THE FATHER TONGUE (2006)

Bearing it? Holding out? Enduring? Junot Díaz could have used any of these expressions instead of the Spanish word “Aguantando”, as the title of his short story included in his book “Drown”, written in one of the most creative and astounding English tones since Carver. But Junot Díaz, who emigrated from the Dominican Republic to the United States as a child, still perceives himself as an immigrant to the English language. Even if Díaz has been “hyped as the next young gun of American fiction”(Spillman), his Spanish words, tossed here and there in the text in a very controlled way , act as a reminder that he is writing from his cultural background as a Dominican and that he has a mother tongue, the Spanish language. This kind of bicultural text has created what it is more a market label than an accurate literary category: the Latino literature. Written by immigrants, and more often than not, reporting the immigration experience, it is a literature written in English and firmly embedded in the American culture. As the Cuban-American writer Gustavo Pérez Firmat states: “Born in Cuba but made in the U.S.A., I can no longer imagine living outside American culture and the English language” (Next Year in Cuba, 1). The Latino label usually doesn’t apply to the immigrants who decided to be faithful to their Spanish and are considered as writers belonging to their national origin –the most famous of them, Isabel Allende, a San Francisco resident, is a Chilean writer- mainly because, like the Cuban poet José Kozer, they have manifested their “will to live in Spanish” (Pérez Firmat, Life on the Hyphen, 161). Those who, inside the United States, play the experimental game of belonging to a sort of nation –the Hispanic community- inside another nation- the United States- write in Spanglish, which is a Spanish infiltrated and modified by the English and, according to Ilan Stavans , “a new American language in the making.”(Marx and Escobar Ulloa). These experimental writers seem to represent the only true literary novelty: living in an imaginary Latinoland inside the United States, they relate to the Spanish language and tradition. Junot Díaz, as Oscar Hijuelos, Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez and many others, represent the Latino writers but their writings, as the exemplary “Aguantando”, show that they might be Latino writers, but there is no such a thing as Latino literature written in English. Once the Latino writer chooses the English, the English also chooses him, and the Latino story, the Latino character and the Latino experience become part of the English language heritage while being, at the same time, ruled by it. What is called Latino literature is nothing else but pure American literature: language rules.

Junot Díaz comes from the Island, that Hispaniola where Columbus landed and started the invention of America. Because America was first a continent, and a promise of paradise for Europeans, no matter if from Great Britain, Spain, France or other countries, all the countries of the Americas share this solid ground of a shared birth. Independence wars brought a new common sign of identity to all the American countries and the leader of them all, the first to cut the umbilical cord with Europe, took the name of the continent: America. That America grew from the independence of the British Empire, which would rule the world still for more than a century, and, as an absolute master of the world, gave good lessons to its breed. The other America, the Latin America, won instead its independence from the falling and destroyed Spanish Empire, only to get the melancholy lesson of the looser. The tension between the Anglo-Saxon culture and the Hispanic culture, between the English and the Spanish, and between the Latin Americans –immigrants or not- and the US Americans, is dyed by this historical background with deep psychological resonances. Junot Díaz literature is inscribed in this confrontational pattern of two cultures and his statement of using Spanish words is also an unconscious rebellion to his choice of English. A rebellion which is also well paid back by Kirzner and Mandell, the authors of “Literature” , the book where “Aguantando “ can be read by English students, but only as “Aguantado” (448) , a disrespectful misspelling, which converts the present participle in a past one and shows how the Anglo-Spanish war is still active, not only in the immigrants minds but in the country hosts.

Between being fully American and rebelling against it, the Latino immigrant dwells under a powerful shadow: the mother land, the mother tongue and probably the actual mother. Junot Díaz ‘s “Aguantando” tells the story of a boy living with his mother, brother and grandfather in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic capital and the oldest city in the Americas, while he dreams of the return of his absent father, gone to the United States. From the first sentence: “I lived without a father for the first nine years of my life” (Kirzner and Mandell, 448) to the last one “What’s the worry with that one?, he’d ask and Mami would say, he doesn’t know you. Squatting down so that his pale yellow dress socks , he’d trace the scars on my arms and on my head. Yunior, he would finally say, his stubbled face in front of mine, his thumb tracing a circle on my cheek” (457) Díaz introduces the relationship with the US as a relationship with an absent father. “He had left for NuevaYork when I was four but since I couldn’t remember a single moment with him I excused him from all nine years of my life”(448) says the protagonist of the story about his father, adding that “the only way I knew him was through the photographs my mom kept in a plastic sandwich bag under her bed” (448) while giving to the paragraph a political spin, since the shot was taken in the same year the US invaded the Dominican Republic, 1965, to prevent a feared new communist revolution in the Caribbean.

“Aguantando” can be seen also as an autobiographical story that reflects the perception of Junot Díaz as an immigrant himself, torn between the need of faithfulness to the mother tongue and the need to betray her to survive in the new American environment, adopting what in the story can be seen as the symbolic father’s tongue. The protagonist relates his miserable life in a poor neighborhood of Santo Domingo, where, like in most of the Latin American countries, there is no law and no justice, with the necessary consequences of lack of education and poverty. The Latin American society is described by Díaz as a feminine dominant society without a rule. For the protagonist, the US appears not only as the place where the father is, but where the jobs are; where men go and where men rule. Junot Díaz ’ s choice of the English language could be based on the deep need Latin Americans have of a father who properly rules the family life in a way its members are kept together and able to prosper. To resign to the mother tongue signifies in Díaz world, to enter in what is perceived as the father tongue: a language that rules the previously unruled. The English language and its tradition are fully embraced by Díaz, as the scholar Rob Jacklosky notes: “In a twist that no marketing strategist could have foreseen, in most bookstores, Diaz shares shelf space with Dickens, often sitting cover-to- cover ... so rather than a ‘front-line report’ as one critique suggests, what we have is a missive from the literary past: Diaz is working in a classic, not a street mode.” In Díaz language, the said and the not-said create a more powerful link to the English speaking reader’s emotions than the hidden meaning of some Spanish words. It is not then the association with Dickens but with Raymond Carver that prevails, in the delicate assessment of the family ghosts. As the critic Eli Gotlieb points out “The family portrayed in many of Diaz’s stories is fatherless, and the father’s ghost presence is the core of the book, a kind of ground tone or ambient noise which shades the narrator’s whole childhood.” In Díaz prose we are far away from any Spanish literary tradition. The sharp language and the sober construction of the scenes remind us more of Hemingway than any of the contemporary Spanish authors, except those who made the point of abandoning the Spanish flourishing wordiness and its tendency to the baroque, and mimicked the precision and brevity of the English, imitating also American authors in the structure of fiction. The reading of “Aguantando” in Spanish, in the translation of the book “Drown” (which, continuing the bicultural battle, became in Spanish “Los Boys”) represents a thrilling experience. The memoir of a Spanish speaking Dominican kid has the pace, the rhythm and the tone of what a Spanish reader recognizes immediately as a translation from the English of the United States, with its hammering sentences, made of mere action, with precise verbs which in Spanish would require infinite adjectives to come to the point, and a whole flair of American-ness in the way of talking about the most intimate feelings, which in its lack of self pity is not Hispanic at all. What happened to Díaz, a Hispanic after all, and how come that even translated to Spanish, he writes like an American? Writing about his absent father, he abandoned his mother and recovered his father in the language of the country that fostered first the father and later the son. By doing so, he became an American writer and completed the full circle of immigration. His cultural background will remain for ever as Latin American, Hispanic, and Dominican but his literature is now nothing but pure American production. The absent father is finally present: English rules.

