To leave again
Ruxandra Guidi. Illustration for palabra. by Jon Williams.
For the writer, the itinerant life of a journalist has led to adventure and reward. Still, she holds dear what she left behind in Venezuela
I remember the day it dawned on me, as a 6-year-old, that my name made me an immigrant even in my own country.
“Ruth Sandra!” called out my kindergarten teacher during recess one morning, struggling to pronounce it. And though I hadn’t protested her previous mispronunciations, for some reason, on this day I decided to follow my mom’s advice and correct her, saying, “My name is pronounced ‘rook-SANDRA,’ all in one word. It’s a Romanian name, and that’s why it’s so weird.”
I am the daughter of a Romanian mother and a Bolivian father, lower middle-class immigrants who fled dictatorships in their home countries and settled in Venezuela, once the longest-running democracy in Latin America. To further complicate my cultural upbringing, my parents put me in a German school, the Colegio Humboldt, where I took an hour’s worth of German lessons each day, for which I don’t have much to show. The Colegio Humboldt happened to be the nearest good school to the apartment where we lived in Caracas.
My buddies had names like Carolina or Helga — but not Ruxandra. The old-school Romanian name can be traced back to Ruxandra Lăpușneanu, a 16th century princess who is alleged to have killed her husband, Alexandru, so that their son would be made king. I believe my parents had hoped that giving me her name would make me stand out in a country like Venezuela, where people struggle with the letter X.
At the Colegio Humboldt, it did. Besides being the kid with the weird name and no German ancestry, I didn’t look like my peers: I had my dad’s Andean features and dressed like I didn’t come from money. Still, I tried. I wore my one pair of jeans (Guess, a brand my mom could barely afford) until holes showed up on my butt and knees — before such a thing was cool. I dreamed of one day owning those ugly neon pink high-top Reeboks with the double straps that cost three times as much as the imitation Keds I rocked.
Ruxandra, her mom Cristina and their friend Maria Elena at JFK Airport, August 1990. Photo courtesy of Ruxandra Guidi.
***
Every couple of months I hear of Venezuelan friends, or friends-of-friends, who are leaving the country. Each time, I am reminded of my own difficult departure for the U.S. decades ago. I was among the first in my class to leave for “a better life” — though back then, as 14-year-olds, we didn’t refer to our middle-class migration in those words. My friends and I simply called it “going to Gringolandia,” where you’d likely learn to speak English without a thick accent and find dozens of options for just about any consumer good you craved (including those latest brightly colored Reeboks). But the truth was much less glamorous: In the late ’80s, my mom had lost most of her savings in an economic crash, and as a divorced working parent, she brought me along to New Jersey as she tried out a yearlong job opportunity. A ver qué pasa.
Within a decade of my departure, my friend Schary had started a new life in Germany. Carlos had gone to Spain, and Ileana, to Houston. Caro would be the only friend from Colegio Humboldt who still lived in Caracas — but not because she didn’t want to go. She’d missed her window to leave for college, and by the time we were in our early-20s, Caro had had her first child.
“Coming to America as a teenager had been something like going through a second puberty with its associated growing pains coupled with a chance for a revamp; an opportunity to get an upgrade, to be born again.”
I went back after almost a decade away, soon after her baby was born. Driving into Caracas from the airport, I could see state propaganda featuring Hugo Chávez’s smiling face and trademark red beret plastered everywhere. By then, it had been just a few years since the Bolivarian Revolution had begun. My dad had just lost his job as oil prices started their descent and Venezuela’s state economy began to falter.
“¡Tienes nuevas lolas!” Caro said to me, looking at my chest, after we hugged on a busy street corner. Lolas? Yes, fake boobs, she said, translating some of the new slang I’d been missing in the years I’d been gone. We laughed so hard, but still she didn’t believe me: Every girl who leaves gets theirs done, Caro insisted, as if letting me know I was doing it all wrong.
Ruxandra on her sixteenth birthday, New Jersey, 1992. Photo courtesy of Ruxandra Guidi.
Coming to America as a teenager had been something like going through a second puberty, with its associated growing pains coupled with a chance for a revamp; an opportunity to get an upgrade, to be born again. The longer I stayed in the U.S., the more I’d shed my class insecurities and my accent, speaking up for myself, negotiating job opportunities and pay, and learning to disentangle and defend myself from shitty men.
But as I got older and witnessed Chávez’s grip on power solidify through his Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela, the prospect of someday returning to my home country began to disappear. Instead, I did what so many other wandering souls I’ve known do: After I graduated from college and was on my own, I sought out new hustles, moving every couple of years and shedding belongings and friendships along the way in a cycle that would become both thrilling and disruptive. Soon after I’d found a new place to live, I’d be beckoned by another brighter-looking possibility, ever the uncommitted immigrant.
***
My husband and I, both journalists, found our way to storytelling partly because of our shared restlessness and curiosity about the world. We have moved 10 times in 15 years, from the Western U.S. to the East, down to South America and back. Along the way, we spent a couple of years living in Quito, Ecuador, at a time when a growing number of Venezuelans were arriving with and without documents, seeking economic opportunity, political freedom or both. By then I’d been living out of my home country for more than two decades. With my own accent increasingly watered down, I went largely unnoticed. Ni de aquí ni de allá.
