Home Sweet Home

“You fucking gringos drive me crazy sometime. Gringos, go home!”

A second ago, I bought this guy a beer at our neighborhood bar. He was having a bad week. Now he was screaming at me to go home. I looked back at him confused: I was up the street from where I live, the same place I refer to as my “living room.” I was home.

Juan was from Guatemala. He recently moved here and married an American girl who he fell in love with. She was volunteering in Guatemala after she graduated college when she met him. Recently, he just received his certificate to be a woodworker here in the U.S., and interviewed for a job. He was not hired.

“He didn’t hire me because I’m Guatemalteco. Not white.” Juan screamed at me as if I had the answers to his worries. “What is it with this place?” A second before that he was complaining to me that the bartender would not serve him a beer. “It’s because I am Hispanic.”

I tried to calm him down and told him that I think it was because she was busy, and because he was not ordering from behind the bar. Instead, he was waiting in the server’s area, the one place that pisses servers and bartenders off more than anything. Plus, the bartender was Filipina, the other bartender was black, the kitchen staff was a mix of Hispanics and blacks, the customers were mostly Puerto Rican, Mexican, black and white, and the music was some type of African rhythms. “I don’t think your ethnicity has anything to do with it,” I tried to reassure him.

Cultural misunderstanding, I guess.

So I bought Juan a beer.

“Can I ask you one thing?” Juan asked me harshly. “Why is it when you people come into my country, do you take pictures of poor people? It’s so humiliating.”

I thought about it for a second, and realized that he had a point. When I was in Italy, I took pictures of the Romanesque architecture. When I was in Chile, I took pictures of the micros (the busses) and of the street art. When I was in Cuba, I took pictures of the 1950s cars and the parks. In Jamaica, the beaches. But when I was in Swaziland and South Africa, I had hundreds of photos of the people. Ditto Bolivia. And Peru.

Why was it when we visit a country with an abundance of poor people, like countries in parts of Asia, Africa and South America, do we take pictures of the people? As Juan let me know again and again, “the poor people.”

“All the time, you American tourists come into my country and ask ‘Photo? Photo?’ Why do you want photos of us? To demean us?”

I tried to think of some answers. “You know Juan, I think it is because we are taking pictures of a people who look different from us. But more importantly, of a culture that is different from us. A culture that we are trying to understand, and we do this by taking photos. In most cases, we are taking pictures of the same emotions that we have here, and they are brought out in our photos: happiness, enjoyment, pain and suffering. It makes us feel closer to the people that we are visiting—closer to their country and culture, and closer to their lifestyle. It is easy to think that we are taking pictures of them because they are poor, but really we are documenting how similar they are to all of us. ”

“Whatever,” Juan responded, not buying into the explanation.

“Your country came into Guatemala and destroyed our lifestyle. Killed our people. My whole family was murdered by you Americans when you were supporting our dictatorship. Now you come into our country and take pictures like it is all just a game.”

I was stuck. There was nothing I could say to relieve these feelings of anger.

Thank god for the guy next to me. He chimed in, “I grew up in Romania, and my whole family was threatened by the Communists all the time. My uncle was shot in the head when I was 12. Boom. He lived, we fled, and I was able to get to America and grow up happily. Let’s take a shot,” He said to us as he ordered three shots of tequila. “I understand your anger, but you have to make a distinction between the American people and their government. I know that as a democracy, the government is supposed to be a direct representation of the people, but it doesn’t always work that way. Most of the people here are not evil, and probably do not even support the way your people were treated in Guatemala.”

“Fuck you gringos,” Juan yelled again, as if we were stuck in the middle of one, enormous cultural misunderstanding.

Juan’s anger would not seize, and he became irrational. But his feelings are no different than millions of people across the world. People hate the U.S., and unfortunately it is becoming harder and harder to separate U.S. citizens from their government. For normal, disenfranchised people in the world, the U.S. citizens and its government has become one in the same. Scary thought. And these feelings are arising everywhere, whether it is a cultural misunderstanding or not.

Finally, Juan left and went home to his American wife.