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BILINGUAL BOOKS

Other Voices

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From the Americas to Jaén / Desde las Américas a Jaén

Migration Stories / Historias de migraciones

by Jon Lindsay Miles

Published: May 2011

Includes sixteen full-colour photographs selected by those who tell their stories in this collection

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Our first bilingual book gathers a dozen voices from Spanish America to tell the story of their migrations and arrivals amongst the olive groves of the north-eastern Andalusian province of Jaén. The translation between the English and Spanish is closely tied to be of practical use to language students or those working with translation, without compromising the pleasures of a good literary read.

The following paragraphs give a taste of what’s behind the cover:

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Guillermo, 49

Cuba

Someone wrote me a letter of invitation so that I could leave Cuba for a visit, but it was refused. It’s something that happens a lot. So people begin to look for the only other way out. Russia was the single country to which you could travel without having to apply for a visa. Many people opted to go there but, to be honest, people who want to leave Cuba will go to any country in the world. They will get onto rafts in the middle of the night and risk their lives to leave. I left to improve my daily life and that of my family. I left to seek freedom, democracy and the personal rights that all people ought to have. You can’t express yourself in Cuba, what you think about things. If you do you go to prison. I couldn’t even say goodbye to my mother, I told her I was going on a trip to the capital city. My son was getting married a couple of days later, and he expected me to be there with him. You can’t tell anyone anything.

My departure was a moment of absolute uncertainty. You set out and you have an idea of how it may be, but you have no idea if you’ll get anywhere at all. What’s going to happen? It’s the question you live each minute with. I had no experience at all of travel. When you arrive at the passport control desk, you know that it can end at any moment. They can stop you leaving and that’s that. And you pass through, and then you start to think about what awaits you on the journey. I thought I’d be in Spain within three or four days, but it didn’t work out like that.

Elvira, 45

Colombia

Home? My homes have been tramatic, a lot more pain than sure. The violence that would accompany me through my home life in Colombia began in the time ofLa Violencia, as it’s called, when the Liberal candidate for the presidency, Jorge Gaitán, was assasinated in 1948. The Chusmas [rabble or mob, in Spanish] – as his supporters were called – rose against the Pájaros [birds, but in the Colombian political context of the 1950s, hired killers in the pay of landowners] to protest his murder. I don’t know if the Pájaros killed Gaitan or not, but their followers burned down the big house and stoned to death my mother Lydia’s first husband. She escaped with the three children out the back of the house and over the rooftops at the moment when the Pájaros were killing their father Horacio in the front doorway. [...]

Instead of flying directly to Spain, we decided to “go round the world” to avoid problems on entry. It was easy to get the three month entry visa to Spain. Nevertheless, because of the problem of drug trafficking, it wasn’t uncommon for flights arriving direct from Colombia to be sent back – and with all the passengers still on board! And things were a bit more crooked than I’m telling them…

We’d booked an internal flight from Bogotá to Barranquilla, then on to Miami with Avianca and finally to Madrid on an Alitalia flight via Milan. But I still had my US visa and so we had an alternative plan: I suggested to Pablo that he escape from the airport into the United States when we were in transit in Miami, and I would use my visa to meet him outside. So there was a plan A and there was a plan B, and, whatever happened once we’d left Colombia, we weren’t going to turn back. We carried some of my clothes in Pablo’s suitcase and some of his in mine, in case we lost one of them, and we left home. We said goodbye to [my son] Alirio at the airport and began our journey. Pablo also left behind two young children.

We had a long wait in Miami airport, and I can only tell you that I felt a great loneliness. I was an ant in this enormous building and, with all the information around me in English and the impossibility of communicating with anyone, I thought that this must be how a deaf-mute feels in the world. I was alone because Pablo had to pass through transit with an escort because he had no visa to enter the US. I was wearing very high heels for the journey and I had to walk miles inside that airport. My bags had to go through customs again and, to my surprise, I was treated very well and politely. I went through immigration and began to search for Pablo. I finally met up with him in the departure lounge.

We were sitting just a few metres from the automatic door that was opening and closing to the outside. I said to Pablo I was going to faint, or to pretend I’d had a heart attack, so he could escape. He began to sweat. “Are you going to escape?” I said. He looked at me and he looked at the security guard. He looked back at me and back at the security guard. And he was sweating. I knew then that we were going to Europe.

Susana, 41

Paraguay

Immigrant Press

But now I feel different. People have helped us a lot, Rodrigo’s cousins let us live with them and gave us food and work. I began looking after old people. There have been problems of course, with one or two unpleasant folk, and, when someone referred to me as “that starving woman”, I felt humiliated. People don’t use the word immigrant here, they say “her de por allí [from nowhere]”. But I can be honest and say that everyone has turned out to be wonderful with us. The most amazing thing they did was to all sign a petition that was sent to the Town Council asking that we be given accommodation in the school house, the house where teachers used to live before they began to travel long distances in cars to work. I don’t know who had the idea but it was wonderful, and we got the place. It’s very small, the bedrooms are tiny, but we’re fine here! I’m very happy and at last I’m at peace. When we drove up the long hill I thought this was an insignificant place, but now these people are my second family. They are fond of me and show me their affection and I’m fond of them too, including the teachers who come here every day to teach our children. This small village is my second Paraguay, it’s the best place in Spain, the people are truly humane.

