I just came back from Colombia after many years of not being there. It shows... I didn't want to believe when people told me the city and the country had changed. Maye it is not so much that Bogota has changed: it is still mostly "under construction", traffic still sucks, people still go out for coffee; public transportation is a cheap as ever, everything is a little bit broken, a little bit trying to be something it is not.
But I have changed, and it showed.
When I used to live in Bogota, before all this moving around and all the growing up, I used to love the way I lived, the people that surround me, the places I went (my place in society??) but I wasn't particularly in love with the country and the identity of Colombian/Latina. Now after realizing many things (among the first, that no, I am not white, and no, I am not tall) I came to realize that I love the country very deeply, the identity of my nation, the history and the outlook. But I cannot stand the way I used to live, and many of the people that used to be around me. For clarification purposes, this does not include my family. They are of a special sort, and no matter what, I will love them one way or the other. It is the other circle around me, what used to be my close friends, that I cannot relate to anymore.
I don't necessarily think that one country is better than the other by the measure of its economical development. That being said, I don't think that US is better than Colombia, only because there are more employment opportunities or we can buy bigger cars, or clothes are cheaper. It is not even the security... We felt pretty safe in Colombia, and God knows you feel observed in the US all the time and the paranoia levels are absurd. What i cannot stand from my country is the prison that people around me have built around themselves to justify a better level of life. It is now out of my reach the whole concept of living in a very constricted area where you can only say or wear certain things or act in a certain way in order to belong. That is SICK.
It is true that in the States, we act a little too loose some times, we let ourselves go in the clothing and become sometimes lazy... but the Colombian extreme of composure is unattractive to me because it is so intertwined with judgment and embarrassment, it makes life impossible.
I loved to be back in Colombia, but the big question in my head afterward was, How did justify this way of life before? How come people that I know to be rational and intelligent, and absolutely charming otherwise, can be so shallow and mean when it comes to "status"???
