Letter from an Immigrant Doomer to His Loved One

This story was originally published on Substack.

The following letter has been translated from Spanish. It was discovered in 2003, buried in a park before it was torn down and re-developed for condos. It has since been received by the intended party, who currently resides in Northern California.

January 1992

Dear Anita,

How long I have waited to write you this letter. I guess I was waiting for the right words to come to me to convey how much I truly missed you. I was always second guessing, always doubting that I ever had the right words to make up for leaving you so suddenly, for departing without notice, without even a single good-bye or an I love you to express how much you meant to me after all these years of never seeing your face. I suppose now is a better time than ever to tell you that I am well, and I hope you are, too, my love.

So they say the war is over and done with. Both sides have compromised, and who has won is up for debate, if it matters at all. What matters is that we can all continue with our lives now. This peace is bittersweet for me, as I’m sure it is for you. I wish I could say it’s everything I’ve ever wanted, but I’ve dreamt about it for so long, often fearing it would never come, that now that I can see it, it’s not at all what I expected. Peace has been served to us in a different flavor than expected. I am like a poor man who starved his entire life, dreaming of a belly filled with apple pies and cafe au laits, only to finally have that hunger satiated with simple bread and plain oats from a stranger. He never received precisely what he desired, but life provided him a different kind of fulfillment, one that was attainable, one that was worthy for a man of his ilk– not a vile man, but no saintly figure either.

Though the rifles and the machine guns have gone down, there are surely many valleys of land mines that must be sifted through and cleaned away. Now begins the reconstruction period where we rebuild all the churches, all the schoolhouses, all the villages they burned, and all the rivers they poisoned. And what about the people we lost? The brothers, the sisters, the sons, daughters, husbands, or wives? Can we rebuild them as well? Oh, what a mess that has been left. But here in el Norte, life is all but the same. We immigrants bake under the sun, washing dishes, trimming bushes, and building houses that I fear we may never get to buy. Here, the time of war that was so real last week is not felt any different from the time of peace that has come today. They all go about their lives in their shopping malls and high-rise buildings, in their prestigious universities and their high-speed subways, laughing and dancing to their MTV energies and Starbucks-lacquered industries. They seem to have no conception and no regard for the bloodshed their own government has wreaked on our land. When I walk the city streets of the American night, I see all the things that they deem worthy of celebrating, the sorts of lives they see as special and worth protecting, even if it comes at the cost of our simple village lives. Their plan is plain to see. They would like it if every corner, every square inch of the world, looked precisely the same as a street corner in Miami, New York, Chicago, LA, or San Francisco. They think a life of Armani t-shirts and Gucci bags will spread itself abundantly throughout the continents, third-world and beyond, until we are all Americans at heart. The funny thing is I think they’re right! I can easily see my Uncle Chuy. He used to take me to the movies every weekend so I could watch all the big Hollywood stars on the big screen. These Paul Newmans and Gene Kellys were such icons of glamor to my little villager eyes. Do you remember when we went to the theater together to see that Madonna movie? Oh, it was awful! But I recall fondly sharing a bucket of popcorn, while I glanced at your smiling face beneath that flickering projection light.

I remember how we used to skip rocks at the lake after school. The Mondays when we walked together back to our homes. So many inane conversations and idle chit-chats... and yet, to me, they seem more significant than the greatest dialogues between the sharpest minds. If only life could be different. If only that war hadn’t arrived. But I suppose that is the way it had to be. The wheels of progress decided our simple way of living was not worthwhile of staying as it was. I want to be angry about it, and you know of course I very well was! Why else would I have taken up arms with my brothers and sisters as a rebel. Why else would I have fired at my fellow human beings as I watched the light of their eyes drain from the bullets I had laid upon them. It never gave me much comfort, knowing that I had to do it, knowing that if I hadn’t shot them, they would have shot me, likely with greater venom in their hearts and even lesser regard for my existence. Yet it all ended up more or less ending the same, and if I still clung to that anger that sustained me on those guerilla battlefields out in the wilderness, well then I wouldn’t have the patience to write you this letter I do today.

Do you know that the man whose yard I landscape is a musician like you? Not professionally, for he is a dentist by trade, but he has played the trumpet for me on several occasions. I listen to him politely and smile, for he is the boss, and though he is no Miles Davis, his face is full of a passion that I did not recognize in anyone else’s but yours when you used to sing your songs when we were together. The boss is a confused man, a lost man, and he looks for happiness and fulfillment in all the wrong places. Though he possesses many shiny state-of-the-art things, nothing seems to fill the emptiness he so clearly has. It seems to me the greatest shame of all. It is so that prosperous, successful men like him can continue to live the lavish, luxurious existences that they do that we have lost everything we so humbly used to have, and yet none of those blood-soaked gains seems to give them any real happiness. I have great respect for this man, even if he is rather ineffectual. Yes, he has told me many times what a pity it is that our land has fallen under the calamity that it has, and though his concern is appreciated, at the end of the day, his pity does nothing to rebuild everything that we lost.

My last wish, besides peace in our land, was to be with you and our baby boy. How I lament that I could not witness the birth of our little man. I have heard from cousins that he has grown into a handsome six-year-old and that he resembles me a great deal. Please take care of him, and please look after him for me. Show him love and teach him to care. I don’t want him to grow up like me, who resorted to reckless behavior to vent his frustrations to the world. I do not want him to fall in with the wrong crowds like I have many times already and have once again here in El Norte. There are many sketchy figures here in these streets, and I made the mistake of trusting them and indebting myself to them just because they resembled you and me. That has been one of the great disappointments for me. Seeing folks like us who have come to this place and accepted the cheating ways and traitorous paths wholesale for their own personal gains. Here, community is a forgotten notion. Individuality reigns supreme. So please, my dearest love, whatever you do, don’t let our boy become yet another fool to fall for this American myth, this dream of a better life. Though life is a nightmare over there, here it is only clear that it is a house of cards disguised by a Mickey Mouse hat. Perhaps you will find that life will become too difficult and unsustainable over there, and it may be true you will have to come up here. And so then you will see for yourself what I can plainly read in every tagged brick wall, in every crumbling public facility and deteriorating home– this will not last. Yet, we must remain strong always, no matter what reality throws at us. Well, now you see I’m running out of paper to write on. I hope this letter receives you the way I intended it to. Perhaps it would be better if I didn’t send it to you at all. Perhaps it is better you go on with your life, assuming I’ve never thought about you and the boy ever again.

Yours Truly,

Tomas