Calida

As this semester goes on and as I'm writing in this blog, I seem to be discovering more and more that everyone, EVERYONE has a story. Everyone has had something wonderful or horrible happen to them, and everyone could fill a book with the strange people, events, and memories of their lives. Each person in this blog has a fascinating story. Whether the way I tell those stories is fascinating or not, each of them has had experiences that have entertained, inspired, and grieved me, and I know that their stories, in this country at least, will probably be ignored.
All of the people in this blog gave up something very important in a gamble for a better life. Most of them gave up family, home, comfort, culture, legality...things that I would not be able to sacrifice so easily. A lot of them are winning the risk, but tonight's blog is about someone who didn't.
Calida was a small, curvy, gorgeous 24-year-old girl from Colombia. She was just a hostess because of her poor English, but she was smart as hell. She had apparently gone to law school in Colombia, and she came to the US with her family and boyfriend, Alejandro, to find decent jobs and decent life. Hostessing was a temporary job to help her learn English, and her boyfriend was the bartender at another restaurant in our chain. They really were an amazing couple: charismatic, mature, super-intelligent, gorgeous. At parties, her boyfriend showed off his bartending skills when he made drinks for everyone. When the bartender at my restaurant did something cool or tried out a trick like making the drinks for customers at the bar stronger than for those at tables, he usually followed it with "Alejandro taught me to do that." Basically, they were good, respectable people. It sucks when bad things happen to good people.
I think the problems began when Calida missed several days of work, then showed up and said she was quitting. I don't know the details, but her family had to return to Colombia, and she had two choices: she could return with her family and perhaps never return, or she could stay in the US with her boyfriend and a be banned from Colombia for two years. I thought she would leave, but she decided to stay and kept working at the restaurant. We were friends, and on my last day on the job at the end of last summer, she gave me a wooden Colombian bracelet that I absolutely love and still wear often. After I quit, I didn't talk to her for a few weeks until she sent me a text message that sounded like something was wrong. I asked her if she was OK, and I was a little freaked out when she sent back, "Something bad happened. I can't talk about it now." I had to wait a couple weeks before she told me that she had to leave the US, but she couldn't tell me why. Before I had the chance to see her again, she was gone.
A couple months after Calida disappeared, I went out with the restaurant's bartender and his wife who were close to her, and then I heard the whole story. Calida and Alejandro had friends over to their house one night. They stayed up drinking and talking until 5 in the morning. Then the friends went home, and the couple got ready for bed. As soon as they turned off the lights, INS knocked on the front door, asked for Alejandro, and arrested him. They told her absolutely nothing. Calida didn't know what was going on for days and stayed at the bartender's house because she was afraid to go home. Then they shipped her boyfriend back to Colombia, and Calida spent the three weeks or so before she followed him packing and selling all of their stuff--she had to sell all the stuff that was supposed to be their new and permanent life in America. Now they are back in the shitty little town in which they started. They probably won't come back, but I have been invited to their wedding when they have it.
When Calida and Alejandro came to the US, they weren't illegal. They had visas, but they expired, and renewal was difficult. It's upsetting for me to see them go even though I know they were outside the law. Immigration is a real problem for this country, but life in general is a real problem in other countries. Those who come here do so in order to escape a cycle of poverty and lack of opportunities in their home countries. The solution does not involve escaping to the US; it has to start in Latin America, but until real changes begin, what can we or they do?

Alba

Alba is about the coolest chick I worked with. On my first day on the job, about the time I was beginning to think I was the only employee with a solid grip on the English language, this girl with really striking, crazy-looking gray contact lenses said, "You're new? ...Man, you're gonna learn Spanish." It was kind of encouraging I guess, and I did learn a good bit of Spanish since I knew barely a word past "hola" back then.
But my story is about Alba.
She is a lesbian who is pretending to be straight for a family and culture that won't necessarily accept her otherwise. In fact, the first time she told me about her preference was about a month after I quit because she heard I might be of the same orientation.
No one knows that Alba is gay except for her sister and her most liberal friends. She thinks that anyone who finds out will shun her, though she's had the same girlfriend for five straight years. She also lives in the basement apartment of her parents' house--with her girlfriend. As far as her parents go, the girl is just a close friend, but they have their suspicions.
As long as I worked with Alba, she was the most ambitious of my coworkers. I got pissed off sometimes because it seemed all she talked about was making money, investments, and success. I told her I just wanted to live my life and I didn't care about money (of course this was when I was making descent money, and I'd forgotten what it's like to scrape by), but she always talked about all the things she wanted to do that involved getting rich. One day she finally told me there was a reason she cared so much about money and that she would tell it to me one day.
That day was the night she came out to me in an Applebee's. It turns out she wants to become successful so bad because she is gay. Right now, she's in college, working, and paying for a car. She's also relying some on her parents because the rent she pays to live in their basement is cheap, but she is terrified of coming out to them. She and her girlfriend have separate beds, they won't hold hands in public, and they are careful about how they talk and act around each other. Over the years, several incidents have made her parents question her sexuality like when a cop found the girls sitting in a parked car together one night, but they believe what they want to believe. She is waiting until she knows she can fully support herself--and her girlfriend, I guess--to come out to everyone without worrying about whether they will disown her or not.

What I don't understand so well is why Alba feels she won't be accepted for loving a woman. It isn't just her family; she told me our coworkers would reject her too. She said it's the Hispanic culture that doesn't accept homosexuals, and she wanted to get away from the culture before she stopped hiding. She's already unattached anyway--her family moved from Mexico before she was born, and she speaks English and Spanish equally fluently. I'm confused about the Hispanic culture rejecting her more than any other for one main reason: most of the transvestites I've seen in Georgia have been Hispanics. I'm not sure about the difference, but I'll take her word for it.