41. How to Look at Silence
© 2022 Nohora Arrieta, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0296.41
The border, they say, is alive and porous, crossed as if by osmosis, as the cells of an organism feed. Crossing the Guajira Desert in Colombia to get to the state of Zulia in Venezuela is what my maternal grandmother Elvia Mármol did for fifty years. This movement, which was so natural to those of us who grew up surrounded by it, still happened shrouded in silence. First, there is the nationalistic discourse that Colombia as a country is very different and very distant from Venezuela. According to this discourse, this back and forth across the border never happened or only happens now that, due to the crisis in the neighboring country, Colombia is “overrun with Venezuelans.” The other silence arises from the movement itself and from the experiences of the women who moved and who move: what happens at the border? What is life like on the other side? On this side?
Elvia or Mami, as she liked to be called by her granddaughters, was the proud owner of the first telephone in our neighborhood, calle Aurora. This luxury turned the house into a center of communications. The phone never stopped ringing, the ring tliiiiin, sharp and infinite. “Elvia Mármol’s house, with whom do I have the pleasure?” Mami would answer, mimicking an experienced receptionist. Then she would run to the terrace and yell out: “Fulaaaana, it’s so-and-so from Venezuela, hurry!” The woman would dash across the room to the telephone in its little corner (dark and private, like an oracle) and lift the receiver with her hands still soapy from the Saturday wash. “He is not coming this December”, “he left me for someone else”, “that woman does not care about her children”, “they fired her from work”, Fulana would say after hanging up, her brow furrowed in what could be sadness or anger.
To say “Venezuela” on calle Aurora was to name an extension of the family geography. It was like saying the far corner of the patio, a reachable yet distant place, inhabited by grandmothers, aunts, and cousins who we had never seen or who we saw every three, four or five years. The journey to Venezuela was such a natural pilgrimage for black, indigenous, and poor families of the Colombian Caribbean, that the Cartagena writer Roberto Burgos Cantor depicts it in one of his short stories. In “Stories of Singers”, the father of Mabel Lara, an aspiring young bolero singer, sends a letter to his daughter from Caracas telling her about the hardships of migrant life. Mabel’s father wants to be a singer too, but while he waits for a lucky break he makes a living as a waiter at a nightclub.
Dear Mabe you don’t know how much I missed you at the beginning things were rough and I was getting pissed off that’s why I didn’t write to you so you and your mama wouldn’t worry they don’t like Colombians here they’re always on you about your papers I took the letter from don Dámaso to the naiclub and in the end I started as a waiter it’s not what I wanted but something is something and I get to hear the orchestras that play with good singers.
“They don’t like Colombians here”, Mabel’s father writes and with little effort one can imagine the expression of distrust, discomfort or annoyance of a passerby in Caracas or Maracaibo at the frequent sight of a family of poor Colombians.
Colombia and Venezuela share a border of more than two thousand kilometers (more than 1,200 miles). Since the late 1950s, people on the Colombian Caribbean coast have emigrated to the neighboring country in search of what in Colombia were luxuries: work, food, education. In the 1970s, the oil boom, with its promise of jobs in both the countryside and the city, turned Venezuela into the promised land. At the end of the eighties, Colombians already represented about 78% of Latin American migrants in Venezuela. Most of the jobs were in agriculture or domestic work. The favored destination for Colombians was the oil state of Zulia. Mami and Aunt Elvira arrived in Maracaibo, the capital of Zulia, for the first time on 25 April 1961.
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Venezuelan visual artist Malu Valerio lived in Cali, Colombia, from August to October 2019. Valerio was invited to Cali as an artist in residence at Lugar a Dudas (Room for Doubt) and during the three months she was there she walked the city wearing seven different pairs of alpargatas, a typical Wayuu footwear. The Wayuu are an indigenous people who live in a territory of the continental Caribbean that extends into both Colombia and Venezuela. Valerio’s alpargatas were hand-woven by a Wayuu woman from the El Monte neighborhood in Maracaibo. In Cali, Valerio bought bread wearing those alpargatas; she got on buses that go down calle Quinta; she breathed the fresh air coming down from the mountains that surround the valley where the city is embedded. She put on the alpargatas and attended workshops for Venezuelan migrant women organized by a religious foundation. Valerio and the women drank coffee or agua de panela and sometimes the women painted and sometimes they wrote. Valerio listened to their stories, read their writing, and took notes. Later, she chose words and phrases and embroidered them with colored threads (red, blue, yellow) onto the dusty alpargatas: “parada”, “abierta”, “nos robaron”, “comenzar desde cero” (“stopover”, “open”, “we were robbed”, “starting from scratch”).