Talking about his first trip back to Dominican Republic, “home”, after twenty years, Junot Díaz writes: “The trip was to accomplish many things. It would end my exile –what Salman Rushdie has famously called one’s dream of glorious return,” to only find that “Nobody believed that I was a Dominican! You, one cabdriver said incredulously and then turned and laughed.” (Díaz, Homecoming, with Turtle) and we cannot but remember the scene in “Aguantando” where the protagonist plays with his friend Wilfredo, “We shook hands elaborately. I called him Muhammad Ali and he called me Sinbad; these were our Northamerican names. We were both in shorts; a disintegrating pair of sandals clung to his toes” (453), and realize how America as a model has always worked inside the Latin American souls, provoking mixed feelings of genuine desire of betterment and an uncomfortable envy which always seems to point out the inferiority feeling where it comes from. In this sense, some could be drawn to think that “Díaz has provided us with an exemplary chapter in the novel of American Empire, showing us both the literal impoverishments produced by colonialism, and –perhaps more difficult to accomplish- the excruciatingly subtle ways in which colonialism can be internalized and allowed a second life” (Gottlieb), forgetting that the cause of poverty in the society where Díaz and the rest of Latin Americans come from , lies not in the so called imperial expansion of the United States but rather in the lack of proper rules or even of a rule. If Díaz, in the rest of the stories of “Drown”, presents also the life of his protagonist Yunior with “his struggles with alienation and dislocation as an immigrant in New Jersey” (Chen), and as a “ghetto writer … he shocks the reader into the experience of rough life in the ghetto. As a result it reiterates Díaz political causes and exposes the delusion of the American Dream.” (Chen) , we might be tempted to shelve him again in the Latino section, forgetting that his chronicles of poverty and his artistically controlled “disregard for English grammar” (Chen) and “His use of blatant curses, Spanish interjections, lack of quotation marks and failure to start new paragraphs” are not far from the Afro-American literature, which has never been doubted of being other than American literature, with the African languages also lost in the far away past, and reflecting accurately in the style of dialogues, the uneducated and particular way of speaking of the working class. As Díaz himself says in an interview by Marina Lewis: “It’s fun to blow things out of proportion to make a point” (Lewis).

In that same interview, Díaz had previously confessed: “Because community work is so important to me, I find myself almost utterly alienated from other writers. Because that’s a central part of who I am. For most other writers that’s not a real concern. Few are the writers I can share both my art and my community work with” (Lewis) “Aguantando” can be read then also as the testimony of a political fighter, in the crossroads not only of the wealthy White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant population and the Dark, Dominican, Catholic immigrant community, but in the wider continental crossroads of the wealthy English speaking America and the poor Spanish speaking America. Two Americas which are doomed to be one, as in the beginning, with the languages reconciled in the richness of the common history and each respectful of its own tradition. In the meantime, Díaz says: “I might grow up feeling truly American, but I won’t. I am an immigrant and I will stay an immigrant” (Guthmann). However, when the drama of poverty and the tragedy of immigration become part of the past and not a poignant daily reminder of injustice, nobody will deny to bilinguals or trilinguals in the continent, the pleasure of expressing themselves in more than one language, a privilege of educated people that only becomes a theme of an essay when writing in the language of the rich is understood as betraying the language of the poor.

In “Aguantando”, there is also a Spanish speaking father who chose to stay in the Dominican Republic, the young protagonist’s grandfather, the father of her mother, who spends his time setting rat traps and remembering “the good old days, when a man could still make a living from his finca, when the United States wasn’t something folks planned on.”(450) As long as the local fathers will fail, orphans will not always have the choice of loyalty to their mother land and mother tongue. They will continue to emigrate and the American literature will benefit from them, even if they persist, as Julia Alvarez in believing and telling us they are something else: “No, I am not a Dominican writer or really a Dominican in the traditional sense….I’ m also not ‘una norteamericana’. I am not a mainstream American writer with my roots in a small town in Illinois or Kentucky or even New México, I don’t hear the same rhythms in English as a native speaker of English. Sometimes I hear Spanish in English (and of course, viceversa). That’s why I describe myself as a Dominican American writer. That’s not just a term. I am mapping a country that’s not on the map, and that’s why I am trying to put it down to paper”(172-173) But she writes it in English. In a perfect, round and polished English because as Junot Díaz concludes: “No one internalizes social norms in society as do minorities in that society. Or, in other words, whatever criteria there is for literature, nobody follows that more to the letter, I think, than people who are literary minorities. There is this kind of colonial baggage…that idea that the Indian becomes more Indian than the Englishman” (Lewis). Or the child, a man, like his father.


Works Cited
Alvarez, Julia. Something to Declare. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.
Chen, Yvonne. "Junot Díaz: Writer, Activist, Teacher."
The Middlebury Campus 23/04/2006
http://www.middleburycampus.com>.
Díaz, Junot. "Homecoming, with Turtle."
The New Yorker 14 June 2004 23/04/2006
.
Díaz, Junot. Los Boys. 1st ed. Barcelona: Mondadori, 1996.
Gottlieb, Ely. "Prose Reviews Drown Junot Díaz." Boston Review. 28/04/06
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Guthmann, Edward. "It's a scary time for Latin American immigrants and Junot
Díaz feels the pressure to help."
San Francisco Chronicle 22 April 2006 28/04/2006 .
Jacklosky, Rob. "Drown- Book Review."
Studies in Short Fiction.
Winter 1998. 28/04/2006 .
(Jacklosky)
Kirszner, Laurie G., Stephen R.Mandell. Literature.5th ed.
Boston, Ma. Thomson, 2004.

Lewis, Marina. "Interview with Junot Díaz."
Other Voices 3623/04/2006
http://www.webdelsol.com/Other_Voices/DíazInt.htm>.
Marx, Agnes and Escobar Ulloa, Ernesto. "Entrevista: Ilans Stavans."
Barcelona Review 28/04/2006 .
Pérez Firmat, Gustavo . Life on the Hyphen. Austin, Tx: University of Texas Press,
1994.
Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. Next Year in Cuba. New York: Doubleday, 1996.
Spillman, Robert. "Salon Daily Clicks: Sneack Peeks." Salon 23/04/2006
.

THE FENCE, THE WALL (2006)

“Tear down this wall!” ordered President Reagan to the Soviet leader Gorbachev in Berlin on June 12th 1987, without suspecting that a couple of decades later, some of his fellows Republicans would pass a bill to build a fence across the American border to stop illegal immigration. As the one who said” “Freedom leads to prosperity” and “The wall cannot withstand freedom”, Reagan would have been more pleased with those, both Republicans and Democrats, who in the House of Representatives, opposed the fence initiative comparing it to the Berlin Wall. As the great politician he was, he would have figured out a better way to dissuade Latin Americans from entering illegally into the United States than building a fence that only would remind Latin American and the world how totalitarian regimes protect themselves. The fence is not just a border patrol instrument but a symbol: a wall between the rich America and the poor America. A wall of fear which will part the American continent in two, as the Berlin Wall parted Europe. A wall of despise which will alienate even more the Latin American countries against the United States, at a war time where friends are more needed than enemies.

The United States has an illegal population of about 11,000,000 people. Half a million more illegal immigrants enter each year. The terrorist attacks of September 2001 left no doubts about the need to know who is who in the country, illegal or not, and to have a complete control on those who visit the country. So, something has to be done. James Sensebrenner (R-Wisconsin) authored a bill known as the Border Protection, Antiterrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005 and President Bush has spoken in favor of this bill, fence included, even if at the same time he sponsors a more sensible guest-worker visa program compatible with his all time friendship with the Hispanic American community. The fence, a rather sterile and expensive device when most of the illegal immigrants enter legally the country and then overstay, has create a heated debate in the Congress. Many Republicans and a majority of Democrats opposed the bill and the five initial fences of 698 miles out of the 2000 miles border between Mexico and the US and look for more efficient alternatives to the immigration issue. This represents also a big concern for the legal population of Hispanic Americans, who fears a big anti-Hispanic wave coming along with extreme immigration policies. We are in a pre-electoral year and not only the Hispanic vote is at stake. Which world policy the United States will adopt and which place Latin America will have within that policy is also a matter of serious debate in the frame of the war against terrorism and rogue states. The Latin American countries can join the rebels or become closer allies with the United States and, in regard to the immigration issue, they have noticed that there are no fences planned across the Canadian border nor any particular fishnet projected in the Pacific to prevent Asian immigration. The fence is a continental issue.

President Bush took office in January 2001 with a promise: that the Free Trade Area of the Americas (which would unite all the American countries in a common market bigger than the European Community), would be accomplished by 2005. That project, which was the priority for a President who understood at that time that the American power needed stronger continental roots to properly compete with the European Community, ended tragically – as a priority- on September 11th 2001. The US forgot its continental mission and went to Asia to secure the European gates. Since then, the image and power of the United States in Latin America has dramatically decreased and, while speeches talk in favor of the FTAA, other measures, like the projected 2000-mile fence, talk of another symbolical fence: the one that divides Americans from the US, from Americans of the rest of the American continent. Once again, it is necessary to remember that if Americans call themselves Americans because they were born in America, the country who took the name of the continent, Latin Americans also call themselves Americans, Americanos, because they were born in the same continent. The shared condition of Americans and the common property of the American continent pose the same type of questions Europeans raised at the time of their union. How to deal with boundaries, border, and common cultural assets is not easy, and that is exactly the problem the United States and the Latin American countries have to explore if they want to build a common market and a political unity. The FTAA –Free Trade Area for the Americas- was proposed as the beginning of the solution but resisted by the traditional enemies of the US. When people like Fidel Castro from Cuba and Hugo Chavez from Venezuela, organize big demonstrations against the United States all over the continent, including the riots in Argentina by the Summit of the Americas in November 2005 when President Bush was visiting, one wonders who the fence will serve, if the United States –who battles to spread freedom in the world- or its enemies –giving them the perfect pretense to regroup behind a fence that shouts the free world is not for them.

