martin bonadeo | texts | inmigrant/argentine

For a newborn child everything is new, everything surprises him. One of the first predictable phenomena he will find are cycles: he knows that at night the sun sets, but it'll rise again in the next morning; we learn this and other very basic cycles in a very instinctively way.

From that first moment, we acquire more and more knowledge, and we began to feel more comfortable with many things. There’s a moment where we settle and feel that things belong to ourselves. After this moment we process changes in our environment in a similar way, and each time we need less time to adopt the new conditions. But what happen if we move from one continent to other/ how much time does it take to include and understand space, social codes and idiosyncrasies from other culture? Can we forget our identity and begin to act a mew one? How long does this individual conquest takes? A year, two years, a decade, a generation, two generations and I already consider myself from here.

The sun offers us a simple way to conceive time: once a year it is located exactly in the same place in the sky. And we usually remember that day as an anniversary, a date to remember. I was born thirty years ago, more than a hundred years ago some of my greats-grandfather arrived from Italy, Spain, France or the Austrohungarian Empire and walked by this same street. With many different suns, hundreds of people from foreign countries enter this country through this pavement full of hope, looking for a better living situation. They arrived with not much more than their shades to learn a language, a way of life and the customs of a new place. Not everything was completely new, they already knew that the sun was going to set at night but will rise again the next morning.

But our shadow varies in different latitudes and ours projection’s shape in the ground will differ according to the light’s angle of incidence. Also, our being vibrates in a different way depending on the piece of earth we have under our feet. There are many new sensations, strange spaces, different colors, unknown textures, scents and flavors. Will we ever be the same again?

We usually organize the life in pairs of opposites: yesterday and today; morning and afternoon; North and the South, here and there; we and the others. But what happens when we began to be “the others”?; when we began to be adults? When the other people's thing begins to be our own? When we began to be part of an alien’s culture? When we began to be called Argentines?

11/28/2005

español