Don’t Cry for Me Argentina

One Thursday night in mid-September, as the shooting of Charlie Kirk, the detention of Jimmy Kimmel, and the escalating violence in the Gaza Strip hung in the air, a friend asked me if I still thought New York—and the United States more broadly—was the place for me.

“What do you mean?” I asked after I said yes.

I didn't think through my answer; I didn't need it. But it was true, after a few seconds it occurred to me that the idea of ​​leaving is increasingly taking on real cultural value. “I just hear more and more people I know talking about it,” my friend continued. “Things seem to be worse than they were.”

The caregiving gene, I must admit, runs in my family. I cannot pinpoint its creator—the volume of paperwork required to wrest a growing family tree from its place of origin when a generation tends to complicate genealogical research—but I am familiar with some of its expressions. Sometime in the late 1940s, my father's father boarded a ship bound for Buenos Aires after the war had left the southern Italian city where he was born devastated and impoverished. According to family lore, he dropped out of school when he was eight, and on at least one occasion he had to resort to cooking with a single bell pepper stolen from a neighbor's garden. In Argentina, he went in this order: got married, had children and finished learning to read.

There were others before him who left. Italian on maternal side; Spanish on my father's side. The Spaniards are also somewhere on the paternal side. My maternal grandmother's two brothers left Argentina in the 1950s and settled separately in Santa Barbara and New York. One was a physicist and the other a doctor, and even as immigrants, they managed to find a coveted piece of what we imagine was once the American Dream. Their success became a living billboard for what America made possible. care became possible, and the images it conjured swirled in the family imagination for decades. From where we were, we couldn't tell if my family members had left their old problems behind to embrace new ones—we were only aware that the familiar problems that made up our lives every day did not exist in their new world. The very fact of leaving and the way we imagined it created the illusion, albeit temporary, of a complete rethink.

When I was eight years old and living in Buenos Aires, two of my mother’s American cousins ​​visited a large family with their children—five of them in total, all about my age. I perceived them as alternative but impossible versions of myself; our differences are an accident of circumstances, but still insurmountable. They looked like me – my grandmother was their grandfather's sister! – but also not at all like that. They spoke English; I only knew the word “door”. Their clothes seemed completely new; I wore second-hand clothes. And most importantly, my country, as I assumed, belonged to them, but theirs did not.

My second cousins ​​had a legitimate connection to the culture I was born into—after all, their grandparents were born in Argentina and raised there. But there is a special kind of escapism that seems to emerge even without such a connection. I've lived here since 2002 – more on that in a minute – and have been hearing some version of “I'll just move to Canada” ever since, although I've never met anyone who actually follows through with it.

This statement is a kind of protest, as well as a manifestation of a sense of ownership, an individual expression of the geopolitical relationships that the United States has cultivated throughout its history. (In one word: imperial.) In 30-second videos on Instagram and TikTok, people (mostly women) born in the United States explain what it's like to leave In fact Seems like. They list things they wish they had known before moving – say to Spain, although the content of the video remains largely the same no matter where they move – or things they would never do again now that they live in Spain; or things that they know they will never get used to, no matter how long they live in Spain. For these “expats,” as it seemed for all my distant and not-so-distant expat relatives, moving to “Spain” was the solution to a problem: among other things, their inability to afford housing in the United States, to give their children a true bilingual education, or, as it increasingly looked like, to cope with the vulgar and brutal political reality of the country of their birth. Yet their new life abroad seems to have disappointed them in some ways.

Although there is certainly an increase in the number of cases where people talking about moving abroad, both online and offline, as well as increasing interest According to companies with names like GTFO Tours, the actual numbers do not yet reflect the mass exodus. What kind of rise is this In fact reflects increasingly widespread, generalized entertainment idea a departure that probably doesn't go so far as to involve obtaining visas or finding new schools for children or the monumental task of acquiring a second language for adults. In this imagined version of events, life is grafted from one place to another, like a plant into favorable soil: there is no restoration; is only thriving. I just want to imagine this picture because it is devoid of any friction – homesickness, desires that cannot be fulfilled; deprived of the impossibility of returning, of the fact that, once you leave, you will never have a real home anywhere else.