Why do Latin Americans want to work and live in the US? I am a Latin American and I can tell why. The differences between Latin America and the United States are not all related to wealth, but rather to the conditions that promote wealth: a strong democracy; solid and respected institutions; justice; respect for the law and the right of property; all conditions which precisely attract investment, which in turn creates jobs and better living conditions, like water supply, power, roads. Latin American countries lack of most of those things. That’s why Mexicans die crossing illegally the border, that’s why poor Colombians swallow packs of cocaine and illegally bring drugs to the US, that’s why drug lords dig tunnels across the border and that’s also why Americans get an illegal crowd that waits their tables, build their houses, take care of their children and mow the grass in their gardens, paying less than they would pay an US worker.

The problem of illegal immigration will only be solved by fair measures that recognize the US need of immigrants to sustain its economy. To legalize workers would create even wages for everybody and the jobs market would be completely clear, with no unfair treatment either for the immigrants or for the US American workers who suffer today a disloyal competition. If those who hire illegal workers were duly penalized, ending the hypocrisy of complaining about illegal immigration but at the same time encouraging the illegal hire, the immigration would be ruled by the natural laws of supply and demand. Justice could be the best fence because nobody would cross a border behind which there is no work.

The problem of illegal immigration goes beyond the Mexican border –with a fence or not. Most of the immigrants arrive with a tourist visa and then stay. They come not only from Mexico but from all the Latin American countries, more and more disorganized every day and with less and less hope. Thirty and more Cubas are on the horizon if things don’t change. Does the United States need that? Will a fence across the Mexican border stop the crowds of impoverished people living in terror of even more totalitarian regimes like the one growing right now in Venezuela? Is the fence the best defense a free country can build against those who don’t threaten its freedom but rather aspire to the same? Instead of the fence, a double answer is needed. First, to rule properly on the illegal hire so that illegal immigrants are not encouraged to an unfair competition with the US legal workforce, and second, and most important, the US should focus –through a political extension of the FTAA- in exporting to the Latin American countries, democracy techniques, institutional know-how and business organization wisdom. These countries which are feared by US workers and businessmen as competitors because of their lower prices, are in fact potential buyers –not only of sophisticated products- but of US services.

The infrared technology, cameras, drones, all the technology, the people to enforce the border, all the fence paraphernalia will cost anywhere from the $70 million already signed by President Bush to an estimate over $45,2 billion when the fence is completed. Wiser laws on work and wiser investment to spread freedom in Latin American countries would bring to the US not only more international friends and military allies but a lot of money, because America –not as a country but as a whole continent- has the potential to become the greatest common market in the world. Greater than Europe, of course, and even greater than China, and this is what will count in the second part of the 21st century. The Free Trade Area of the Americas is not only a commercial project; it’s the most important project the US has for its survival as the leader of the world. That’s why so many enemies of the US leadership are interested in poisoning its relationship with Latin America: nothing better for them than cutting the roots the US could grow below the border.

Reagan remembered, in that same wall speech at Berlin, the words of Secretary of State George Marshall in 1947 -“Our policy is not directed against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos” – and also the signs Berliners could see posted at that time - “The Marshall Plan is helping here to strengthen the free world.” In our days, Samuel Huntington is less generous: “There is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican-Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English.” If it’s true that immigrants accepted in the United States should respect the language and values of those who welcome them, it’s wrong to imagine that the Americano dream will stop. How to dissuade new immigrants from crowding at the border? Those who still remain in their countries might continue to dream in Spanish, but only as long as they have the freedom to dream. Since freedom has been a common cause for Americans and Americanos since the Independence, maybe the time has come to reverse the immigration. Pressure for pressure, Americans could now be those who cross the border bringing their knowledge and businesses to the Americano countries which desperately need it. A fence would only bother their friendly and joyful march south.

MY AMERICA, SU AMERICA (2001)

A few days ago, during the Hispanic Heritage celebration, President Bush, with a funny smile and a wink to the Spanish-speaking audience, converted the well-known Mexican saying Mi casa, su casa, into Mi Casa Blanca, su Casa Blanca. The Latinos living in the United States maybe didn’t need this assessment, since they perceive themselves as Americans in their own right in spite of their Hispanic heritage. But maybe in the times of the Free Trade Area for the Americas, probably the most important international issue for the United States after the war against terrorism, the large continental majority could be a better audience for the kind and generous invitation of the President of the United States.

Latin Americans beyond Mexico, successful partner in the NAFTA, wonder if the coming free trade area will make of them welcome guests of the economy of the most powerful country in the Continent and on the planet. At the same time, President Bush and the present administration haven’t yet made a clear assessment on the levels of protection the US will eliminate in order to allow a real free trade with the less favored countries, which – like the USA itself—desperately need new markets.

Fidel Castro, who has very clear thinking about what a real friendly association with the United States would mean for the Latin American countries -- no longer doubting about the benefits of capitalism — has recently expressed that the Free Trade Area means nothing but a disguised annexation. For Castro, Latin America has no other choice since the external debt of almost every country is impossible to be paid. No longer an exporter of socialism, angry with his exclusion from the project, the Cuban leader spreads the negative idea that there are only two possible options --- annexation or bankruptcy ---, an idea that will make its way into the Latin American public consciousness unless discussed.

The binary thought that opposes imperialism against socialism is an easy path for skeptical Latin American minds, by whom the Free Trade Area is quickly explained as a threat of annexation by the United States of all the countries below the Rio Grande. The idea that a fair capitalism can spread in the same countries where all the economic theories seem to always have failed to eradicate poverty still needs powerful thinkers and speakers. In the United States, worker unions believe that any agreement with poorer countries will encourage American companies to produce in those countries with lower wages. At the same time, the poorer countries worry that their production will not be accepted in the United States.

Both parties seem to need to be addressed with a project that encourages both the United States export of infrastructure services – such as roads, water supply, communications, building, railways — as well as the export of Latin American industry. Both parties should be encouraged to merge companies from one side and the other, ,making of continental capitalism a new flag. It wouldn’t harm if the United States would be the first to resign the old thinking, inviting Cuba to join the project, maybe trading the blockade for the start of free elections. Exports to Asia, Africa and Europe under the Continental brand – a large and all-inclusive American brand—would exponentially increase the wealth of the USA as well as the rest of the countries.

The experience of NAFTA is the perfect example of what happens when trust and a common commercial purpose lead the association between a rich economy and a less developed one. Cultural and military associations will follow in the steps of the trade agreements and finally a political association –not too different from the European Union — will give a convenient frame to a union among equals. A continental federal system will be understood as the opposite of imperialistic expansion, and a union in freedom will be the ultimate response to those who could still blindly talk of annexation.
Defying those who don’t believe in the good will of the United States, and making of the Free Trade Area of the Americas the most generous project of capitalism for the creation of wealth and well-being, President Bush could soon say: My America, su América. He would make clear, once and for all, that America is the common continent, a unity from the start, and that intelligent people should not make a confusion between leadership and imperialism.

THE WAR AND THE FREE TRADE AREA FOR THE AMERICAS (2001)

From Monroe to San Martín, from Bolívar to Martí, from Kennedy to Perón, the union of the Americas in a one and only American nation has been the most cherished dream for American patriots. No matter which country they've stood for, the idea of a great America, where they all could found a new civilization, has led the most audacious continental projects since the days of Independence.

George Bush revitalized the dream in 1994, with the project of the Free Trade Area for the Americas (FTAA), but the Clinton administration, more inclined to other international issues, tabled the idea. Present President George W. Bush, during the Summit of the Americas in Quebec last April 2001, reaffirmed that the Free Trade Area would be completed by 2005. A few months later, the attack of September 11th on the USA drew the attention of both the government and the people to the new issue of terrorism and the war both in Afghanistan and on the home front. Shared by Americans from everywhere, but seen as a threat by the rest of the world because of the incredible amount of power that it would give to the United States and the associated American countries, the dream of the FTAA was again postponed.

