Coming to America (IV): Rude Awakenings

From: “The Recollection: Bringing Back my Long-Gone Parents, One Object at a Time” By Jorge Goldstein

In my last blog, Bad Habits, I promised to tell you about some Argentine customs that, for better or worse, I brought along when I came to America. So, here we go.

Whether we like it or not, we Argentine-born denizens have a reputation in the rest of Latin America of being snobs. Now, I don’t want to cast aspersions or judge all my compatriots in such overly stark terms but . . .  well . . .  looking back at the time when I was young and growing up in Buenos Aires, that judgement sounds about right. Not that I was self-conscious of my own snobbishness during my young years; it is with hindsight that I recognize that it was ingrained in me early on.

BA feels architecturally like a mix between a sprawling Latin American metropolis and certain corners of London, Barcelona, and Paris. It has a distinct European-ness to it: café life, late dinners, espresso bars everywhere. Early on in life, I caught the affliction of many porteños, as we inhabitants of the “port city” by the Rio de la Plata are known, and started thinking of myself as part Argentine and part foreigner. Having been raised by European expats in an Anglophile Austro-Hungarian cocoon, I easily got infected with the bug and adopted the elitist attitudes of my urban compatriots. I was more European than the locals, as Mom kept reminding me. We porteños in turn were better than the country bumpkins from the hinterlands. And, since we were Argentines, we were altogether better than everyone else in Latin America. The aspirations of European Kultur that I had inherited from my parents got layered on top of all that and made me into a first-class snob.

That’s the baggage I brought with me when, in 1968 at age nineteen, I came to America. What followed was a rude awakening.

Upon arrival in Troy, New York, I quickly made friends with a large group of other Latin Americans, who were also foreign students at RPI. They were Venezuelans, transplanted Cubans, Colombians, Ecuadorians, and Puerto Ricans. All of these new acquaintances already knew of and tolerated Argentines’ snobbishness. My new friends made fun of my distinct sing-song accent. They ridiculed Argentines’ dancing styles. “Jorge, you don’t know how to dance anything Latino. Sure, maybe tango, but Argentines don’t know how to have serious fun; you’re just a bunch of melancholy snobs. Fun is drinking rum and dancing salsa and merengue, coño!” Coño, a favorite Colombian word for . . . let’s call it muck . . . went into my new vernacular, together with suck and douchebag, the new words I had learned from my roommate Darrell and my neighbor Henry.

I also received a humbling lesson in history from my South American friends. While still in elementary school in Buenos Aires, I had learned my local Argentine patriots, like Saavedra, Belgrano, and the rock star of them all, José de San Martín. Interesting guy, San Martín. It was drilled into me that he was the central hero in the struggle of Latin American independence from Spain, a sort of Latino George Washington. He remained thus drilled until years later, when my newly minted Latino-American buddies set me straight: “San Martín was a secondary figure, dear Jorge, but Simón Bolívar ? [their own drilled hero] . . . Now, here’s the true star of Latin American independence.”

Silly of me to think otherwise.

And my pals had no end of Argentine jokes, which, while celebrated in much of Latin America, were new to me. Sort of like, “An Argentine is an Italian who speaks Spanish and thinks he’s English.” Or. . .  “Why do Argentines look at the sky and smile when there's lightning? . . . Because they think God is taking their picture.”

My early months at RPI were filled with such sobering experiences. I had to come to grips with others who did not have the same exalted view of my Argentine roots. No matter all that, however, I have never quite shed the image of myself as an Argentine who speaks English and thinks he’s Austro-Hungarian.

My newfound crowd of South Americans transformed my identity: I changed from being a European guy in a sea of Argentines (as I was back in BA), to an Argentine in a small pond of Latin Americans in Troy, and all of us Latinos in upstate New York swimming in an ocean of gringos.  And while we swam, I quickly noticed that my friends – as well as I – kept insisting how everything was much better back home. Ecuadorian deserts were better; Colombian coffee was better; Argentine steaks were better; the music was better; even the pizza was better. It was all better over there.

