Illustrated by kaya joan
La patria.
In Spanish, the motherland is really a father figure. The word comes from the Latin pater, or father, which is the root of patriot, as well. Like your father, la patria is deserving of your unwavering obedience.
Most of my adult life was spent estranged from my father due to differences of political opinion, or as he once told me, “because I refused to obey.” The thing is, when he was younger, my dad hadn’t been one to obey either. He left Bolivia when he was an adventure-seeking hippie in the 1960s and never went back to live there; he fled tradition and slow-paced village life, and found refuge in cosmopolitan Venezuela, a place that was then full of opportunities.
As a child growing up in Caracas, I had to sing to the big flag in the schoolyard each morning at 7 a.m., but I didn’t understand or care much about the lyrics to our patria‘s anthem. Down with chains!, the gentleman yelled, the words went. I didn’t question my father’s authority in those years, either. Quite the opposite: I thought my dad was the best, a fun guy. But my feelings about my patria and my father would change the older I got.
When I was around twelve, all I wanted to do was to go to the biggest mall in Caracas every weekend. I loved spending the afternoon at the Centro Ciudad Comercial Tamanaco (the CCCT), a sprawling multi-level structure built to resemble an inverse pyramid, rising above the chaos of Caracas’ concrete jungle. The CCCT boasted over five-hundred stores, four movie screening rooms, and many bars, dance clubs and fast-food eateries with English-language names. As far as my friends and I were concerned, this was the place to see and be seen. It showed that you had money to waste, or at least pretended you did. I looked up to the kids who told stories of getting their gold necklaces snatched in muggings that happened in the CCCT parking lot or outside our school gates. By the very next day, they’d show up with shiny new bling around their necks and I’d wonder what it would feel like to have that kind of money, so much that you could stockpile gold.
My dad was often without a job and broke. A free spirit, his friends would say. A deadbeat, my mom always said. His roster of beautiful younger girlfriends left him with little money or time to spend with me, and we started drifting apart. The less we saw each other, the more I learned to ignore his advice.
Then came El Caracazo in February 1989, the popular uprising that paralyzed my city with strikes, lootings, and extrajudicial killings. What started as impromptu protests over the rise in the price of gas and public transportation quickly became an insurrection that threatened to topple the neoliberal government of Carlos Andrés Pérez.
My mom and I watched it unfold on TV, horrified at the sight of dead bodies strewn on downtown streets and of stores with broken windows. We wondered when the violence would end. This is not us, the news anchors would say. The daily Diario El Mundo ran a headline that I still can’t forget even thirty years later: “Mata el Hambre con Comida de Perros!” (She Kills Her Hunger with Dog Food). The column told the story of a mother of seven who looted dog kibble to feed her family.
My friends and I were too naïve to understand the reasons behind El Caracazo, incapable of empathizing with the working-class women and men taking to the streets to face off against the repressive police and military. But my dad felt differently; he’d fled a dictatorship in Bolivia and was hungry for revolution. Even though he didn’t join the protests, he cheered them on from his couch. And he called out my lack of class consciousness, blaming my private school education, my love of American things. He cautioned me against turning my eyes away. “El Caracazo isn’t going to go away,” I remember him telling me. “It’s only going to lead to more and bigger protests. And then, hopefully, there will be change.”
Political instability spread out beyond Caracas over the next year. Coup d’etat attempts followed, led by an idealistic military officer from a working-class family—Hugo Chávez Frías. Meanwhile, Venezuela’s foreign debt continued to grow while President Carlos Andrés Pérez got embroiled in corruption charges, and eventually, was removed from office in 1993.
Looking back, I admit that my dad was right: El Caracazo would change things in Venezuela. It would go on living inside all of us, even as it pushed many people to leave the country, including my mom, our dog Valentina, and me.
***
We landed in a suburban New Jersey town in July 1990. I knew only a handful of English words: Hello. Thank you. My name is Ruxandra. Ok, you can call me Roxanne.
