Nelly Lejter, Culture Clash (1): Strangers in a Strange Land

Native Venezuelans who pursue graduate studies in the United States become a special breed of expatriates.

Spending five or more years abroad always implies an uprooting. We learn to live in another culture, with different ways of thinking and of conceiving daily life. Moving to the United States, furthermore, implies a distinctive kind of uprooting. For us Venezuelans, living in America represents the fulfillment of a dream deeply embedded in the national culture. America embodies progress, development, the rule of the law, the land of opportunity and of real equality. America is a way of life that we will never be able to build in our tierra de gracia.

No matter how nationalist we are or how committed we may feel to coming back home, going aboard the ship of a graduate degree in the U.S. is always a big temptation. The first period there is of bewilderment and joy. I will never forget my amazement at the fact that a check could actually be sent by mail, without fear of having it lost or stolen. The standards of everything—from bank transactions to stopping at red lights to producing knowledge legitimate to the eyes of the American academic culture—are, more often than not, radically different. We learn the gringo ways and are proud of our success; if only we could hide that inconvenient Hispanic accent! We quickly and willingly forget our criollo ways.

After this initial period, life in America continues to show its promise—but also its downsides. An incident makes us acutely aware of our “Hispanic” condition. We learn of Oklahoma, Monica Lewinsky, Columbine. We become aware of the great extent to which America is a racist society—a feature we find difficult to grasp or to identify with. We start to learn that intolerance is an important part of the American culture. The idea that “something is very wrong with our society, with our lives” is not exclusive to the United States or to Venezuela. Yet we know that in America it is possible to enjoy material and immaterial goods that are simply unconceivable in Venezuela.

A growing feeling of symbolic and actual distance strongly contributes to shape our experience abroad. Today, the Internet makes it easy to keep in touch. E-mail and Web pages leave it up to us to keep ourselves to be aware of what is going on in the country. Those of us who were up North in the early 1990s barely got information from the two coup attempts from phone calls to our families and incipient communication by e-mail. Even with the greater information flow provided by the current technologies, the fact is that in a very short period, many things have changed radically in Venezuela. In very few years, “Venezuelan exceptionalism”—its image as an example of stability and harmony in a continent marked by civil wars and authoritarian regimes—became a thing of the past. We start to think that if and when come back, we will hardly recognize the country that we had left.

Economic conditions have also changed, obviously for the worse. Young professionals with top-level academic degrees will have to face the fact that economic returns will most likely not constitute the measure of their success. Nor will they represent the rewards one should only expect to enjoy after years of hard work and personal sacrifice. Short trips home for the holidays or vacations tend not to help when it comes to “keeping in touch”. The environment seems so hostile. The streets seem so dirty. Too much anarchy, too much bochinche; above all, too much uncertainty about our own future here. Nothing seems to work and no one seems to care enough to actually do something about it. Everyone seems stuck in the past, or rather—in the Chávez Era—in an impossible millenarian dream. It would seem that, while we were away, everyone in town drank from that poisonous well that made everyone crazy. We feel relief when the plane finally takes us back to our corner of the Empire. The final trip home is still far away.