It doesn't surprise me that this particular dream is now gaining momentum, not because America is fraught with problems more than at any other point in history, but because—at least for people with the cultural, social, or literal capital to move abroad—it has become harder to perform that age-old ritual of coping with difficulties: ignoring them. In one online video, an expat woman describes her spending habits in America: how big her house was, how massive her and her husband's trucks were, how many children's clothes she owned, and how new their backpacks were at the start of each school year. I think about the existential discomfort that consumption must have masked, and how difficult it must have been to maintain all those purchases. No wonder she wanted to leave.

Walking away—in the image that comes to mind when watching someone else do it on Instagram—also means leaving behind your historical context, freeing yourself from social and cultural consequences that you never chose. When my parents expressed the care gene, Argentina was in crisis. The economy collapsed; at the end of 2001, the country had five presidents in eleven days. It became unclear when things had gone wrong, or if they ever would. The departure was made in order to avoid something that was perceived as irreparable, which was also, albeit unconsciously, an attempt to live outside the forces of history; another impossibility. But despite everything, it suddenly seemed possible—for a while. For about the first decade I lived in the United States, until I was 20 years old, I felt that the national history that had once belonged to me was distant and no longer accessible. In this new place I could become a completely ahistorical subject. There was nothing irreparable here, because nothing was broken, and if it was, I didn't know enough—about the history of the place, about its politics—to perceive it as such. If there had ever been a time when things were “better”, I wasn't here for it, and neither was anyone I knew or trusted, which meant I had nothing to complain about. When George W. Bush became president for the second time—despite my objections to his belligerence, his decision to create ICE, and the xenophobia he fueled, which directly affected me—I didn't feel like I had anything to do with it. I couldn't vote, and neither did my parents. Outwardly, I lived the life of the teenagers I saw in the dubbed shows I watched on TV as a child: going to school, playing football, going to dances. I applied to college. I dreamed about what kind of job I would like to have. I threw a baby shower for a friend of mine who got pregnant as a teenager without thinking about how she could end up like that. (Read: all the political and interpersonal systems that failed her.)

I now realize that this was a version of the American Dream, even if it wasn't exactly what I imagined my cousins ​​would have when they visited Buenos Aires many years ago. All Americans were born into this: the illusion that you can somehow escape the consequences of politics, that your life can exist without this burden, always hovering in that shameful “unbearable lightness.”

And it really was unbearable. If coming here would solve some problems, it would be easier to find money; everyday life has become safer; the country became more politically stable, at least temporarily – it also created a number of new countries. Of course, I was ahistorical, but this quality was accompanied by a noticeable lack of free will. I felt like I was living in a stereotype; I could only perceive this country and its people through pre-existing narratives of convenience (and its corrupting abundance), community (and its alienating lack) and culture (and its corrosive lack). I was full of anxiety. I was brought here without a say at best, and against my will at worst – I cried for days after the dinner announcement that our family was moving to a small rural town in Tennessee – and I wanted to be thrown out by a similar act of God. I counted the days, months and years that passed in a process exactly the opposite of that of the prisoner, always moving away from the goal rather than closer to it, and each of them was a score against me.

I was trapped in a chimera, an impossibility, and I longed, in a word, for reality. It suddenly appeared in the person of Donald Trump. By the time of his first election, I had already been a US citizen for several years. I was a graduate student at Berkeley. That night, sitting in the basement lecture hall listening to Douglas Crimp connect ACT UP and art history, I felt the energy in the room turn toward the door in the back. First, one and two at a time, and then whole rows of people ran out. After the woman looked up from her phone and announced in disbelief, “He’s winning,” I joined them, jumping into a taxi with two friends to meet others who were watching the results in a town bar. The next morning, as we took the BART train back to the East Bay, the mood was funereal. Silence. A few tears. The woman opposite me sank to the ground in despair. A man of about fifty stood, searching the faces of the other passengers for sympathy or empathy, I couldn’t tell. I think a certain idea of ​​America is dead. Justice, opportunity, a place where everything is possible for everyone.

It has died again countless times since: with the Muslim ban in 2017, with George Floyd, with millions of deaths from COVID-19; with every announcement that health insurance premiums will rise next year, that SNAP benefits will end, that rents will continue to rise, that houses have never cost more. The dream dies again with every news story that reveals a gaping hole where the moral center should be.

It continues to die, and this is what makes people look for it in their dreams of leaving; it's a dream about saving a dream. But in this death for me, as for hundreds of thousands of others, there was also something like birth. An opportunity to see this place as it really was and try, no matter how impossible it might seem or feel, to do something about it. Doing the work to make life work where it already is. This is more difficult than it seems in fantasy, and more significant, but it is real.