While the United States keeps busy in its war for self defense, the rest of the world sees with certain unhidden relief that the Free Trade Area for the Americas, with its market of eight hundred million people and incredible military potential, is not for tomorrow. The complicated relationship between the USA and the rest of the American countries, where love and hate as well as envy and cooperation are tangled in unresolved feelings, also shows some cracks after September 11th. Last week President Fernando Enrique Cardoso, from Brazil, said that the United States was no longer reliable to rule the world, and that the countries from the Mercosur would do better to seek partnership with the European Union rather than look to the USA project for the FTAA. The Dominican Republic, which has suffered a substantial reduction of the traditional flow of United States tourists, has also turned its eyes towards Europe. Argentina, the most supportive continental partner in the project of the FTAA, sinks into an economic and political despair where the temptation to strengthen its traditional links with Europe is seen as a possible salvation. The war has obviously attacked the United States economy as well as its commerce with the rest of the American countries. Since the attacks, the message of expansion that the FTAA promoted has been suddenly reversed , and the dream of a common area of commerce could seem again a dream left to patriotic utopists, if the multiple commissions of the FTAA were not working on in silence, ahead of all public knowledge about the final triumph of the Americas cause.

We have heard enough about the Chinese character and how a crisis can be taken as an opportunity; maybe now it is time to think about how opportunities are lost because of unexpected crises. This November 13th, in Washington, DC, there will be held a FTAA meeting of the Special Committee on Inter-American Summits Management. Maybe there the extraordinary opportunity of the Free Trade Area, in opposition to a terrorism jealous of the unstoppable power of a Greater America, will recover its character of hope in a better life for all Americans.

THE US LEADERSHIP: GOOD AND EVIL IN THE BATTLE FOR THE WORLD’S SOUL (2001)

Right at the time when talks on a variation of the Free Trade Agreement for the Americas started, the attack on the World Trade Center put a question mark on this issue --- the four plus one, linking the four countries from the Mercosur to the United States of America. The United States, by an act of war, was distracted from its continental purpose and sent again to the battlefields of Asia.

If the FTAA project was the reassessment of a constructive leadership, trying to build an American continent with equal opportunities for every country in an incredible and generous spread of US knowledge and resources, the war against terrorism seems to appeal more to the destructive military power of the United States to guarantee a global modernity. Confusion about the means might nevertheless ruin the end.

Formerly the shining example of the growth that is possible for countries in Latin America, Argentina’s now sinking economy gives part of the clue to the dilemma the US leadership has to face and which certainly goes far beyond terrorism. Widely promoted by the media, a rise in anti-capitalist thinking in Argentina is demonstrated by acts of urban subversion and by the recent electoral campaign, where most of the candidates pointed to the failed destiny in the friendly USA-Argentine relationship. Traditionally linked to European social-democratic and liberal thought, many of the Argentine media persist in showing how weakened the US position can be in this part of the world. The Argentine leaders who support a strong and close friendly link with the USA as well as a determined resolution to progress into modernity, whatever it costs the country, are not believed by the people since the United States doesn’t seem to be an enthusiastic supporter of the same idea. The United States' slight distraction from hemispheric issues has developed into a strong indifference since the terrorist attacks. This would be irrelevant to United States destiny if not for the fact that the terror it is having to endure now grew out of those very same sources of indifference, distraction and lack of planning.

Decades of terrorism all over the world, based on a theory by which the rich have to be destroyed in the name of poverty, a theory vastly spread and still alive and well in countries once upon a time known as the Third World, like Argentina, show political planners and military strategists that the best way to avoid destruction is to make plans for a common construction. In other words, it is up to the rich countries with the know-how to do it, to build with the poorer countries a strategy for a better and safer world, where everybody’s needs are taken care of. The Free Trade Area for the Americas has this profound meaning, based in a continental brotherhood, and represents also the beginning of a military commitment, since the terrorist threat is believed to come also from the neighboring continental countries.

A military alliance extra-NATO between Argentina and the United States started in the nineties an example of cooperation; but without a strong United States interest in the common continental destiny, this alliance wouldn’t be enough to prevent Argentines and other continental populations from becoming resentful crowds more affiliated with violence than with justice.
If Latin American countries have been considered as the US’ backyard, it is no less true that the US is Latin America’s backyard. The attack on the city of New York and on the Pentagon means that the vulnerable and weak backyard might not be any longer the Garden of Eden for Latin Americans in quest of leadership and a model. The effect could be that they turn their minds and economies to Europe again, like in the years before World War II. Then the effect of the terrorist attack could only be seen, like in the old times of the Three Worlds, not as a Third World envious revenge but as a carom, the billiards master coup of a declining Second World on a rising and powerful First.

Maybe while pursuing and punishing the terrorists, the United States should invest intelligence in the reconstruction of the idea of paradise as well as in the strategies for sharing it with the whole planet, starting with their own continental region and ending, why not, in Afghanistan, where the local millionaires like Osama Bin Laden continue to play the same role that regressive oligarchies all over the world have played: destroy and divide in order to reign. The role that US Americans have in this unexpected and maybe really holy as well as wholly new war is no more, but no less, than to be the crusaders of common wealth and prosperity.

Part of the idea of paradise is bounty. Nothing better than the promise of this bounty to the hungry people of the world, to make understandable the real difference between good, which builds, and evil, which destroys.

WORD SMUGGLERS: A BEAUTIFULISSIMUS EFFECT OF CONTINENTALISM (2001)

We can make a speech with gusto, or, as we would say in Spanish, con brío, or we can welcome a friend with a cheerful mi casa, su casa. We can learn that in Spanish, the very, the superlative, the “a lot”, can be just an ending to an adjective, and that things can become extraordinary also in English, by a Latin pass of magic: greatissimus, beautifulissimus and wonderfulissimus.

An erotic feeling happens when we transgress the borders of the language, smuggling at the same time words and a new vision of the world. We already know about the fascination of the inhabitants of the Hispanic America for the English American words and their automatic association with a wealthy and prosperous society. To these other Americans, living beyond the United States borders, some English words are the mantra they need as aspiring winners: ok, sorry, I love you, sale, top, full, fashion, cool. They get from the language the reward of power. On the other side, US Americans, including the most visible of them, President George W. Bush, seem to be equally pleased when trading English words for Spanish ones, and smuggling, in the heart of Yankee land, the mysterious delight of being another, a Hispanic. The primary Latin that sounds underneath the Saxon brings to their consciousness a feeling of ancient belonging. Rome and Greece claim their children drowned and revived in the barbarian Northern wave-- and propose an everlasting brotherhood with the faithful Latinos beyond the ocean.

The languages, in the frame of the Great America, that America that engulfs the United States, are making an intimate wedding in the hearts. Citizens of a brand new project for the Americas, the Free Trade Area, the Americanos from everywhere realize that they are part of a new cultural reality that will lead to a new political agreement. Americans or Americanos, brothers, pals or hermanos, from Native, or European -- British and Spanish, and from all the other European countries—or African descent, are engaged in a new collective creation: the whole American cultural identity. The common fact of belonging to the same Continent, and together being mostly cultural heirs to Europe, no longer Europeans but Americans, is the main stone on which the new American, the whole American culture will be built. The policy that defends this culture, in commercial and military issues, is called Continentalism. And to this point, an update of the word Continent is required. "The Continent" is no longer the European Continent but the American Continent—and yes, that includes both the North and the South parts of it. Continental trade involves the USA with NAFTA as well as NAFTA with the rest of the Continent, within the new FTAA. Preceded now by an unavoidable cultural and language merge, the future trade merge is the nightmare of the European Community.

Europeans see in this American market of eight hundred million the definitive sign of their decadency and their withdrawal to an honorable second role in the world. This omen is at the origin of many criticisms to the cultural marriage between English and Spanish speaking communities of the American Continent. When two giants marry, chances are that the baby will be enormous, and what Europe fears the most is the Great America that the FTAA is giving birth to.

The Latino writers have assessed in many novels and short stories the oral experience of Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Cubans and Dominicans in the USA, where both languages were melted into a new one, the Spanglish. A more subtle way of dealing with a bicultural life is the one adopted by well-educated people, who tend to use just some words or grammatical constructions to add a different point of view to a well-preserved language. English or Spanish speaking, they trade values without too much reflection and with the spontaneity of a Continentally shared life. While the Spanish speaking try to grab the key to commercial and financial success, the English speaking crave for a better quality of life, made of passion, love, friendship, good food and the laziness necessary to enjoy all this.

At the same time, some kind of distrust nests in some American minds. They think that maybe all this melting and marriage and illegal word smuggling will lead to a bad place, the hell of patriots, where the nations loose their identity and are destroyed forever. Crusades for just English in California, or for an exclusive use of Spanish in the media language in Argentina, witness the fear of the blend, rather than the richness of an enlarged language and a wider identity. Both definitions, “el inglés es nuestro” and “Spanish is ours”, represent a valid statement. They could also be the cry of war of the lusty language smugglers who have probably understood before anyone, that they share not only languages but also the ownership of the Continent.

