Language and migrant experience

Shortly before arriving in Australia I saw a video in which the activist Thimbo Samb said he discovered he was black after migrating: he discovered he was different. Although I don´t live the experience of being racialised, I completely understood what he was talking about, as since I live in Australia I discovered I am Latin and Argentinian.

Actually, it was a rediscovery, rather than a discovery. Since I am an adult, I understand that our countries have a similar history that has led to very unequal societies, with economies wich are devastated by foreign capital. Understanding that I am Argentinian took me some thought processes, in order to distinguing belonging to a common history, from nationalism.

That is how I came to understand that I am Argentinian because I was born in a country where there was a military dictatorship in the recent past, where the native peoples were dispossessed of their lands and today experience persecution and criminalisation, where annual inflation was of 94,8% in the last year and the currency has been constantly devalued for the last twenty years. And also there are a lot of beautiful things, incredible people, art flourishing in the neighbourhoods, an incomparable popular intensity.

Living in Argentina I used to think a lot about my privileges as a white Latina. I think there is a gap in the collective identity and in how we think about ourselves, which has not yet been reflected on much but which undoubtedly implies a place of privilege. Because we granddaughters, great-granddaughters, great-great-granddaughters of European migrants do not suffer repression in our territories, our houses are not burnt down and we are not killed by the State from behind. Even if we don’t have native blood, our roots have been cut off.

In Australia I found a new aspect: I understood what does it means being Latin, Argentinian and migrant. I see in social media pictures of people all over the world, scattered, pushed by the deepening crisis in an election year with desolate perspectives.

Of course I live my experience from the point of view that it is a privilege to be here. I had the necessary financial resources and emotional network to do so. Living in a different country is challenging but also nurturing, the familiar is left behind and something new opens up. Something that forces you to completely rethink yourself.

For me, migrating was a forced mourning of all the expectations I had for my life, things that weren´t happening but to wich my heart was still attached. Once I could do it, I began to open myself to the possibility of being reborn as a migrant.

I remember the vertigo during the transfer after the flight Buenos Aires – Miami, when the world stopped being in Spanish and started being in English. Ceasing to be a native speaker is an instantaneous loss of privilege, the one that gives you something as simple as talking like the other. Even if you have studied, watched movies and listened long hours of podcasts, arriving and meeting the living language is quite different. The first few weeks it’s even dizzying, it’s like trying to watch a film without subtitles but you can not say “I am tired, I´ll turn it off”. A movie that never ends.

Little by little gaining confidence, fluency and vocabulary: accepting our mother tongue is necessary to embrace our experience.

So here I am. Pushing the limits of language to continue doing one of the things I love the most.