After school, I spent afternoons alone in the apartment watching TV, mostly commercials for all the things I could have bought if we only had the extra cash: furniture, acne treatments, shoes, dinners out, cars. A Burger King commercial seemed to be on all the time, and I, trying to hold on to the sense of independence I had in Caracas, decided this would be the very first place I’d walk to on my own in America.
The Burger King was just a couple blocks from our apartment, and I navigated the distance through traffic lights and English language street signs that I didn’t fully understand. Inside, the restaurant didn’t look nearly as cool as my old haunts in Caracas. People sat alone, looking down at the greasy countertops as they lingered for hours.
I missed my friends, and I missed my father, even though I already knew what it was like to miss him back home. I knew my dad couldn’t afford to pay the long-distance fees but I still spent my weekends sitting by the phone, hoping he would call. We had to stick to snail mail that was exchanged in increasingly longer intervals.
***
The American Psychological Association has a term for what I remember my first year in America to be like. Disorientation: the impaired ability to identify oneself or to locate oneself in relation to time, place, or other aspects of one’s surroundings. This can often be caused by alcohol or drugs or can occur in situations of acute stress, like experiencing fires or earthquakes. In my case, I’m sure my disorientation was magnified by my social isolation, my teenage malaise.
I romanticized our old life in Caracas and demonized the one in our suburban town, with its quiet tree-lined streets and orderly traffic, a town that annoyed me with its civilized neatness. I couldn’t find my way around, literally and figuratively. I could only walk to and from school with the assistance of a friendly crossing guard who mispronounced my name, and I could go to the local Burger King. I missed Caracas, with all its urban, sprawling, unpredictable chaos.
My dad used to tell me stories about how he missed his town in Bolivia after he’d left, mostly the spicy food, the landscape. He loved the flowering trees and vines and thought of himself as a country boy at heart.
***
Hugo Chávez became the President of Venezuela in 1999. Finally, Venezuela had a president who didn’t come from the corrupt ruling class. Finally, Venezuela had a president with big social justice dreams. His charisma was impossible to miss: He had this wide toothy smile, was quick to sing in public, and could seamlessly switch back-and-forth between quoting Marx and speaking in slang. My dad loved him, thought he was a real man, someone to look up to. My dad and I agreed since I fell for him too, even from afar. He was no pendejo, like the rest of them.
But just like El Caracazo, Chávez would surprise us. He unleashed attacks against anyone he saw as part of the opposition, and his policies pressured a lot of once-independent institutions—the universities and much of the nonprofit sector—to cozy up to him for fear of being shut down.
His repeated efforts to change term limits and his efforts to destroy a free press and silence dissent pushed me away ideologically. And it wasn’t just me: Most of my old classmates, neighbors and family friends—people from all parts of the political spectrum—were pushed out of the country as well.
But my dad stayed. Not because he was too old to start over again somewhere else like my mom and I had. It was because he believed in Chávez’s Plan de la Patria, an idealistic set of socialist policy and economic plans that Chávez described as an “all-out weapon for the counteroffensive,” against neoliberalism. But his administration was heavier on rhetoric than implementation. From afar, I was increasingly skeptical about him and his government, but my dad couldn’t see what I did. I thought he’d gone crazy. He probably thought I’d become a hyper-materialistic gringa. Although, I guess I don’t know for sure what he thought because we didn’t talk much for more than a decade.
Why exactly weren’t we talking? I couldn’t say. Every year that passed I thought would be the last of our estrangement. All I knew was that I wanted him to accept me as I was: a young emigrant who’d come of age elsewhere, in a place he’d never been, a place he distrusted. He jokingly referred to the United States as The Empire, like Chávez did. In fact, my dad was becoming increasingly absorbed into the cult of Chávez, like millions of other Venezuelans. Between us there was no middle ground.
***
In The Rebel, Albert Camus writes, “We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages.” I read his books in my twenties, and thought Camus was a god because of how well he seemed to explain my experience. When I left home, I dragged El Caracazo along with me as I moved from place to place. And I witnessed my already precarious relationship with my father vanish across time and space.
