Based on real interviews with the immigrant population of South Florida. Adapted and translated to english by Isaac Sante.
The interior of the cruise was a carnival of color and food, making the guest forget about life on land. I played into the escape fantasy by serving at the restaurant, one beer and burger at a time.
While the guest dreamed of escaping to the ocean, I dreamed of living on the land. I would go into the restaurants outside the port and come back. Moving from international waters into the United States on a lunch break. People didn't care back then.
The bubble finally bursted when I was laid off from the cruise. Something about my English not being good enough to serve food. I laid my back against the wall outside the cruise next to a line of other laid off servers. They cried as we had about three hours before the cruise would drop us back in our home countries.
I reached for my pocket and found $50 dollars. “Fuck it, Im not going home broke.”
I took a shuttle to the port entrance and called a cab to Miami Beach. I walked Ocean Drive with its majestic neon signs and enjoyed the shadow of palms on my face.
At night I laid my head on my backpack next to the beach restrooms.
“Where am I going to sleep, how am I going to eat?” I did that for three nights.
On the fourth day while walking around, asking for work, Tony the owner of a taco restaurant hands me a menu. “Learn it, and start getting orders”, he said. I was catching myself in a new country with nothing, but then again I was leaving behind even less.
On the sixth day as I learned what the fuck a quesadilla is, I pump into a waiter in the restaurant next to me. I leaped towards him and started crying after realizing it was my brother Miguel. I had known he was in Miami but we had lost communication after he moved.
I'm glad I took that cab.
I like to go to church as a ritualistic thing. I pray to the cosmos or something because I agree with the church that there is a connection between all forms of life and matter. Maybe that thing is god, it's something we are yet to understand in any scientific sense.
What I enjoyed about the show Cosmos is how Carl Sagan broke down our understanding of the universe, bridging humanity with something as stale as a rock or moving as water. We came to understand that the molecules that create us are also spread in the guts of the milky way.
Why does this exist? Why do you see it and what is your relationship to the things around you?
We are one and everything affects each other.
That’s real power. Knowing concretely you are in everything then you can’t have enemies. It’s strange that my parents and their generation took the power of connection through god and hijacked it to create barriers. “I'm more righteous or my truth is more accurate”.