Elena, 33

Honduras

My mother has had connections with a non-governmental organisation and, when I was a young girl, she used to invite the members of a Dutch church group to our house. I remember that I used to complain at how she always fed these visitors first, how she gave them the best fruit and we, her children, had to wait and eat what was left. There was even a day when a bus-load of twenty people all came to shower in our house! This is the attitude that people in Honduras have towards those who come from other countries. This is the attitude I brought to Europe and I’ve found that things are different here. Here people don’t treat foreigners like this, they don’t look at them in the same way. [...]

What happened was that I had a relationship that didn’t go well and I decided to change my life, to change the air around me, thinking it would put everything behind me. I made the decision to go and left the country all within two months. But the burden of the loss of the things that matter to me in life has been greater than the relief of putting that relationship behind me. You think you won’t feel the pain of  being away from home, not so much, but it’s greater than you can imagine.

Roberto, 13

Argentina

My father died on 24 November 2008. He went to the doctor, the cardiologist, who said he was all right. And then he was playing with my brother and his face changed colour. I ran to the doctor when he collapsed, to call for an ambulance. Mum was pressing on his chest. When the ambulance came the doctors told us to go to the neighbour’s house to watch TV. When they came round later they said he was dead. I tried to help my brother and sister, and to support my mother. I tried.

My mother doesn’t work, she looks after the house. We share the housework between us. She doesn’t spend time with us. She wants to go back to Argentina – we all do. It’s where our friends and family are. It’s possible we could go back at the end of this next school year, but there are also doubts about this. We talk about it but it’s not decided.

Úbeda? What does Úbeda mean to me? It’s the place where I live now. The best thing about being here is the landscape, the vegetation and the parks, like Parque Norte. And you can see the mountains from the balcony. Argentina is all built-up, it’s only the landscape of the city. The most difficult thing about being here is just getting used to it, and the difficulty of making friends.

Since I arrived, I’ve thought about what I’m going to do in the future, what kind of work I’ll do. I wonder if it will be difficult to get a job because I don’t have the knowledge you need to be successful. But later, when I’ve done my studies, I think I’ll be all right. It’s strange, but when I watch television these ideas about it being difficult come to me.

This conversation? It’s been relaxed, and I’ve talked to you. I’ve thought about my things, things I don’t talk to my family about much. And I can free myself of the things that I carry around in my consciousness. It’s strange, I was always at home in Argentina, and then I had to change, to come here.

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OTHER BOOKS

"An adventure in perception..."

Along the Way. Walking in Úbeda

by Jon Lindsay Miles

Published in 2009

Includes sixteen full-colour photographs taken around the town in the changing light of the Andalusian sun. The views are not the standard compositions one finds in the tourist guides on sale.

Along the Way received its first review from Clive Scott, author of Translating Rimbaud’s ‘Illuminations’ (2006) and Street Photography (2007):

“An absorbing biographical and autobiographical portrait of the City of Úbeda, not so much a travel guide as an adventure in perception. Jon Lindsay Miles writes with a stylistic gracefulness and a searching interest in the human that offers the reader the kind of insight to be found in the pages of an arresting novel. Moments of savouring, moments to savour.“

From the Introduction to Along the Way:

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Eduardo stopped his bicycle at the kerb and called me over. “Will you come to my home and talk with my girlfriend?” he said.

I was weary after four months’ travelling in the Southern Cone. Fray Bentos, my last stop on the Uruguayan leg, was a mere thirty kilometres away, and I was having to share the bathroom of the Mercedes Youth Hostel with members of an adjoining sports club whose toilet-training had never been completed. But walking the streets of any new land provokes questions about life beneath the surface of its hotel rooms and restaurants and general scenery, and so Eduardo’s unusual invitation was too good to refuse. I decided to stay another night in Mercedes.

There are a number of visitor guides to what is nominally called the Ciudad de [City of] Úbeda translated into English (and one of them is comprehensible), but none of them tells you what it’s like to live in the eastern Andalusian town that is my home. Along the more typical guidebook tour describing its sights, the idea of this book was to include a narrative to Úbeda’s life and culture along the way. This story of my first year in Spain includes as an appendix an account of early experiences of the health and medical services on offer to “we locals”.

Most visitors to Úbeda come to see its architecture and so the chapters of this book are organised around five walks that describe all the town’s important buildings and their historical context; but the ambition of its narrative is broader.

Reading is for me a pleasure when a writer has used words to evoke a feeling or a perception rather than offer a description of it. This kind of narrative awakens autobiographical thoughts and memories and strengthens my participation in the story. Rather than offering the standard views found in most guides, the accompanying photographs are similarly intended to evoke, rather than describe, the artistic beauty of Úbeda’s architectural heritage: an invitation to make one’s own journey by way of the text.

A UNESCO World Heritage site

That afternoon in 1993 with Eduardo and his girlfriend Estela allowed me to grasp something of the reality of life beneath appearances in Uruguay, from the redundancy of locking a rented bicycle in their patio, to the legacy of the military dictatorship and history of “disappearances” that had ended only eight years before our conversation.

My puzzlement over the manner of Eduardo’s invitation was explained when I discovered that Estela spoke some English; Eduardo’s act was a double kindness, and he listened to the sounds of his girlfriend’s words as eagerly as I did to their meanings. I left their home and cycled back to the hostel toilets with the warm feeling that the streets of this small town in South America now belonged to me, a little to me, in a way they hadn’t a few hours earlier.

Along the Way is not any type of Bible of life in Úbeda – although I hope my fellow Ubetenses would recognise their town in its pages. It’s a book that suggests answers to the questions I asked in my early months here.

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