Conversations Across Our America: Talking About Immigration and the Latinoization of the United States

Gloria Caballero

Gloria Caballero was a graduate student writing her dissertation in the Department of Spanish at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is originally from Cuba and migrated here after marrying an African American who had spent time in Cuba working in an educational training program. She is also a mother who contemplates what it means to raise her children as Cuban Americans when her own values and experiences have taught her to be wary of being too comfortable with life here. gloria: I was born in Santiago, Havana, Cuba. I married a man who was born in Harlem, New York. I used to be an English teacher in Cuba, an interpreter, and he was part of this huge project there to teach and retrain teachers of English to their knowledge of the English language since traveling abroad from Cuba is so hard. louis: Was it hard to leave Cuba to come here? gloria: It was hard because it takes two to tango. It was hard for me on the part of the Americans because I was a member of the Young Communist League. They were afraid I was going to come here and kill the president . We married in Cuba, had our first child in Cuba, and that was part of the whole problem. [My husband] pretended to be here when he was in Havana. And on the side of the Cubans, it was hard because you were de facto leaving your country for an enemy one. louis: So what did you have to do to convince the United States that you weren’t going to be a threat? gloria: It was amazing. He had to go down to Cuba to talk to the folks in the Interests Section, and they gave me this interview that was horrible. gloria caballero 12 conversations across our america He was outside and I was inside with the baby. They wanted us to produce some proof showing that the baby was an authentic baby, you know, that he was the father and I was the mother and I was not marrying just to leave Cuba. It was a very sad and horrible interview. louis: How long did that process take? gloria: Six months. When we moved we came here to Massachusetts, to Brookline, because he was a professor at a university in Boston. At the time when he went to Cuba, he was living in Montreal, but he kept his job at the university teaching languages. So we moved to Brookline where his mother was living. We lived there three months until we got this call from Milton Academy saying they needed a Spanish teacher. He said, “Well, my wife just arrived, she’s Cuban.” And they said, “Well, we want you both.” We ended up working there two years. In ’99, I applied to come here to the U.S and arrived here in 2000. louis: What have been your impressions of the United States? gloria: I was not impressed at all. I don’t know if I came here already influenced by all the information that we were getting in Cuba, but when I Gloria Caballero in her office at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Photo by Louis Mendoza. 13 leaving came here not even the snow impressed me. But the waste and the abundance of things! I came in ’97 right after the hub of the Special Period in Cuba and coming in and seeing all this plethora of food in stores. You have rows and rows of Cheerios. I remember the first month I would get dizzy in the car because I was not used to being in a car. In Cuba you bike a lot. But here everywhere you went, you had to take the car. We ended up working for two years at Milton. They are rich people, very rich, the Ivy League, and food was wasted, and everything was so much that it was grotesque. I had to appreciate the fact that we were given that job, that we made good money, that our kids were in a safe environment. I came here shaking because of the proliferation of arms, weapons, and drugs in the streets. louis: Do you have ambivalence about being here where the culture’s so different from Cuba’s? What do you think has happened to your identity? gloria: It’s funny, I’ve been back to Cuba...