“Sam Is Not My Uncle” and the Hispanic Dream of the US

Among the statistics of the more than 50 million Hispanics who live in the U.S., now representing one in every six residents, are hidden 50 million American dreams that, like so many others, have helped weave the history and culture of a country with more promise than any other. “Sam Is Not My Uncle: Twenty-Four Immigrant Stories and One American Dream” is an anthology created by two writers and immigrants who wished to pay tribute to the northward journey of their fellow Latin Americans.

In contrast to those who came during the 19th and 20th centuries, the immigrants who make up the latest layer of U.S. society have been Latinos. It is these Latinos who have navigated the economic crisis from which their home countries are still recovering, and the Latinos who have suffered some of the most profound blows in the U.S., like fraudulent mortgage loans, as unflinchingly depicted by the Argentine author Diego Fonseca, editor of the collection together with the Brazilian Aileen El-Kadi.

Tangled in a mesh of ethnicities and languages that make up the U.S. are Argentinians, Colombians, Venezuelans and Chileans, who are searching for an identity. Some also carry with them the stories of immigrant parents and grandparents. For them, the arrival in a new country where it is so easy to “hide” in the streets of large U.S. cities helps to create and express those symbols of identity that were never able to fit in in their country of origin. Victims of multiculturalism, they were born in the U.S., but were never “from the U.S.”

Many repeat the story of the eternal immigrant who, tired of telling her “various origins, exotic roots and inexpressible multilingualism” in conversation after conversation, ends up reciting from memory the travels of the past, the distances, the dates … as El-Kadi recounts in “Travesias.” “Until you hear the last, ‘oh, wow!’ of your listeners, and life returns you to your usual dullness.”

For others, landing in the U.S. was the ultimate clean slate. “Those who left did so with high hopes, though the work they ended up doing in their new destination was very different than what they had dreamed of,” writes Claudia Piñeiro in “Miami,” “something that they would not have agreed to work at in their own country. If it was necessary to lower oneself, it was better to do it far from home, where there were no witnesses.”

Some of the authors were born in the U.S., then grew up in other countries in Latin America, and did not feel truly American, real nephews of Uncle Sam, until they returned as adults. Others, like Jon Lee Anderson, emigrated to save a few dollars packing Easter baskets, before jumping back to his beloved destination in the heart of Latin America. We meet a journalist who ends up working in a prestigious cheese shop in New York, where he deciphers distinctions of class and race while dodging knives in the kitchen. We meet the young man who, in the words of Eduardo Halfon, learns from his parents to soften the consonants when pronouncing his country of origin and thus suddenly realizes that “compared to what was spoken towards the south, this was a different country.”

The book reminds us with more relevance than ever that the advancement of Hispanics in U.S. society did not happen overnight; it was more than a Supreme Court justice or that November 6 which gave them a lesson in democracy and demanded with their vote they get greater representation. It has been a silent, vigilant, persistent, tireless march forward that has seen an increase from the time of the hippie movement — when Argentine author Gabriela Esquivada reminds us there were barely one million Hispanic immigrants — to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when there were already 40 times more.

The collection edited by Fonseca and El-Kadi illuminates especially the experience of Latin American immigrants in the face of the attacks on the twin towers that late summer morning. Some of the authors were already living in the U.S., but this does not mean they experienced the gravity of the attack in the same way [as native-born Americans]. Between the immigrant and Uncle Sam there is an ocean of cultural difference, which decades of life on the streets of New York, Detroit or San Francisco will not help cross, though the story is certainly worth telling.