The Riddle of Cantinflas: Essays on Hispanic Popular Culture, Revised and Expanded Edition

Mother of Exiles

8 Try not to let anyone carry the burden of your own nostalgia. —Li-Young Lee, “Self-Help for Fellow Refugees” (2008) The Statue of Liberty is, arguably, the most famous sculpture in the world as well as the most renowned immigrant to New York. Copper clad, it is a massive 151 feet tall (with the pedestal and foundation, it is even taller: 305 feet) and weighs 225 tons. For more than a century, it has sat on the twelve-acre Liberty Island, once called Bedloe’s Island, in Upper New York Bay. But she wasn’t always there. Like many New Yorkers, she came from somewhere else: in her case, France. And like millions of immigrants, she changed her name to become an American. She was originally known as La Liberté éclairant le monde, but her appellation is an English translation: Liberty Enlightening the World, although people prefer to call her by her short name, Lady Liberty. Although she made it to these shores before then, her documents date her arrival—or, rather, her inauguration as a full-fledged patriotic icon— on October 28, 1886. What is intriguing is the way that, perhaps as a result of her assimilation, she came to represent something nobody at the time could have predicted. Lady Liberty was made by sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi as a celebration of the one of the three principles—the “liberté” in the motto “Liberté, egalité, fraternité”—that linked France and the United States. The French Revolution inspired the American War of Independence of 1776, and a century later the two republics were eager to emphasize their MOTHER OF EXILES MOTHER OF EXILES 9 connectionthroughtheidealsof republicanism.ThesculptorandtheFrench government donated Lady Liberty as a gesture of camaraderie. Itisgenerallyacknowledgedthattheinceptiontookplaceduringanafter dinner conversation in Versailles attended by Bartholdi, where Édouard René de Laboulaye, a politician and professor of jurisprudence, said: “If a monument should rise in the United States, as a memorial to their independence , I should think it only natural if it were built by united effort—a common work of both our nations.” Bartholdi took the suggestion as an incentive. Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel, who also designed the Eiffel Tower, ended up building the structure of the statue. S How was liberty replaced by immigration as the message Lady Liberty eventually projected to the world? Neither Bartholdi nor Eiffel ever contemplated the idea. It was left to Emma Lazarus, a Jewish American poet, to do the job, quietly, maybe even inadvertently. Lazarus wrote her sonnet “The New Colossus” in 1883. She donated it for an auction of the Art Loan Fund Exhibition in Aid of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund. The purpose of the fund was to raise money to build the platform for the statue on Bedloe’s Island. Thepoemisonlytangentiallyaboutfreedom.Itstruethemeisimmigration . It was stamped on a plaque at the pedestal in 1903, thanks in large part to an effort by one of Lazarus’s friends, Georgina Schuyler. Lazarus imagined Lady Liberty as a caring, protective female presence, a protector and caregiver embracing those left homeless by other countries, greeting them as they arrived, seeking a new start in the United States. It’s intriguing that the Mother of Exiles, as Lazarus calls Lady Liberty, was not, on her birth day, a mother of exiles! The absence of this specific meaning at the start of her life in America makes me think of a photograph I once saw of a house where my family lived in Copilco, the neighborhood in Mexico City where I was raised. I was brought to this house a few months after I was born and lived there for eighteen years, almost until I immigrated to New York. In my mind’s eye, I see the house as the theater where I performed a generous portion of my life. Yet this specific photograph depicts my house the year before I was born, that is, before the house was mine. 10 MOTHER OF EXILES What do I see in the photo? A strange past, a past without me. And a future that might be described as a reservoir of memories waiting to materialize. Maybe that’s what poetry is: an invitation to look at things without us attached to them or in ways that weren’t part of the original intention. My experiences and perception transformed that house into a symbol for me, just as the American experience and perception transformed a French statue from...