Juan Carlos

NICARAGUAN; NOW LIVING IN MIAMI

So, you are actually the first person that I am doing a full interview with. You said our stories sounded similar. So tell me about your family.

Absolutely, of course. I hope that my memory is accurate. But my memory has me leaving Nicaragua for good on May 29th, 1979. Why do I remember that date? I'm not really sure. For some reason it stuck in my head. The context was, “We're going on a vacation, and we're not going back right now.” And then, ‘right now’ turns into 40 years.

Where did you go?

My little brother and I came with my mom went to Florida, where she had a cousin. Then my uncle’s family came up, and my dad came later, maybe in August. The eight of us ended up in a two-bedroom apartment. My uncle's family had rightfully had rented the place. And so, when the landlord would come over, we had to disappear. Mind you, it was on Brickell, which is like the nicest part of Miami. 

How did it change your family?

In Nicaragua, my dad was a lawyer, and my mom was a housewife. But in the U.S., my dad couldn't practice law, and he felt he didn’t speak English well enough. He was at a loss as to what to do. Meanwhile, my mom, who's got a humongous personality and is all about people, ended up going into real estate. She had no education past high school, but she’d studied in the U.S. and speaks very good English. She became pretty much the wage earner for the family. My dad did end up switching careers and using his connections with his brothers to work at a bank. But it was a really different dynamic between them. It was very difficult for my dad to go from the man of the house and the earner to someone who just didn't know what to do with himself. Eventually, they split up. 

I feel like that leaving home really affected the way that I see and do things. It shaped me in a very major way. As an adult, I’ve come to think of it through the framework of trauma. But it sounds like you don't necessarily feel that.

I don't think I've experienced it as trauma. It was uncomfortable. We’d been very well off in Nicaragua and now sometimes I’d say to my mom, "Can we have Burger King?" and she'd say, "No, I can't afford it." But I don't remember it being particularly difficult in the sense of, “I want to go home.” I was happy to be here, strangely enough. First, because everybody who I cared for got out. And then, not that I knew this as a nine-year-old, but a lot of my experience is shaped by being a gay man and feeling like, Thank God that I grew up here. Because who knows what my life would have been like if I'd grown up in Nicaragua. Would I have been closeted my whole life? What kind of pressures would I have had to deal with? Growing up in the United States, I was able to be free. So I didn't feel that sense of loss and real connection to the Nicaraguan experience. Miami is home much more than Managua ever was.

It’s actually very heartwarming to hear that you have that detachment, that you planted yourself so firmly in American soil. Because I didn't really, but I've obviously spent 40 years here. I have a career here, I married, I have a kid. This is my country. And I wonder whether some of this has to do with the fact that you were in Miami, and I was in Ithaca, New York, where Latinas were hard to come by.

Yeah, I had never had the experience of being the outsider because I grew up in Miami. You're just surrounded by Latinos. But when I went away to college, it was to the mountains of Massachusetts. It was the first time I’d experienced, “This is the Latino. This is somebody who's different.” It was your first identification. That was very strange and jarring. I’d always gone by Juan: I was very much about speaking English, fitting in. I wanted to be an American just like everyone else. But when I turned 18, I’d decided to use my full name, Juan Carlos. And people were just like, "My God. Your name is so long." So I went back like, "Okay. I'll just go by Juan. It's easier." And then, when I came back to Miami, and I was like, "Dammit, my name is Juan Carlos, and people are going to get it right." That was one of the first times that I felt like my latinidad is very important to me. But, it's interesting because it's never been a Nicaragua identity but rather than a Latino identity within the context of the U.S.

Whenever I go back to Nicaragua, I feel a strong, immediate connection. I haven’t lived there since I was eight, but I miss it.

Since my cousin got married when I was probably in my early 30s, I haven't been back, and I have no desire to go back. And when I have been back, which was rare, I always felt a complete disconnect. I’d feel like, "This is supposed to feel like home, but it really doesn't." 

So how do you feel it’s affected you? 

Nicaragua is something that is part of me. I feel very strongly about saying, "Yes, I am an immigrant. I am first generation. I was not born here." In Miami, everybody thinks you're Cuban. If you're successful and have an education, they're surprised that you're from Nicaragua. I found that very insulting.

Anytime that I can identify as a first-generation immigrant, I do. In my doctoral research, I looked at Spanish-speaking immigrants who came to the United States as English-language learners, and found their way to the Honors College at the community college. It was very much a desire to counter-storytell, because so many of the stories we hear are about failure, about their inability to complete college or complete an English-language program. I hadn't really thought about why I chose that as my topic, but talking to you makes me think. I mean, it's my story in a different context.