The beauty of English and the beauty of Spanish compete, as well as the immanent beauty of the two world visions, and no one could say that this competition will lead to a victory and a defeat. Rather, as the increasing mischievous word smugglers seem to show, the illegal creativity will come to an end. Too many smugglers, we know, finally allows for free trade.

AMERICANS SAY I, AMERICANOS SAY YO (2001)

And Americanos from Brazil Eu, and the Américains, Je. And more Americans from everywhere, speaking Native American, European or even Asian languages, use a different word when they have to say, for instance, that they are the citizens of some country on the American Continent: I am Canadian; or, yo soy cubano. Also when they simply realize a new cultural fact, that they are Americans, though the word Americans can lead to another confusion. I am an American and yo soy americano, could mean a different thing in the times before the Free Trade Area for the Americas, but will necessarily mean the same thing in the near future, when the Continental union flows from the commercial treaty. Americans are Americanos, and Americanos are Americans; and both are one and the same with the holy American spirit --- though the multitude of American languages constitutes something larger than a trinity.

After such a statement, cries against Yankee Imperialism can be expected, claiming that, after all, this is what the Free Trade Area for the Americas was invented for, to make of all the inhabitants of the American Continent the subjects of the United States Empire. We have heard that song often, sung by a yo as well as by an I. But, since the Americanos existed before the Americans –the Spaniards came first-- what yo say is that I am as American as US Americans. And yo being me-- an Argentine from the American Continent writing in English-- at the same time yo and I, I agrego or yo add, that US Americans are not my subjects as well as I am not theirs, and that a new thing is happening while yo write and an I read. I and yo share an identity: I and yo are Americans.

We can say I, yo, eu or je, but in any language we will only assess one fact, that we are Americans, and that this Americanity is --through the tiny pretense of Free Trade-- the excuse to get finally together in a political, cultural and military association. As Europe did, America will. Behind the I or the yo, to mention only the two most widely spoken languages, what is hidden is not an imperialistic threat, but a common destiny.

How can individuals with different heritages build a common culture? The experience of Latinos in the United States and that particular new language—the Spanglish—as well as their mongrel new culture –half Yankee half Hispanic— shows that unexpected things can happen when the geopolitical border becomes only a thin line in the soul of real persons living in a real dual culture.

Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and Cubans came across the border into the U.S. carrying within them the invisible contraband of the old Spanish American Empire. Language, habits, history and religion, all packed into mind and emotions. The memoir of old mother Spain brought into the kingdom of old mother Britannia and mingling amidst inequalities and sorrows. The marriage of the people sharing a border will be followed in the present decade by a larger, continental marriage, that will include a vast majority of the Hispanic countries. The last word about the history of the people on the American Continent has not been said, and a new common cultural adventure seems to be starting.

If the United States was the heir of the victorious Empire, the Hispanic countries were the heirs of the defeated one, dragging with it into the present the karma of failure, with the weight of one of the most remarkable and original cultures on the planet. When somebody says I, the I carries a history of success. When somebody says yo, the yo hurts and has to work hard to remember that Spain was an Empire long before the British, and to open in the mind a way to possible success. At the same time, the I has the obscure feeling that a long time ago the Spaniards were greater than the British, and the intimate fear that in every Spaniard breeds the germ of an enemy.

When I and yo quarrel, both imperialistic minds can tangle and get a general sense that between I and yo, there can possibly only be a battle, a winner and a loser. It doesn’t take long for them to assume that if the Latinos are allowed to speak Spanish in the United States, English will be condemned, or that if the children in Hispanic countries speak English, they will lose their national independence.

But when I and yo live in the same person, a doubled imperialism rises, with two descents, two heritages, two languages and two religions. Since the idea of being two in one, and precisely not a two made out of a giant and a dwarf, but a two made out of two giants, the I and the yo go mad and have hard time reacting, either as an I or as a yo. And when I and yo get together on the point of faith, even if I enjoys being a Buddhist and yo an Atheist, an emotional earthquake dissolves both the I and the yo, and memories go back --- in language to Latin, in history to the same European kings, and in religion, back to the old times of Christianity, before any partition. The I and the yo disappear, the person remaining just says “sum” and realizes that this is all what any American life is about. Sum here, in America. Sum sums, and adds, and many sum sums more people and a bigger American crowd, and any wedding between giants is allowed to be consummated and it is also admitted than a giant baby can be born, and cry the first primary cry, sum.

No I, no yo, just sum American, sum americano, sum from a Continent mirror of another Continent, sum from America as young mirror of Europe. To be an American means then to those from different European ancestors, to be the cultural sons and daughters from Europe --a mother older than Spain, France or Great Britain. To be named Americans refers to a common new motherland, where the Natives Americans and the Americans of any European, African or Asian descent close their past and open the future. A future in which America will be composed of thirty-five countries and will own a multilingual American culture, different from European, and also from African and Asian cultures, though including bits of them all, in an authentic seed of universality.

Americans say I, Americanos say yo, but not for long. We will hear us and nosotros more than often, and nos and nous, and many other things we don’t dare to dream, in the new American times to come.

THE CONGA LINE OR HOW TO BUILD A CONTINENTAL POLICY (2001)

While alerting drums beat from valley to valley, Americans from everywhere go to battle: the coming Free Trade Area for the Americas is seen as an unfriendly ghost who will take jobs and money away from where they are already not abundant. From California to Patagonia, as the song says, a crowd of eight hundred million people are tapping their shoes, more ready to march savagely to a demonstration than to go to a ballroom.

The war against a feared and increasing poverty as well as against a flight of capital and manufacturers has started. The protesters against globalization and against its youngest breed, Continentalism, attract the attention of doubtful people all over the Continent, who wonder if this new free trade agreement can be of any benefit for them or will represent, again, a shortcut to misery. As long as it is not understood that a free trade area is not only a commercial area but also a political and cultural agreement, the drums will not play a cheerful music that gathers continental populations in a happy dance of love, joy and growth.

The Free Trade Area for the Americas is not a free trade among equals. Though the previous NAFTA has given many examples of success, the fact that this time the partners are thirty-four and with completely different political and economic situations gives little hope for an easy path. Since the leadership of this project is undeniably US American, the main question of success or failure is about how the USA qualifies for this leadership. Besides, the USA has to play the drums as well as dance dance, with the help of Argentina which has, through General Perón's continental doctrine, a solid theoretical foundation for this political construction.

Of course, Perón thought in the 50s that Argentina could be the natural leader of such an association and that that association would include the United States only in the last period. All the Ibero-American (of Spanish and Portuguese descent) countries would gather first in a still politically difficult but culturally easy association, inviting the United States to join them when their power would be the USA equal. In spite of] their abundant natural resources and their talented people, the Ibero-American countries have made in half a century a poor performance, and the United States has become the first country in the world, as well as the economic, financial and military leader of the planet. The Perón plan has had to face a change: Argentina and the rest of the Ibero-American partners, in order to constitute a continental association, have had to accept the USA's leading role.

How is it that a project, which was mainly an Hispanic project, not even Ibero-American because Brazil always rejected the idea of a continent going beyond the limits of South America, came to be a high priority US project? Disfavored by its condition of being a continental minority in a large majority of Ibero-American countries, the USA has always more willingly played a role in the whole planet than in what was its so-called backyard --- a bunch of poor unknown Latino countries only able to buy US industrial goods and to get bank loans at high rates. The achievement of the first common market in the world, followed by a political and cultural union, set the example: the European Union was to be naturally followed by an American Union.

The eventual construction of a whole planet free market with the same political rules begins with that first continental brick. The necessity of a safer planet, with countries linked by open markets and financial interdependence, builds the rest. Continentalism is understood also as a convenient path to a military cooperative association for safety and peace. By proposing the Free Trade Area of the Americas to the countries of the Continent, the United States enlarges the Free Trade Area of the world, obtaining at the same time a market big enough for fair commercial competition with the European Union.
Where the factories will relocate themselves for the best competitive product prices, and who will be the owner of jobs and profits, are questions raised by the old pre-continental thinking, particularly by union leaders who are not adapted to the conditions of a new economy. These issues, even if they are the ones that get the headlines, are not the most relevant in a future Continental economy. Since the problem remains on the political construction, the economy will be affected more by how the United States as a political leader organizes the continent, and how --as the richest country in the world-- it manages to raise the rest of the countries of the Continent to its level.

