When speaking of the 1980s and 90s, I like to refer to it as the previous century. “In the previous century, we didn’t have high speed internet,” I might say. It lends a sort of historical ring to it, like a time and place long ago and far away. In a sense, it was a long way back. Last night, I laid in my bed and watched the last innings of the final game of the baseball World Series on my cell phone. I couldn’t have done that in the previous century. Times change, things evolve. People too– we change and evolve with the passing of the years as well.
This is relevant to me because I recently reread articles I wrote back in the 1990s about my life in Costa Rica. I was younger then, less patient, more ready to criticize and lampoon Tiquicia. I wrote a column, for two different monthlies that catered to the expat communities here. I was, to put it bluntly, a smart ass.
I cringed while reading some of my more pointed articles. At the time I was writing from the point of view of an American who was frustrated with the things we took for granted up there. Down here, the telephone company was still a monopoly. Cell phones were rare and the still in demand landline phones always had a long waiting list.
Many heavily traveled roads and streets were dirt, which meant dust in the summer and mud and potholes in the rainy season. Cops were either apathetic and poorly trained or corrupt predators, using the badge to solicit bribes. I ridiculed shopkeepers who whipped out their calculators for the simplest addition. The local customs, the local diet, all was fair game. My audience, which consisted mainly of other impatient expats like myself, ate it up.
I was in the early years of my second marriage– to a Tica– and the only time I wrote without a condescending voice was the occasional article about home and family life. Otherwise, I felt like my marriage to a local somehow gave me a free pass to be a self-appointed expert on everything that Ticolandia lacked.
A Tico friend who was fluent in English read my stuff and wasn’t overly offended, mainly because he shared my acerbic sense of humor. He suggested that I turn the tables, and write something from the point of view of a Costa Rican fed up with Gringo arrogance. So I did. I wrote from the perspective of a fictional brother-in-law.
I have numerous brothers-in-law, but none speak English well enough to write like my imaginary cuñado. I laid it on heavy, with over the top mentions of fat, aging gringos, their tongues coated blue from sucking on tablets of viagra, chasing girls young enough to be their granddaughters.
My narrator bragged about all the naive, panting young gringas he happily bedded and then dropped when the next Latino hungry candidate caught his eye. It was a 600 word middle finger in the face of the expat community. I had hoped it would be taken in jest, but I was wrong. One retired military vet angrily asked where my make believe brother-in-law lived, because he was ready to punch him out. Another reader greeted me with a frown and said that visiting tourists would read it and never want to come back. The response was so overwhelmingly negative that I found myself avoiding people on the street until the next edition of the monthly came out.
Imagine writing something and then hoping people did not read it. That month was a turning point in the way I looked at the place I had chosen to live. Just because most Ticos would not be able to read my articles did not make them any less nasty. It was a bit like making faces at a blind person.
I began to write from a more objective and empathetic viewpoint, with an eye toward getting to know the culture and the history. I mined my wife and her family for material– not for laughs but for honest appraisals of their lives and how they differed from my own. I sometimes made myself the butt of the joke and discovered it was okay to laugh at my own occasional ineptitude when it came to adapting to my surroundings.
And so it has followed all these years later. I am no longer an outsider, looking in, ready to ridicule. I am as much Tico as Gringo, on the inside now, where the viewpoint is completely different
