This deep attachment to family in the Midwest surprised me, because by the time I moved here, I knew that the picture of the region offered in headlines was one of departures. I take comfort in knowing that one day they will be able to write with more ease.
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Students often ask me how to write about home without hurting anyone. Our lives were insular, the kind of lives easily mocked in independent films and comedy skits, but they were family oriented. Like my students and my neighbors’ children, I spent summers playing tag, inventing stories, and listening to the women gossip. We descended on local parks and house parties, one tiny tornado of a family, the Spanish bursting around us. We had one car, and into it we packed everyone: my sister and me, the aunties, the uncles, and if my abuela had been in the States, she would have been squeezed in too. My neighbor hauled her children to barbecues and my students wrote about their hometowns, and I remembered my own extended Latinx family in Jersey and how none of us left the house alone. I get all of them this weekend, so she gets a break.” As one mother explained to me, “My sister and I take turns. The youngsters who flocked to multiple houses on our street were not friends but cousins. One grandfather came to mow the lawn every week and see his grandchildren. The same was true for my Black neighbors. I would tell my mother how my white students grew up in small towns here that once revolved around agriculture, and although none of the relatives now worked on farms, the families stayed: three generations, sometimes more, within a few blocks of one another, and church together every Sunday. When I ended up in Ohio, then, I began reporting on the Midwest, for my parents, my aunties-myself. And when my parents moved in their 60s to South Florida, they again settled in a working-class, mostly Spanish-speaking neighborhood. They never ventured into the Midwest, because every penny went toward the mortgage. For them, the map of the United States ended just beyond where we lived. They had embarked upon one enormous migration in the 1960s and ’70s-my mother and three aunties from Colombia, my father from Cuba, an uncle from Peru-and upon arrival in the Garden State, they stopped. My immigrant family had never lived west of the Hackensack River in northern New Jersey. But I held my tongue, as I had moved only recently to the Midwest for a university teaching job and knew nothing of the region. I remember how a friend raised in southwestern Ohio once described her childhood: surrounded by cousins and aunts and grandparents, in a close-knit tribe of Black folks who loved, and frequently gathered at, the large tract of land on which her great-great-grandparents had built the family home.Īs I listened to her, I almost said, It sounds like you grew up Latino. They value having their grandparents close by, the cousins down the block or across town. The image of flight is so dominant that I had forgotten its opposite: People stay in the Midwest. At the tables, in other words, were intergenerational families-something I usually see in the United States only in immigrant communities. At one table, a mother measured out a few ounces of soda for a child while talking with a woman who appeared to be her mother.
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Teenagers bantered with grandparents, and a boy barely out of diapers lunged for a plate of french fries. There were probably fewer than two dozen tables, and every seat was occupied not with friends or drinking buddies but with families.
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The classic burger joint came into focus.
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Distracted with full tables, she took my order and moved on-and for some reason, perhaps since I was alone and thinking of my mother, it seemed that when the waitress walked away, a curtain parted before me. No, I said, slightly annoyed because I had grown up with a mother and three aunties, all from Colombia, who did not believe that anyone, let alone a woman, should do anything alone. The waitress wanted to know if someone would be joining me. It was a Saturday afternoon, pre-COVID, and people crowded the tables at Zip’s Cafe, a small restaurant whose interior was as dark as it probably had been the first time its doors opened in the 1920s. I was ordering a burger in Cincinnati the first time I began to sense that the Midwest was somehow familiar to me, which is to say that the Midwest was somehow Latin American.