With the help of emerging secondary leaders who cannot be ignored because of their size and the influence they exert in their region, such as Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, the United States can avoid the cultural trap of misunderstanding by accepting that they live on an --at least-- bicultural and bilingual continent; as well as the political trap of imperialism, by organizing countries under a federal system. The way to get countries into a cooperative association seems to be based on a recognition of the equality of both dominant cultures --- the Anglo-American and the Ibero-American --- as well as on the imitation of US administrative systems to provide equal rights and justice to the rest of the countries on the Continent.

The idea of an enlarged Federalism, where all the countries would join together on equal conditions in an American Union, points only to a richer continent with multiple owners and beneficiaries, instead of to an Empire with a ruler and its vassals. This continental Federalism needs the active participation of countries that will fear less the mighty power of the USA if allowed to install in their territories the same laws and regulations as exist in the USA. Only this would gain the immediate support of traditionally disorganized societies who would then feel ready for fair Federal competition for investments and production.

The main business of the United States will not be --as the US American workers fear --- in moving factories to countries with low salaries, but in exporting services. From the reorganization of state administration to the updating of infrastructure like highways, water supply, electrical power and communications, the upgrading of services in developing countries to the level of --at least --- the poorest state in the United States will prevail as the most rewarding investment.

At the same time, the local production in every country –contradicting their local union leaders who fear US export of goods -- will jump to an international level and besides selling to the rest of countries on the Continent, will export to the rest of the planet under the new Continental flag.

A new vision, considering Federalism as the political tool of Continentalism, and services instead of products as the main US export to its neighbors, improving dramatically both Ibero-Americans' conditions of life and US business earnings, can change the sound of the drums and go from a military march to a mambo. Reluctant countries can then forget old ideas about Imperialism, accept the Continent as the common motherland and join, one by one, the fair and joyful conga line.

FREE TRADE AREA OF THE AMERICAS: THE EAGLE AND THE CONDOR (2001)

During the Quebec Summit in April 2001, thirty-four countries of the American Continent ---all of them, with the only exception of the uninvited Cuba --- agreed to continue the conversations that would stretch a free trade area from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Here and there, bilateral or multilateral meetings spring up and many leaders, in the USA and in the rest of the countries, are starting to realize that the agreement known as the FTAA is not only about commercial issues.

The effect of a collision of the two predominant cultures– the English speaking culture with the Spanish speaking one --- as well as the new political meaning of a market with eight hundred million consumers, goes far beyond the scope of the usual worries about unequal commercial merges. While the labor unions in the USA and Canada on one side, and in the Hispanic countries on the other, may claim that they have everything to lose, and paranoically believe that their neighbor-- whoever it is-- will get all the profit, the political leaders, at least, have grasped that the serious matter will be the cultural, military and political effect of such a union. In addition, the September 11th attack on the USA made the war against terrorism a continental issue and common defense has become a priority, regardless of the old antagonism.

Is there an eagle flying over the Continent? Is there a condor getting ready to fly as high and as fast? In fact, both things seem to be happening on a Continent, whose casual mention will mean, --- even for the English speaking Americans --- the entire American Continent, in a necessary update and a cut of the umbilical cord to the old meaning of that word.

The first commercial issues that have been addressed concern the actual level of protection, and free markets. The main political objections of the countries who would enlarge the existing NAFTA till it embraces the whole Continent come from their perception of the FTAA as an imperialistic USA threat that could also change cultural and military conditions. From Brazil to Guatemala, the image people have is that of an eagle grasping the local markets and destroying the chances of any local production. In the USA and Canada, the primary reaction is about the same: North American workers are afraid of a condor breaking into their jobs, with lesser salaries and lower production cost, and they imagine factories and capitals migrating South.

But in reality what is to be built is a brand new political structure, a Continental community, where partners will be equal in their rights and subject to a common commercial organization. In this sense, a departure from the traditionally inefficient economies will certainly generate a drastic change, but a change for the best, engendering more productivity and competition. A complete understanding of the project is necessary in the minds of all eight hundred million American inhabitants of the American Continent. The desired equality in the rights of member countries is meant to include the treatment of cultures and languages, a common military commitment to the defense of the common Continent and the war against terrorism ---the last addressed issue and probably the most important in the months to come--- as well as a new reading of the word American, which will mean not just US American, but any kind of American.

As in the song, the condor flies, and so does the eagle, and a marriage of both is in the air more than a fight between them. And if we see some signs of a battle, let's not panic. It might only be one of those petty prenuptial quarrels that are quickly dissolved by the passions of fierce love.

CONTINENTALISM: A NEW POLICY FOR THE GREAT AMERICA (2001)

The Continent is now for Americans a different thing than it used to be. For the heirs of the British islanders’ language, the Continent continues -- more often than not-- to be the land across the channel, the firm territory beyond the islands, the European Continent. Now, with the prospect of the Free Trade Area for the Americas, an increasing feeling of a common land blossoms in all the countries of the area. A new idea about the old fact of living on another continent, the American Continent, has emerged both in spirit and language, and in this century Continent and Continental describe a belonging and a new policy.

The Spanish-speaking people, maybe because of their condition of discoverers and conquerors of the new territory, have always been clear about the continental quality of America, about the spatial, cultural and political separation from Europe, and above all, about the unity of the Continent seen as a single geographical entity, subject to a possible geopolitical union. Instead, the English-speaking Americans kept the name of America for only the United States of America and referred to the continental territory as the Americas, in a term that separates more than unifies. The Spanish-speaking people talked confidently about America, with the spontaneity of those who knew that there were two continents in question, Europe and America. Overseas became quickly for them a reversible expression: overseas could be America or Europe, according to where the person was actually speaking. The Canadians, half Europeans through the Commonwealth and half Americans, had a new perception about the Continent, and for them Continentalism, an expression probably inaugurated by Harold Innes, meant, early in the 20th century, every geopolitical movement linking Canada to the United States, movements perceived always as subtle or not so subtle ways to tear Canadians apart from Europe.

Affections, ideas about the national self, and political and cultural wars have surrounded the words America, Continent, and Continentalism --- a word that is not even recognized by the spell-check of computers. All this emotional turmoil breaks out again in the middle of the commercial battle for the Free Trade Area. Like with the North-American Free Trade Area, the Caricom, or the Mercosur, traditional quarrels and friendships between American countries emerge, but this time, since the discussion is about the whole continental area (including the Caribbean Islands-- as American as the rest), the concept of Continentalism raises arguments which certainly involve much more than commercial agreements.

Bolívar and San Martín in South-America had the dream of what they called the Great America. Heroes of the Independence wars, they advocated for an American union. President Monroe in the United States had, with the same independent spirit, the idea of an America just for the Americans, and he meant with this statement to be far more inclusive than what the enemies of the United States want to believe. General Perón, in Argentina, was the first to start a continental association: in 1949 he promoted the ABC, the Argentina, Brazil, Chile agreement, which was intended to start exactly what the NAFTA started in the mid-90s and what the FTAA is supposed to start now.

General Perón, contemporary to the Foundation of the European Community by the Treaty of Rome in 1957, and enlightened witness of the whole process, was probably the first American leader to speak about Continentalism, understood as a special policy dedicated to the union of America not only in a common market but also in a common political, cultural and military association. In the earliest 70s and before dying in 1974, he warned the revolutionary youth about the political sequence for years to come: that nationalism would be followed by continentalism to finally end in a necessary and unavoidable universalism. The foresight proved to be true and in the times of globalization, Continentalism is merely completing its also unavoidable historical routine.

Europe has already completed a political union --- we talk now about the European Union --- and America, as a Continent, is on its way to achieve in years to come its own political unity. The idea of a continental union, which will in the first place install on the planet a market of eight hundred million consumers --the biggest market in the world-- scares Europe, and we can perceive the influence of the frightened European perception on the Americans everywhere. Here and there, projects to split “the Americas” into at least three separate markets, surge in the speech of local American leaders, both in North, Central and South America. The unity is resisted by many other American countries, which fear the omnipresent ghost of Yankee imperialism. The resistance to an American Union is promoted in various ways by European political or economic interests, in a secret war impossible to understand without the concept of Continentalism. For a certain period of time, the two Continents will commercially compete for the markets of the rest of the world and for political supremacy. Though all this will end, as General Peron warned, in a universal market and a universal political union, the continental step will make fall many countries, long before that.

From Alaska to Tierra del Fuego -- to say it with the already famous inclusive formula-- a new patriotism is the challenge for the Americans from here to there. The idea that the Continent is the new motherland --representing a more superior interest than the country land-- and that Americans from everywhere –including the powerful and feared Yankees-- share a dazzling brotherhood, has started to put hearts on fire, minds in thought and hands in action.