So . . . while my friends made fun of my porteño conceit, they also gave me deeper insights into human psychology. I soon recognized that everyone  was a snob, not just I. Whether or not the milk back home tasted better than the milk in Troy, all of us foreigners wanted it to taste better. We wanted to feel superior to our American hosts. Our food, our music, and our sports were just plain better.

Exile is good for sharpening the mind and finding out who you are. I figured out that, just like my Latino crowd pretended to be superior to the gringos, so had the Europeans of BA felt superior to the porteños, and the porteños felt superior to their Argentine brethren, and so on, up and down the line. Feeling superior is a good way to fight the loneliness of the outsider. Julia Kristeva, the French philosopher of estrangement and exile, calls the expat who watches from the sidelines, “an other.” We Latin Americans might have felt like “an other” in Troy, just like the Europeans felt in BA, or the porteños felt in Argentina, or the Argentines in South America, or anyone, anywhere for that matter. While our accents, our food, and our tastes were different and made us stand out, we needn’t worry. We weren’t just different than our American hosts; we were better. It is the immigrant drama playing out everywhere, and forever.

Inevitably, along with my snobbishness also came a certain sense of over-the-top cleverness, which in Argentina goes by the phrase “viveza criolla,” creole cunning. The term, used throughout Latin America but often employed to portray Argentines, describes behavior that is a tad antisocial and self-indulgent. It celebrates being quick-witted, blaming others, and taking advantage of opportunities – even if beyond acceptable norms.

The best I know how to illustrate viveza is with the famous goal scored by Diego Maradona in the 1986 World Cup soccer match against England. Film reviews show that he used his hand and not his head to push the ball into the net. This was a devious move that the referee didn’t catch, and which resulted in England’s elimination. When asked after the match if he had used his hand, Maradona said only that it was “the Hand of God.” Both the goal and the explanation are good examples of viveza criolla. And so were the celebrations of Argentines all over. Maradona’s viveza had redeemed us from the oppression of the old Brit colonialists. Our pleasure was doubled in that we had shown up the English, who invented the game in the 19th century and exported it to the world.

None other than Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentine writer, said about viveza criolla: “[To an Argentine], passing as immoral is less important . . . than being thought of as a moron. . . ” Viveza was in the air in Buenos Aires when I was a child. You took it in with every breath of the humidity that crept up from the Rio de la Plata and suffused the city in permanent mugginess. I struggled mightily with the prevalent viveza when I was a boy. The ethic instilled in me by my parents, especially by my German Dad, was based on being honest and observing the rules. But Dad’s mandates inevitably clashed with the viveza all around me.

Another good example of viveza criolla is truco, a fun card game that I learned as a boy, and which has no equivalent in America. Truco means “trick” in Spanish and the very word gives it away. It is like bridge, except with a deck of Moorish cards and the generous use of señas, facial gestures that are used among players of the same team to signal their hands to each other. To let your partner know that you have an ace of swords, you quickly pull both eyebrows up; or, for an ace of clubs, you wink; or, if your hand is bad, you close your eyes for a split second, long enough to let her know that it's a seña, not an itch. You need to transmit these señas rapidly and without the opposite team seeing them. And you need to keep spying on your opponents  - since they are also trying to pass the same ones to each other. I brought the game and the associated viveza with me from BA. I played truco with other Argentines every Saturday afternoon during my student years in America.

But playing truco or celebrating a devious goal by Maradona were the least of my problems. My prime case of viveza criolla showed itself in the story I told you in my last blog: the habit of consulting with others during exams. That sure got me into trouble in America, and quickly.  

I am happy to say that I have shed all of the viveza I brought with me. RPI, Harvard, Law School, the founding and running of a law firm for decades, and multiple U.S. judges and colleagues have squeezed all remnants of viveza criolla from me. My German Dad prevailed in the end.

How about that pervasive Argentine snobbishness that also came along in my luggage? Well . . . I am sorry to say that occasionally it still rears its head. When in 2013, the porteño Jorge Bergoglio became Pope Francis, it confirmed that God is indeed Argentine. And everyone knows that Argentina has the very best soccer players in the world. Just ask the French team that lost the 2023 World Cup to Lionel Messi and his band of compatriots.

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Here's the immortal Maradona in 1986, a split second after the cunning Hand of God pushed the soccer ball past the English goalkeeper.