comforted me; while said country was still riddled with McDonald’s and KFCs, I hardly ever saw anyone in them, as they were wildly expensive relative to other, local, fast food retailers. The capitalista warpig drain the swamp-ass candidate running against said former guerrilla had hired a collection of tired looking men to blast reggaeton and wear his t-shirts on a main thoroughfare; it was obvious they were doing it to survive and not because they believed in their plastine-faced overlord.
I honestly enjoyed the brief reprieve from American entitlement, which I had experienced in excess when our second attempted flight out of the United States was canceled because the captain, uh, didn’t show up (in the captain’s defense, I’d also be disinclined to start work at 2AM, nor would I feel one iota of loyalty to American Airlines were I unfortunate enough to be under their employ). An irate white couple occupying the counter space at the customer service desk next to us refused to leave because flying anything other than first class to their vacation in Aruba was unacceptable. “His dad is fucking dying,” I spat into the woman’s bloated visage while gesticulating toward Anthony, “I’m sorry about your vacation.”
And yet, the grizzled hand of Ugly Americanism still made it to the care facility Anthony’s father lives in two hours out of Bogotá in the form of an insipid mashup of Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry Be Happy” with “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz and “What a Wonderful World” performed by that corpulent Hawaiian dude everyone’s mom loved in the ‘90s played on a phone, rendering the already miserable scene of watching a young woman shove cookies into an empty-eyed man’s complying mouth well and truly intolerable. I hope I die before I get old enough that my “love of music” becomes one of my only defining characteristics and someone plays a Nirvana/Pearl Jam/Candlebox/Machine Gun Kelly mashup on their Apple Watch while Soylent Green is fed into my gaping maw and I, a prisoner of my own mind, lack the motor skills to forcibly press the stop button.