I was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1960, and I came to the U.S. when I was three as a refugee. And I grew up in the most unusual place if you think of it in terms of story. You would have sent me to Miami in a novel. But I ended up instead in this microcosm of a town, this little tiny bedroom community, Decatur, Georgia. Or as you know back then I’d love to say to Decatur, Georgia. Or as my mother would say it with her Cuban accent, Decatur, Georgia.
And that, those two accents tell you how far away these two cultures were from one another. And no one spoke Spanish in Decatur that we knew of. There were a couple of translators. But really there weren’t services. There were very few people that did language midwifery, if you will. So whether it was school or anything else, you had to sink or swim. I would tell you that it was horrible, but I believe in real stories. And sometimes it was very difficult and sometimes there were such moments of grace.
I, of course, encountered people who were resistant to this group of bedraggled foreigners who arrived in this little town. But see the town had room for us. It made room for us. Didn’t feel threatened and it didn’t feel crowded, for whatever reason. And so we entered their churches and synagogues and schools, sometimes on the playground, or in any of those other places, there were people who were unwelcoming, I would say the same number who opened their homes, who taught my mother how to cook, “the grit,” while my mother taught café con leche classes to her Sunday school ladies, how to make café con leche.