An organization staffed almost entirely by immigrants and first-generation Americans, we at GrubStreet are as keenly aware of the sheer breadth of "the immigrant experience" as we are the crucial contribution immigrants make to American arts, culture, and society. In defiance of an ethics of exclusion, we’re curating a series of immigrant stories that celebrate and illuminate the plurality of immigrant life. This installment comes from Neighborhood Programs Fellow and Grub Instructor Denise Delgado. Teen writers can catch Denise leading two summer camps: Flash Fiction Mini Camp for Teens, and August Week of Creative Writing for Teens. Adult writers, work with Denise this fall in her six-week course, Jumpstart Your Writing.
They came here in one-way leaps. My father and uncle, Zenén Darío and Nelson, were born in Pinar del Rio, Cuba. At the time, a corrupt and repressive government ruled the country, and about a decade after their births, they saw that government dismantled by revolution. But hope gave way to fear, and by 1961 something called Operation Peter Pan was happening. My father and uncle were among thousands of children whose parents put them on planes to the U.S. to escape the harm they believed would surely come. At ages eleven and thirteen they came to Miami to live with the family of my grandfather’s former boss and work paper routes.
Their mother, my grandmother, Carmen, came alone to the U.S. at forty, the same age I am now, to reunite with her children, clean hotel rooms, and babysit. My grandfather, Senén Ismael, had trouble securing a visa and came to Miami five years later. He worked first at a tennis shoe factory, then as a hotel bellhop into his seventies.
“Our story isn’t special,” he told me once. “We’re not different from most people.” But both my father and uncle shattered in their thirties. Both drank; my father began to terrorize his family; my uncle abandoned his. Both passed away many years before their time. Did anything happen to them as children, I always wondered, beyond the separation from their parents? Beyond that ordinary trauma of improvising a new life in strange country, cut off from every familiar thing?
This is one of my greatest preoccupations as a writer. How can the chain of events that causes a family to seek refuge in a new life, and make that one-way leap, haunt their lives and their children’s lives here in another country, twenty, forty, sixty years later?
My grandparents and my father seemed to regard their lives here as something like an accident—a temporary condition that unexpectedly became permanent. My grandfather asked for his ashes to be scattered in Cuba. When I was nine, my father began to talk of going back to Cuba to live. But a combination of policy, personality, and circumstance meant that none of them ever got to go home again, feel its familiar textures, its air. They never again saw sisters, brothers, the places where they were born. What is that like?
I’ve only ever glimpsed it. In Miami, where I lived before, experiences like theirs were so common, so ordinary, that I took certain aspects for granted. And then at thirty-eight I came to New England after a life in South Florida. We all—me, husband, child, dog—drove together. We arrived with perfect English, an apartment lease, U.S. degrees, and a good job waiting. Even with all that, even as a citizen, the eight months before we could fly back home felt interminable. I move through this new life feeling rootless and foreign, shocked at the distance between me and every familiar thing, and humbled by how slight it is.
