Marcelo E. Fuentes: Introduction

During this summer, I had the opportunity to visit Canada for the first time. I went with my partner and her family to the town of Halifax, which uncanningly reminded me of my Chilean hometown, Puerto Montt: a similar little port with a couple of islands in front, great seafood, and lots of foreign (mostly American) tourists arriving in gigantic cruise ships. While walking on Halifax’s seafront, it suddenly hit me: I remembered being a teenager in Puerto Montt, walking on its seafront or “costanera” and looking at the American tourists while meditating about my uncertain future. Would I ever be able to travel abroad, know other countries, speak other languages, as I had always dreamed of? My chances were far from good: my parents had only crossed Chile’s borders during their honeymoon to go to neighboring Argentina. My dad, who had joined the Chilean Navy as a teenager just to escape poverty, had also been to England as a young sailor and had treasured a few pictures from that trip forever. That was it: for a low -middle class family in Chile under a dictatorship, the idea of traveling the world was nothing short of an insane dream. I envied those smiling, packed-with-dollars American tourists so much.

And now, thirty years later, I was here in Canada, as a recently naturalized American citizen, having just walked out of a cruise ship, trying the local fish and admiring the landscape. When I suddenly realized I had become exactly the kind of person I had wanted to be as a teenager, I wondered if my past self would have felt proud or resentful towards my present self. Because, after all, what was the connection between those two people, the one who I am now and the one who preemptively envied (or even hated) me? Could I really think about them as two separate stages of the same person? Or are they just two completely different people, period?

Most of our contributors, as many of our faculty and students at NJCU, have had a similar cleft in their lives and identities. They or their parents were born in another country, they came to the US searching for a better future and sometimes they found it; even when they did, that achievement is often tinged with plenty of lost battles and disappointments, because such is life. Whenever we talk about migration in our classes, there is always a lot of hope and satisfaction with our parents’ and our own achievements, but also many stories of disappointment, encounters with xenophobia and racism, nostalgia for people and landscapes we will rarely or never see again. Other unpredictable and sometimes traumatic circumstances (the death of a parent, a global pandemic, economic difficulties)

only add to the confusing plot of our personal histories. Are we actually the same ones we were three years ago? What about twenty-five or fifty years ago, when some of us did not exist and others were just little kids? Who are we, really: these or those?

The contributors to this issue wonder about these and other questions regarding the connection between their identities and personal (hi)stories. In our bodies, thirty trillion cells get replaced every two or three months, enough to create an entirely new person. Certainly, therefore, it is not our material sheath what provides the connective tissue of our identities. What about our ideas, experiences, feelings? After how many trillions of them we start becoming a different human being?

Our first contributor, Dyana Rivera Barreiro, has a distinct answer for some of these questions. In her poem, “La mujer que soy es la niña que un día fui," she imagines an encounter with herself as a child and she discovers that both versions of the same person have something to offer and learn from each other. Diana Concepcion’s text "Un lugar al que pertenecer,” addresses another kind of conflict: the one caused between the mixed descent of the speaker and the expectations of other people for an unambiguous identity, until she learns to take pride and refuge in her full, magnificent multiculturality. Similarly, "Las raíces de mi vida" by Francy M. Moser talks about the dignity and beauty of a mixed-race, multicultural Latin American identity: because the speaker ’s personal histor y is also the histor y of an entire community, she realizes that both her roots and her future are inseparable from those of so many other people like her.

The next three contributors are also concerned about their identities, but they see them as much more closely intertwined with those of their loved ones. "¿Quieres café?" by Yoandra Vázquez Pérez, for example, describes the impact of the covid pandemic on a loving family routine characterized by the simple gestures of sharing a cup of coffee, a kiss, and casual conversations between the narrator and her father. In "Estar sin ti es estar sin mí," Adnaloy Fierro connects the bittersweet experience of migration with both the affection and the longing for her grandmother, while affirming that we always carr y our loved ones with us wherever we go. In a similar way, the narrator of "Ama sua, ama quella, ama llulla" by Ernestina Vargas sees her entire life, identity, and values influenced by the moral principles and wise advice of her grandmother : just a few words in a different language can carry, despite their strangeness, an entire world of integrity and wisdom across generations.

Finally, the poem "Soy" by Emilio Angulo Perkins goes back to the fundamental topics and questions of this volume: Is it possible to define who we are? Should we just settle for establishing who, or what, we are not? The speaker ’s final answer is as clear and revealing as any of the previous contributions: “Somos / otredad que hermana” (“We are / an otherness that unites”), he concludes.

In January of this year, Zen master Thích Nhất Hạnh died in his homeland, Vietnam. He used to say that we should never talk about being, but only about interbeing, because nothing exists by itself, but only in a deep, intrinsic connection with everything and everybody else. He used to teach that a cloud never dies because, when a cloud seemingly disappears, it actually becomes rain or hail or snow or ice, and then ends up being river or tea before going back to the seas and skies. We are not different from clouds: we only exist in relation to others and we never completely disappear, but travel around the universe in different forms. Once we were elements in a star, now we are people over this earth, tomorrow we may be dirt and clouds. Who knows? The important thing is that our stories never end and we don’t, either. We exist, we love, and we persist in the existence of our love for others.

Editor of Voces Latinas

is of Colombian descent. She was born in New Jersey and raised in Puerto Rico, before coming back to New Jersey to build her adult life. A transfer student from the Interamerican University of Puerto Rico, Dyana is currently majoring in Spanish and minoring in General Business. Also, she plans to get a master's degree in Education Administration.