Mojado

When I was living in California during the 80’s and 90’s I never felt like an immigrant. I feared the migra and the ghost of deportation haunted me 24/7 no questions asked. But I never felt like an immigrant. I could never relate, for example, to real immigrants, those that traveled land, sea and air to get to California. They were a world apart. Specially Mexicans who were from Mexico’s deepest south, boy, were they ever immigrants. Like a new dimension sucked them into my time capsule. Either way’s I was at home whether I had legal papers or not. And am just darn sure there were loads like me back then.

Here in Sweden am an immigrant and to be totally up front with you I still don’t have the slightest inkling what in heaven’s tarnation that means, this is true, really. But I can’t escape it, people see it in me and hence end up in their warped sense of a vortex that includes the nasty blackhole of feeling like an immigrant. Every now and then I may have an outburst about my condition of being an immigrant because society is steered by those conditions and not my conditions, O Captain my Captain is neigh here. But for the most part, and I do mean the most part, I live oblivious to the fact that am an immigrant and I live in Sweden, period.

And I think I don’t tend to live my life hating every nook and cranny of Sweden and consider myself well adapted to this society with a few minors discomforts here and there. I certainly don’t go around spewing my complaints down my breath every waking second of the day. Yet there are some and these some, boy do they ever eat, shit and sleep I hate this place their waking 24 hours being. God, I can’t stand it when another immigrant comes to me looking for solace or a sympathetic ear to pour down every darn ache and pain that ails their soul for being in Sweden.