The Library kicked off its celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month (Sept. 15–Oct. 15) with a keynote lecture on Sept. 18 by author and Washington Post Book World editor Marie Arana. (The program can be viewed on the Library’s Web site at www.loc.gov/webcasts/.) This year’s theme was “Getting Involved: Our Families, Our Community, Our Nation” (www.loc.gov/topics/hispanicheritage/).
“I am an American of both sides of the hemisphere,” Arana said. Born in Lima, Peru, Arana’s heritage lies not only in the strict Catholic traditions of her Hispanic father but also in the staunch independence of her American mother.
“I grew up in the red-hot middle of a clash of cultures,” she said. “I felt utterly Peruvian, yet, because of my mother, I was also seeing Peru through a foreigner’s eyes. It has been a good preparation for the double life I’ve lived ever since.”
During World War II, her father entered the United States, literally, as mail cargo. He hopped a plane from Panama to Miami, essentially taking the place of a 110-pound mailbag.
“The war was raging, and the colleges and universities had few male students. Latin American boys from allied countries were invited to fill the places,” Arana explained. “My father knew that if he could just get himself to Boston and enroll in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he might have a better life.”
Arana joked with the audience, saying her father told her to tell them that he was “numero uno” in every classroom he ever attended.
Arana’s father came back to Lima with an education and a wife—one who was resolutely independent, “full of secrets” and who clashed with the values of her new family in which a wife knew her place and children were raised by the entire family.
“My father came from a culture that believes in family above everything, that venerates the past,” said Arana. “Children live in their parents’ world.
“My mother prized individual rights above everything: a culture that believes in the future, that children should forge lives different from their parents,” she said. When Arana arrived in New Jersey at the age of 10, she was certain her family could be torn apart at any second. Although her parents had a great love between them, they never seemed to agree on anything.
“Antonio Skarmeta, the Chilean author of ‘Il Postino,’ once said ‘The hardest thing a human being can live through, outside of war or starvation, is a desire to be something other than what he is.’ That’s the work an immigrant child does every day,” said Arana.
She continued quoting Skarmeta: “’I’ve always been interested in children who inhabit two worlds: one being the world of their parents, who insist on loyalty to the country they have lost; the other being the world just beyond their door, a world that insists on loyalty to the new, immediate life to which they have come. Often the children of two worlds are stronger for it.’”
As a nation of immigrants, America can be defined by Skarmeta’s outlook, Arana believes.
“Every successive wave of immigrants that enriched this nation has suffered dislocation and anomie, but their children have grown up better for it, and strong,” she said. “I say, that’s what we Hispanics give to America.”
According to Arana, the term “Hispanic” isn’t one used by the people of her heritage. “In our countries of origin, we are Peruvians, Salvadorians, Argentines, Chileans, Ecuadorians, Mexicans.
“Not until we are here, living in the U.S., do we encounter that label, Hispanic,” she added. “But we take it on gladly, check that box on the census form, and from it we make a community of like-minded people that doesn’t necessarily exist beyond American borders.”
She espoused the Hispanic values of family, work, dedication, ambition and a love of life. These are the things her own mother and father taught her and encouraged her to speak about for her lecture at the Library.
In concluding her lecture, Arana echoed the sentiments of Simón Bolivar, the leader of Spanish-American independence and the subject of her next book. Bolivar’s great hope was that all countries of Latin America would unite and forge a strong, new race of people. Unfortunately, he died in 1830, destitute and exiled from his native land, never seeing his dream come to fruition.
“Here in North America, we children of Hispanic Heritage, a wildly various people with diverse backgrounds and individual histories, stand united as citizens of a common culture with much to offer our country,” Arana said. “We bring, as my mother and father say, strong notions of family, of work, of dedication and ambition. We advance an agenda of global understanding. We make a new world out of America north and south. I’d like to think that, in ways such as this, we make Bolivar’s dream come true.”
