American Notes (1)

As I close the American phase of my life, I feel like writing a few nice notes about that country. Like most Latin American leftists, I have several grouches toward the US, especially its foreign policy. Having spent 17 years in the US, there are many things about the "American way of life" that I never quite got to like. There are many aspects of the US that deserve criticism. I have done a little bit of that here and will do more, for sure. But I want to say some nice words about the US. After all, the US gave me several things that I am grateful for. This might take long, so probably I will spend several entries in this blog on this topic.

The first thing I want to reflect on is the degree to which the US has been a part of my life. I now realize that it goes back to way before that August 13, 1993 when I moved to Stanford. Let me start with something silly.

A few months ago, I walked into a gas station in Virginia and found, among the reading material for sale, a copy of the Bristol Almanac in its typical orange cover. It was a blast from my past. Like most Bogotans my age, I am one generation removed from the sleepy, semi-rural provincial towns of Colombia's countryside (Villavicencio in my parents' case). To kids like me, raised in Bogota by parents that were already leaving behind their rural roots, the Bristol Almanac was one of those symbols of the agrarian popular culture that we were all expected to rise above. We treated it with the mixture of scorn, snootiness and fondness that upwardly mobile youngsters reserve for the quaint stuff of their grandparents. Then, in that gas station in Virginia it hit me: the Bristol Almanac is American. (Well, it's obvious, of course, but I had never appreciated that.)

Like most Colombians, I was raised to think of the US as a futuristic land, the place of high technology, amazing engineering feats, space travel and so on. Seeing that Bristol Almanac I realized that America was also part of my past. Many barely literate peasants of my grandparents' generation relied on it to check the stages of the moon. Any self-respecting cowboy back then would use a machete engraved with the brand "Stanley" on it. (Well, the German-made "Solingen" was also a badge of pride.) I remember the workers in the family farm talking about the "rotospí"; it took me years to realize that it was a corruption from the English "rotor speed." In short, the countryside Colombians my age wax nostalgic about, was already saturated by American technology decades before we came around.

I'm no expert in popular culture, and I could use help here, but I surmise that American culture was already making inroads in our countries before it hit us like a tsunami with the advent of television. As far as I know, jazz, arguably the first American gift to global culture, was not very popular in Colombia at the beginning (certainly not in my family), but I have the impression that the "big band" sound was having some influence on local singers. Already by the 1950s, a successful concert in New York was a regarded as a crowning achievement for Colombian musicians.

There is a hallowed tradition in Colombian politics whereby an ambassadorship in the US is (or was?) almost a prerequisite for the Presidency. It dates to the 1840s with Pedro Alcántara Herrán, continued through the XIXth Century (Santiago Pérez), into the early XXth Century (Enrique Olaya Herrera) down to the 1980s (Julio César Turbay). Even Conservative patricians like the Ospina family had very close ties to the US dating back to the late XIXth Century. Laureano Gómez, probably the Colombian politician more immune to Anglo-Saxon intellectual influences at the time (he clearly preferred the French and Italian hard right, but, for the record, was no Nazi) finally caved in to reality and dispatched Colombian troops to help the US fight in Korea. From that point on (albeit even before then), Colombian military would routinely travel to the US and get acquainted with it.

In short, the ties of Colombia with the US are deeper and older than what we often assume. Some of them predate the onslaught of modernization that took place during the 50s and 60s. Colombians of my age were born into a country that was Americanized in ways that may be easy to overlook but nonetheless important.