Continentalism seems to be the new word for hope to the poor in the Great America, and probably the new word for victory to the United States, as the richest country in the world. Of course, and until the time of the fair Universalism comes, with its promise of final peace on Earth, American Continentalism has become a nightmare to Europe; and as a political idea, an unanswered question to Asia; maybe a clue to the wounded Africa; and an unexpected opportunity for the long denied cultural Americanity of Oceania.

ABOUT WRITING IN THE TIMES OF THE FREE TRADE AREA OF THE AMERICAS (2001)

There have been times when I´ve had trouble with a computer because it was set only for the English language and it didn´t allow me to write in Spanish properly. A letter was missing, the ñ, as was the umlaut and the accent mark and both the upside down question mark and exclamation point needed in front of questions and exclamations in Spanish. But now, on my Spanish language computer, I have another problem, which is the lack of English Spell -Check . Living in a two-language world is complicated, but even worse is to live in a four-language world: I write sometimes in French and in Portuguese and there again, on both English language and Spanish language computers, letters and accents and particular signs such as the cedilla are missing. The integration of the Americas is a technological problem from the start, but even more urgently a cultural one: do all the languages have the same status? Which is the same as to ask: Do all the cultures have the same value?

When we think that next April thirty four countries will sign the agreement to integrate a free trade zone before 2005, we wonder first about the usual commerce laws and the equality they are supposed to bring to the parties of the agreement. Only in the second place do we realize that something deeper is going on among the signers of the treaty.

Being different and at the same time being a part of the same thing, raises questions in every single language of the Americas, and for every national thinker the question is more and more about how we will deal with each culture.We wonder if there is going to be a fight, and who will win in the end, and the nightmare of an uneven imperialism haunts us. Being a Bolivian is not the same as being a Yankee, though a primary question jumps out: what will the Americans from the US be called? "US Americans", maybe, since they will finally have to share the name of America, which is one and only also as a continent, with all the rest of the thirty five remaining American countries, which have been more modest and adopted a second name, leaving the word American to the common property rather than to Yankee greed.

And how will the giant deal with the smaller countries, or even with the big sized ones like Brazil or Argentina? Will every "American" country get the same status that Canada and Mexico have in the present NAFTA? Is it the pure Yankee imperialism that will prevail, as the leftists from the whole Continent claim, influenced by the perpetual divide and conquer European thought? Or, on the contrary, are we at the dawn of a free political, cultural and military association based on the common character of Americans (whole Americans, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego) with a new identity to explore? Signs of a merging new American culture can be seen here and there: a Hispanic minority increasing in the United States, now surpassing the African-Americans, and a military and economical Argentine drive towards an American common market (extra NATO ally military status, and dollarization) show that people are acting toward merging even before the computer manufacturers have reacted.

There is more communication between Americans of all origins than anyone thinks: US American citizens buying big farms in Patagonia; Argentine citizens teaching Spanish in the US; Brazilians dealing with Mexicans; Chileans with Venezuelians; and Rockefeller visiting Cuba and reminding us that Cuba belongs to America, no matter what the former USSR might have thought. It is a strange melting pot indeed, of Americans mingling with Americans in a broth of the four main European languages , mixed in with more than thirty five cultures, each having even more languages, such as the always forgotten American Native ones and all the rest of the European languages that migrated to the American Continent and the Caribbean Islands.

I am writing in Buenos Aires for the English-speaking reader, I still don´t have a Spanish-English dictionary in my computer, and, of course, I know I will solve part of the problem – with a click on the multilanguage button, by trying to memorize every foreign keyboard, or by simply surrendering to an uncomfortable plastic keyboard cover that includes the missing characters. But, am I ready to merge into the pot and trust that all will be for the best? That is to say, is there an English speaking American writing specifically on this issue for an Argentine or Peruvian reader? I wouldn´t be afraid of merging if somebody up there in the North of the Continent is also scared about what will come out of this mainly cultural marriage and wants to communicate with the rest of their Americans pals and share. We are all Americans – not USA subjects– but members of a great, multilingual and fantastic new thing. Hello, is anybody out there awake in this dream? The Great America is waiting.

AMERICAN GIRL (2001)

The Argentine writer Manuel Puig was the first to discover the effect of the Hollywood silver screen on the hearts and minds of Argentine women living during the 40s and 50s in big houses in small towns or in small houses in big towns. In those times when Evita and the always neglected criollo workers were the absolute stars in a too Peronist Argentine public life, provincial and porteñas –from the capital port of Buenos Aires— middle class women couldn’t dream but of a better place to live. A place with blond people with blue eyes that would restore them as the worthy people they had –as European immigrant daughters-- struggled to be. A place where they would be recognized as different from the crowd of half Indian dark workers that invaded those days the national scene, and where they would be loved by loving men –who always seemed to be far away from that country where men had more important things to do than to love. These women thought they had no room for any further class ascension if those little dark heads, the cabecitas negras, were in the heights before them, though later as a middle class they would replace the old upper aristocratic class. Also repressed as women --even if the hated-by- them- and loved- by- Perón Evita gained for them the right to vote—middle class women began to live an imaginary movie life. This life happened to be, without these women being too conscious of that fact, a Yankee life. In love with Tyrone Power, Clark Gable or William Holden, they helped the writer of great talent and intuition that Puig was, to build a series of extraordinary feminine characters, where the hidden lust for sexy men was as meaningful as the distance from where the Argentine middle class women lived, to paradise.

When Perón was thrown out of government by middle class military men –the husbands of the dreaming women— a new golden age of the forbidden fruits of the always distant United States started. I was eleven years old then and at the same time I went with my mother to see Eva Perón’s rich clothes and hundreds of shoes –what my mother blamed and what I saw as the necessary outfit of the popular queen she was-- I got my first Parker pen. My mother could buy her first pair of nylon stockings while a new present arrived into my hands: a bunch of small violet envelopes with bubble-gum that tasted like root-beer and came with colored pictures of Hollywood actors to whom you could write to get their autographed artistic pictures, which I did. Before and after obtaining those fragments of American real life, I sat close to my mother every Saturday in front of the literally pearled screen of the neighborhood movie theaters and fell in love with Anthony Perkins. I was obviously another generation who didn’t enjoy too much the macho type, too close to the military with big moustaches and their scornful look towards the always-inferior women.

With the new open market following ten years of protected Peronist customs, a new kind of goods came in to keep the dream alive: the glossies. My father got himself a subscription to Popular Mechanics and to the Readers Digest. My mother got House and Gardens, and I was included in the package with a subscription to American Girl. My youngest brother didn’t get any and that may be why he was the only one to desire to actually live in the United States, which he succeeded in doing through endless summers competing on waterskiing teams.

I was an avid reader, besides being an eager movie spectator, and the Popular Mechanics soon provided me the plans for a home where I should live when I would meet Bob or John and have with him four kids with English names. Meanwhile the Readers Digest gave me the directions on how to think, though with little success, because the more refined Frenchmen in the private school I was sent to during Perón’s government to avoid the obligatory Peronist doctrine in public schools, got my soul first. The silver bullet of the commercial empire did reach me, though, by way of American Girl in a section called Pen Pals.

My letter must be still there; it was the second time I was published, the first one was in La Semaine de Suzette, the French magazine for nice girls. I was looking for friends abroad, maybe real people beyond the screen. While I got some answers from the clients of the remains of the cultural French empire, and wrote for years to people in North Africa and in borderland French provinces like Alsace and Provence, I was inundated with letters of young American girls and boys. I couldn’t feel more happy and loved, getting attention from strangers like Blanche DuBois, and being finally a star just because of a tiny bit of paper, a letter written in English, an envelope and a stamp. I selected of course the boys, as Mae West would have done, and I remember having corresponded lastly with a young charming boy, Danny T. McCarthy, from Springfield, Illinois and, because of his friendship and sympathy, I began to love forever and beyond any silver screen, those United States impersonated by these real people who addressed to me tender and kind letters. With the first teen rebellions and the bloody Argentine history that followed, that love would be buried, though, in the deepest bottom of my heart and forgotten till more favorable times.

I was fifteen and a little more advanced in the study of the English language at the French school than when I wrote letters to my American new pals. I was then summoned by my English teacher to make a speech in front of the class and this is how my first political speech in any language was “The growing importance of Communist China”. It was the year of the Cuban revolution, which was probably the start of the last battle between the United States and the Latin American countries. Che Guevara was an Argentine and was pictured with Fidel Castro on Life magazine’s cover, as admired young rebels, when it was still a thorough continental truth that they had to replace the dictator Batista. Following the new trend, I was becoming a revolutionary Latino American, a Communist because my father was rich and I was not and that seemed unfair to me. And also a Peronist because my mother didn’t like Evita or me, and because the workers communism was supposed to help were all Peronists. I had, like the biggest part of my generation, an emotional answer to an era that in many senses was about to end, though nobody really could predict what the change would be. I was just for a quick move to a better world, whatever this might mean in the future, like all the Argentine baby boom generation.