One day in 2015, as I worked from my Quito home office, I received an email from a writer in his mid-30s responding to my call for pitches for a new environmental magazine I was editing at the time. “¡Epa, chama!” “What’s up, buddy!” he replied in true Venezuelan, once he realized we came from the same place. Jeanfreddy and I soon hit it off, as virtual friendships can go, connecting across time and geography over Skype or WhatsApp. We’d send each other stories about Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, and his rambling press conferences, or memes that made fun of his propaganda or misinformation campaigns. Finally, I’d found someone in Venezuela who kept a good sense of humor despite the bad news all around him.
Ruxandra at 39 while living in Quito, Ecuador, 2015. Photo by Bear Guerra.
We bonded over our unique names. It turns out Jeanfreddy’s mom, Yeyis, was eight months pregnant when she and his dad, Freddy, redeemed a flight voucher to Paris. It was to be their dream honeymoon, except Yeyis started to experience labor pains soon after the plane took off. So the pilot came to speak with the couple: “If your son is born midair, he can have a universal passport until he comes of age,” he told them. After some back-and-forth, they agreed to turn the plane back and return to Maiquetía Airport, where an ambulance waited for Yeyis. They named their baby Jeanfreddy, fusing together the very aspirational and French-sounding “Jean” with his dad’s name. “I could have almost been French,” he likes to say.
But all our joking aside, I knew life had become very tough for him and his family. U.S. sanctions against Maduro meant that everyday Venezuelans could barely afford food or gas or medicines. The U.N. estimates that around 6 million Venezuelans have fled in recent years, among the largest displacement crises in the world not caused by conflict. In many of his WhatsApp dispatches, Jeanfreddy would tell me about people in his Maracay neighborhood who were losing their businesses, packing up their most essential belongings, and leaving their homes fully furnished under lock, hoping one day to come back. Young parents were taking off for Colombia or Ecuador and leaving their young children behind with relatives barely able to feed themselves.
“I needed Jeanfreddy, and so did my family, as long as they stayed in Venezuela.”
Before long, Jeanfreddy and I became close and interdependent: I would hook him up with writing assignments here in the U.S., and whenever I could, I’d send money so he could buy food for a soup kitchen he and his wife, Aruska, ran in his neighborhood. I also sent baby clothes for some of those kids whose parents had left the country. Every month, I sent money for my dad and half-siblings via PayPal, and Jeanfreddy would exchange it to bitcoins to increase its value before depositing it into their bank account. He lent advice to my little sister, Bibi, a high school senior, suggesting that if she wanted to leave Venezuela, she needed to think it over, save money, plan things out. I needed Jeanfreddy, and so did my family, as long as they stayed in Venezuela.
***
Once, Jeanfreddy shared how when he was 19 years old, he and his buddies decided to move to Amsterdam to make it big as a metal band. He’d fantasize about how his stage presence would make him famous, how they would marry Norwegian models, and dress in black leather. His immigrant reality turned out to be much more mundane: He’d spend most of his days cooking at home, taking his dirty laundry to the laundromat, trying to save money. “I discovered that winters could be unbearable and that the Dutch were more interested in electronic music,” he wrote.
As his tourist visa ran out, Jeanfreddy decided that life had become too difficult as an undocumented immigrant. Two-and-a-half years after leaving for Europe, he broke up with his Polish girlfriend, sold his bike to a Chilean friend, left his apartment to a Brazilian, and headed back home. “Now I’m where I want to be, where you can always go to the beach and drink some rum,” he told me three years ago, but more than 15 since he’d returned to Venezuela.
“I’m also mourning the loss of one of my last connections to home — to a place I see no rational way of returning to.”
One morning this spring, Jeanfreddy sent me a text via WhatsApp: “I have a surprise. Wish me all the luck in the world.” Soon after, he shared his big news: He’d been hired for a dream job in Bogotá. He and Aruska can now access affordable food, reliable public transportation, health insurance — all of the things that had been out of reach for them in Venezuela.
I think about their much-deserved stability and newfound happiness and how it may be much different from what I felt when my mom and I landed at JFK Airport on a sunny summer day 30 years ago. I’m also mourning the loss of one of my last connections to home — to a place I see no rational way of returning to. With Jeanfreddy gone, my little sister Bibi is once again daydreaming about leaving and I find myself repeating the advice he gave her: Try to save some money and plan things out. I’ll be doing the same on my end so I can help her.
Jeanfreddy tells me there is a neighborhood in Bogotá called Cedrizuela where growing numbers of Venezuelan immigrants have resettled in the past two years, opening up new restaurants. When I come visit and we can finally meet face-to-face, we’ll go there for a meal. Over a shot of rum, we will daydream together about going back to the place we’re from.
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Ruxandra Guidi, a native of Venezuela, has reported throughout the Western Hemisphere for over 20 years. Her work has appeared on the radio shows PRX's The World and NPR’s Latino USA, and in Orion Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Atlantic, The New York Times and other publications. She teaches audio and freelance storytelling at the University of Arizona and collaborates regularly with husband, Bear Guerra, under the name Fonografia Collective.