In the summer of 2002, the third time I’d been back to Venezuela since leaving, I sat in a taxi that would take me from Maiquetía Airport to a hotel in Caracas. My driver, José Ramírez, was in his mid 20s, like me.
“I voted for Chávez at first,” he told me, racing at full speed through city streets, running red lights, he said, so we wouldn’t get mugged by a thug on a motorcycle. “But then I got tired of his promises and I burned my red hat and all my other Chávez paraphernalia. That’s it!” José vigorously waved his right arm as he told me about being held at gunpoint four times in the six years he’d driven a cab in Caracas. Chávez, he said, was not doing anything serious to quell the violence in the country, and José was working overtime—as was the rest of his family—to save up enough money to move to Panama. “There are tons of Venezuelans living in Panama City now. I hear that life is better there.”
Venezuelans were also ending up next door in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Spain, Australia, the United States. Traitors, my father called them. I took it personally.
The Chávez government fostered a spirit of distrust about the media and that had started to make me—a journalist with an American passport—a persona non grata in my own country. On subsequent trips, I remember how difficult it was to do interviews, and I was questioned for hours at the airport and in government offices. In 2009, while I talked to people a few blocks from the presidential palace, a young man introduced himself by showing me a series of photos he’d taken of me all over Caracas—pictures of me in profile, inside a taxi, pointing my microphone at interviewees. “I’m just keeping track of what you’re doing,” he told me, with a smirk. I’d been given a minder, or rather, a reminder that I was being watched.
***
There is something about the idea of the fatherland that I’ve always found comforting. Not the patriotism part, but the part that explains my accent, my sense of humor, my love of long days at the beach and my itch to dance salsa music whenever I hear it even though I’m not particularly good at it.
About eight years ago, one of my father’s Venezuelan ex-girlfriends living in Mexico reached out to me and we started talking about missing home, about feeling endlessly uprooted. Then one day she told me, “Your dad is getting old.” I knew what she meant.
Over the years, my dad and I had started to rebuild our relationship. Both of us were older, mellower, willing to put our differences aside. At least I know I was. By then he seemed to feel as lonely in Venezuela as I had during my first year in America, disoriented by the disconnect between his ideals and the reality in his adopted country, a place where he could no longer find medicine or afford food.
He visited me once when I was living in Ecuador, but we never met in Venezuela again. Without discussing politics—we knew better than that by then—my dad explained that for my own sake, I shouldn’t try to come home.
Sometimes, he talked about returning to Bolivia, to the farm where he grew up, even though he hadn’t seen it in over three decades and it no longer belonged to our family. I tried to convince him to go back to Bolivia, too, so he could spend his twilight years in the countryside. But he felt it was too late.
He told me he was writing a collection of his childhood stories, starting with his very first memory of sitting on his father’s lap when he was three.
“Can you even remember your dad when you were three?” I asked. “I don’t think I have any memories from when I was that age.”
“I do remember it. Very clearly,” he said.
One week before my father died in March 2024, we had a long WhatsApp call. He told me that he’d grown disillusioned with the Chavista revolution now under his protegé, Nicolás Maduro. I couldn’t believe it: twenty years into the regime that had pushed us apart, and now he was admitting that it had failed. He didn’t acknowledge how much pain our political and emotional estrangement had caused over the years or how unloving it felt, and I couldn’t get myself to demand more from him either. In a way, I can’t blame the revolution for pushing us apart. But I can blame it for making it impossible for me to return to my own country to be with my father and hold his hand as he died, even if it meant doing so in silence.
My half-siblings and I have been talking about bringing his ashes to the Bolivian countryside next year, even though we don’t have land rooting us there. No matter. We’ll find a big old sauce llorón or weeping willow in some open field and spread his ashes there, or better yet, a retama, a bush also known as a broom. It has these ridiculously bright yellow blooms that take over its branches from April until the end of the summer. When my father first left the cold Bolivian high plains for tropical Venezuela, he brought some retama seed pods with him in his suitcase. He tried planting them in pots, and in the ground, gave them lots of love and attention. They never took.