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“1961”, says Elvira over the phone. “1959”, my mother writes in a WhatsApp message. The women of my family do not agree on the date. What they do agree on is that Mami and Elvira went to Maracaibo to work as domestic workers and the other daughters were left in the care of their grandmother. We do not know what made Mami return to Colombia seven months later, whether it was missing her other daughters, fearing that an employer would take liberties with Elvira or the fatigue of working all day without earning enough money to even dream of a small house in Cartagena. Four years would go by before Elvira, then a young adult, returned to Venezuela to try her luck. She never came back to Cartagena. Miriam also left.
Half of my generation was born in Venezuela, the children of Elvira and Miriam, as well as half of the following generation. For those born on the Colombian side, Venezuela was the land of plenty. There were new clothes in December, shoes for first communion, telephones, and Whirlpool washing machines. In contrast, in Cartagena all we had was scarcity of food and the fine dust covering calle Aurora. The photographs that Mami accumulated from visits to her daughters and granddaughters on the other side roused in the Cartagena generation the feeling that we were not the chosen ones. In one of these photos, Mami has a short hairstyle, painted nails, a yellow blouse, and a black skirt with a print to match her blouse. She is about to cut a cake (it was her birthday). The two tiers of the cake, the bouquet of flowers, and the size of the speaker from the sound system in the background were irrefutable proof of what in Cartagena we considered the lavishness of Venezuelan life.
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The words embroidered on Valerio’s alpargatas do not tell the stories, they compel us to intuit them. The details of the journey will always be a secret, at least for the viewer who, presented with the image, asks: When were they robbed? Where did they stop for the first time? Was the border opened?
The numbers are easily found online. In May 2020, there were one million Venezuelan migrants in Colombia. Half were undocumented. Half were women. But the numbers, as we know, say little and confuse experience with statistics. When referring to Venezuelans, the Colombian media are torn between applause (“a Venezuelan publicist creates jobs”, another Venezuelan investor builds a construction project in Bogotá) and contempt (“65 Venezuelans at a party during COVID-19”, “ten Venezuelan thieves”). In the midst of the clamor to make Venezuelans into heroes or villains, depending on the needs of the primetime schedule, reports like Andrea Aldana’s article published in July 2020 go unnoticed. In La Trocha, Aldana interviewed a group of Venezuelan women who were victims of sexual violence and human trafficking in Cúcuta, one of the large cities on the Colombian border. Some of the women had been convinced to travel to Colombia with job offers as house cleaners or caregivers for the elderly.
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Mami collected photos. I’m not exaggerating when I say that she was the queen of Instagram and Facebook before Instagram or Facebook existed. But there is not a single photo of her first trip to Venezuela in her album collection. In one of the conversations I had with my mother before writing this essay, she tells me that she remembers Mami setting fire to a bundle of images on the patio. There were no stories either. Mami, who was a great conversationalist and did not miss a chance to talk about her life, never told the story of the trip with Elvira to Maracaibo on 25 April 1961. She did not tell how they crossed the desert in La Guajira to enter Venezuela without papers. She did not speak of the arid desert soil—open like a wound—or of the stagnant pools of water where they pushed aside clouds of mosquitoes before bending to drink, or of the long night when she crouched on all fours over Elvira for fear that one of the guides would rape her eldest daughter while she slept. She did not talk about the first day in Maracaibo, when they wandered for hours until they found a residential neighborhood where she was hired to clean houses and Elvira was hired to take care of a child. How many times did she see Elvira during those months? Did she have Sundays off to spend with her teenage daughter? How was her relationship with her employers? Who were her employers? If there was ever a moment while cleaning floors in the house on calle Aurora, when Mami remembered those seven months scrubbing floors, washing clothes and silently crying for the three children she had left behind in Colombia, she never mentioned it. Why did she burn the photos from that trip? Why didn’t she want to remember? What didn’t she want to remember? The loneliness of being a poor migrant woman? Mabel Lara’s father’s “they don’t like Colombians here?” The trip crossing the desert? The fear of rape?