This generation defined itself as Peronist as a reaction to the powerful and repressive military, and as Socialist because baby boomers had been --thanks to Perón-- massively well fed and well educated, and had an access to books and to the Marxist international movement. Even the middle class who rejected Perón had to give their kids a better education, and this meant an upper class foreign private school to split them from the modest dark newcomers who invaded the public schools. Both breeds, the dark and the European descent whites, would meet in the following years --with their new gained books and their youthful strength-- in the greatest revolutionary movement in Latin America. Hollywood missed the story and it was a British author who would write later a famous and incongruous Evita addressing in English the Argentine people and asking them not to cry for her, which we couldn’t help doing, watching both opera and film.

When I finished my French double Baccalaureate, I started to teach French in an English school. I was Miss Ferraro for two years, living some days a week a real Anglo life that had little to do with my Italian and Spanish roots. When Kennedy was shot, I was teaching and pupils and school staff had to gather in the courtyard to pray in English for his soul, our Father thou art in heaven. And so God, who usually spoke to me in French because of the Catechism taught at school, became an Anglo-Yankee divinity, confirming that Atheism could be safer for an independent and national spirit. After all, Perón had also quarreled with the Catholic Church, and the Argentine military who subjected him to a coup d’état were Catholics, reaffirming the fact that they didn’t like women to be sexy.

The projection of a film lent to the school by the US embassy about life in the colonial times opened a window in my heart while I watched the green lands of Virginia and the so cute farmers battering butter in a wooden bucket on their cute little wooden farms, as ancestors of a rural romantic life that could have been lived in any country of America, including mine. The film ended and I was in love again for a while with the luminous land as if it were mine. This film had a fingerprint of destiny, but then I didn’t know that.

After two years working as a teacher, I entered a Film School and began to work in movies as an assistant producer, and later as a producer and director. I had a battle to fight: Hollywood had to be replaced by Argentine films, like in the past, when the Argentine movie industry conquered all the Spanish- speaking countries. It was a worthy cause and I couldn’t feel more comfortable in that kingdom of images, where I didn't have to use my mother language as an expressive instrument and where I wouldn’t have to face the unpleasant question of which language spoke God.

As my teenage speech had predicted, China became important, as did Cuba and Russia, and soon the same Latin American kids who dreamt cow-boys dreams in their childhood and who died for Bazooka bubble-gums, became rebellious against any power, parents, military, rich ruling classes and of course against the too powerful antagonist in the Continent, the United States, supporters of all the military anti-socialist and anti-peronist movements. I joined the energetic crowd and cried Yankees, out of Santo Domingo, and felt that all Latin American countries should get together, with Cuba, of course, and fight the Yankees who were the friends of our enemies, the local militaries. I danced though with Elvis Presley and Chubby Checker, and my lasting love affair with Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra continued to grow in the most secret channels of my soul as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Joe Cocker found a place there too.

The public story is well known: the military trained in the United States to fight all the continental guerrillas in the frame of the Cold War organized more and more coups d’état with the help of the United States who wanted to make sure that the Soviet Union didn’t go beyond Cuba on the American Continent. The Beatles sang, and there were also the hippie times with the demonstrations against the Vietnam war, with the French May calling imagination to power, and with the whole planetary baby boomer generation blaming the United States for being the cruel rising empire after World War II. Real life was in those years definitely more interesting than films, and when Perón came back to Argentina --after eighteen years in which the military could neither unite nor rule the country-- a new chapter began. The Argentina hidden behind the screen appeared then for the first time to our already adult eyes, and with the leading of Perón, a new consciousness about what was ours and what was others' suddenly emerged. I became the proud owner of a now luminous Argentina –as luminous as the Yankee land of the screen -- where my roots had their regular place and my language was my mother’ s language and not the school's language or the language of any foreign group.. I left the films and began to write in Spanish for small union magazines, in a lasting political writer career. With a new born love for my country, I discovered a nation and a history as worthy as others. I was no less than a French or a British person, and Spanish was just as worthy a language as theirs. Perón had a very talkative relationship with the youth, and we soon learned that Marxism was as foreign a thing to us as the Yankee obeisance to the military. Neither Yankees nor Marxists, just Peronists, was the most popular cry, with the opposition of course of the Marxist guerrillas, which began then to fight Perón. The Perón doctrine considered that there were two empires at war on the planet and that we were a different thing between them, a Third World, for which they were struggling. Perón soon died, and the military –who didn’t listen to him-- went behind the guerrilleros as well as behind the Peronists, considered by them the most dangerous because of their bright nationalism. The seven years of military government are known all over the world, because of the thousands of missing young and not so young people, and because of the world famous Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, no longer the Manuel Puig heroines but the suffering women whose kids had been taken away and killed by the military.

I survived, and in between I was married and had my own children and I even had time to divorce, when I woke up a morning at war with Great Britain because of the Malvinas Islands. A new milestone in the complicated US- Argentine relationship was set: the United States, a friendly country to Peronism by then because of the common war against the Soviet Union, was supporting Great Britain and not Argentina, in spite of all the treaties of common continental defense. The military lost the islands as well as the government. With more young people dead on the altar of a war which was rather a British secret service plot than a nationalistic Argentine epopee, a new bleeding wound was inflicted on the US –Argentine relationship. Most Argentines felt betrayed by the United States, and I perceived in this the final result of the war: Great Britain would never allow The United States to rule in a country which had been before Perón and since the times of Independence, their informal colony. I suspected that something like a different war was running in Argentina, which had to do more with Europe than with the Soviet Union or the United States. After all, the United States had been divided at the beginning of the war between their European colonial obedience to Great Britain and their continental American identity shared with Argentina. In my increasing perception, against the predominant opinion, that Argentina and the United States were meant to be partners, I was influenced neither by the silver screen nor by memories of Hollywood stars, but led by the same nationalistic attitude that Perón brought to my life. I saw Argentina widening , and lengthening to its Continental dimensions and making the United States of America more than a neighbor, an American brother living in the same common house, son to the same mother Europe we both had to fight in the past and we both should fight in the future to assert our own American identity.

The rest of the recent history is more than well known-- how the Wall of Berlin fell and how the United States won the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Also how Argentina became, during the first Peronist government after Perón’s own, a political and a military friend to the United States, and how both countries support nowadays a Free Trade Area as a first step to a Continental Union, as predicted by Monroe, by Perón and by every American patriot from Martí to Bolívar. A union where an American girl could be either a US American girl or an Argentine American girl, making of America a country the size of a continent, and of eight hundred million Americans, the wealthiest population in the world, a happy ending that Hollywood hasn’t dreamt yet.

Two years ago, I met a man on the Internet, the new tilting seductive screen. He lived in Virginia. After a couple of hundreds of emails, which brought up the forgotten experience of American Girl, I met him. If Puig was alive, he could write an epilog to his novels. Real life has changed since the times of Peron. The distant and desirable tall handsome man, blond with blue eyes, has left the screen and walks, taking me by my arm, in the Buenos Aires streets. The girl who wrote letters to the people behind the screen lives now some months of the year in a cute little home in a cute neighborhood in the always green Virginia, writing now scenes from her Argentine life, read maybe by dreaming US American women, tired of their cute screen life and wanting something which looks as passionate as the Hollywood films promised to dreaming Argentine women of the past.

The nightmare of misunderstandings of the past seems to be over and the wind of history blows, bringing now the Free Trade Area for the Americas and with it, the beginning of an unavoidable Continental Union where Argentine and Yankees will be co-stars in the same film with thirty-five other countries, counting Cuba which has to be there to have a real Hollywood happy end.

In Virginia or Buenos Aires nights, love and written dreams don’t stop and ask now about the next step for us Continental Americans and how we shall arrive later, when the Continent is united, to the universal one land, where we will be just human being owners of a multitude of countries, a multitude of languages, a multitude of cultures.

Like Puig's heroines, unhappy women all over the planet could now be dreaming and seeing themselves through a Continental American film—made or written in the US or in Buenos Aires-- promising an era of friendship and love that will become again, after history weaves its material, a foreseen reality. Also, another American girl could be, without knowing, in her way to be more than she ever dreamt, a universal girl, writing letters to her future.