In the mountain of photographs that my younger brother scanned for me with the patience of a saint, I found a black and white photo of Mami in downtown Cartagena. It was taken, I suspect, after her return from Maracaibo, in November 1961. Mami wears a tailored dress, her hair is down and styled, her nails are painted, and her shoes match the buttons on her dress. In her dress, her painted nails, and shoes, I see the Mami I knew, but there is something in her eyes that I do not recognize. I imagine that it is the anxious and obstinate look of someone trying to forget.
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Somos cuerpo, Somos territorio, Somos (e-in)migrantes (We are body, We are territory, We are (e-im)migrants) is the title of the art exhibit that Valerio created after her residency with Lugar a Dudas. In one of the pieces, Valerio embroiders onto a white cloth the lines of maps, the states, and the rivers that make up the more than two thousand kilometers (more than 1,200 miles) of border between Colombia and Venezuela. On top of these lines, there are others, those of the routes that migrants take from one place to another. The piece is a body: the routes are the arteries, the veins, the fluids of the body.
The living body that Valerio embroiders has been nourished for decades by the Colombian-Venezuelan families who live on both sides of the border. It was nourished before that by the Wayuu indigenous people, in whose cosmogony such a thing as Colombia or Venezuela does not exist. Bodies, as we all know, can be violated, and it is no feat of mental gymnastics to imagine the reasons for the absence of this body in what we call Colombia: the omission of the Caribbean and the border regions in a country that imagines itself as Andean; a migrant population with an indigenous or black face in a country that sees itself as white and mestizo; a migration of the poor.
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As a result of the diplomatic crisis of August and September 2015 a total of 1,600 Colombians were deported and approximately 2,000 were displaced. Mami traveled from Colombia to Venezuela in June of that year. Her last trip back to Colombia was in December 2018. This crossing was no easier than the first crossing in 1961, although she was not aware of it. I asked the cousin who traveled with her to tell me again about the return trip: “Okay, so we got on a bus, then in a car, we took a back road, we paid off these people, we paid off those people, we reached the border and then we took another bus. Thank God we’re back in Cartagena.” My cousin finishes and I ask her: “Whose car was it? Who did they pay off? And Mami? Didn’t she get tired? Didn’t she complain? Wasn’t she afraid?” “Mami slept the whole trip, like now.” My cousin does not linger over the details. There is no description of the trip or, if there is, it is minimal. Partly it’s due to habit, I think. But in part it’s also as if the journey denies a description of itself, as if silence were the only way to name the trip and the way it was done: without papers, taking a back road, paying off these people and those people.
From December 2018 to December 2019, Mami slept, and sleep was the only place where she really was after there was no longer anything in Mami that remembered who she was. In sleep there was no Cartagena or Maracaibo, only a house with a big patio that the family would walk across. In December 2019, Mami went to travel the border endlessly. Remembering her, I think of a poem by the Wayuu poet Vito Apüshana, entitled “Woumain” (Our land):
When you come to our land,
you will rest in the shade of our respect.
When you come to our land,
you will hear our voice, also,
in the sounds of the ancient mountain.
If you arrive in our land
with your naked life
We will be a little bit happier…
and we will seek water
for this thirst for life, endless.1
1 This essay is for Mami. I thank Nora Elvira, Dinora, Nando and my dear mom for sharing with me their memories. The original version of this essay was written in Spanish. This English one would not be possible without the outstanding translation skills of my friend Lucy McDonald-Stewart. My friends Emma Shaw and Rahma Maccarone also helped me, as always.