Relatos de un Autoexilio

Mis vivencias como inmigrante salvadoreño en tierras lejanas y algunas cosas mas.



Very difficult to get use to it! :S
This is just an example

Oh… I really love this track (the YouTube video). It really reflects what and how I'm feeling right now. I feel that I am constructing a world of lies and fantasies to everybody, just only to be accepted in this intolerant society around me.

I really miss my friends in El Salvador. They used to tell me that if I go to live here in the US, I will regret it soon because I would feel very lonely. I hate that they were right. I used to told them that Vegas is a very tolerant city, maybe much more than San Salvador, and that I would be very happy doing what I like there. But something was unexpected: The Financial Crisis. Unfortunately for me, the economy were so screwed up and the unemployment so high, that destroyed my dreams and plans to stay and live in Vegas.

But not everything is bad after all. The only thing that I need is some kind of angel that would tolerates me the best. Some kind of friend that would be there when I need him. And a confident who I could tell him almost all my things that are inside my head (things that most of them I cannot tell to any “ordinary” person). I don’t expect perfection. I know that perfection doesn’t exist. I need just only a person like those thing that I just said.

Oh, by the way, this is the first time that I post in English, so if you see “misplaced” words in this post, don’t blame me. I think that my English is not very good to have a very fluent conversation with a native English speaker, but at least I can write it, and I can express myself with it. How good is my written English? What do you think about this post?

Videoclip above and music by Sarah McLachlan is Copyright from Arista Records. Not copyright violation is intended.

(Note taken of The New York Times page http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/nyregion/westchester/15colwe.html?_r=1)

LIKE many immigrants, some of the Salvadorans who live here have one foot in the United States and one foot in their homeland.

Their soul and spirit are back in El Salvador with the spouses, parents and children they left behind when they came here seeking jobs. Much of the money they earn ends up in El Salvador in cash remittances for those relatives.

And a March 15 election in El Salvador is generating excitement and heated debate in some neighborhoods here — even though Salvadorans living in the United States can’t vote in it unless they return home.

The region’s Salvadoran pockets — in Port Chester, in Hempstead and Brentwood on Long Island and in Bridgeport in Connecticut — are hotbeds of campaign fervor. On Jan. 11, for example, organizers for the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, the leading opposition party in El Salvador, held a meeting in St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church here to drum up support and raise money for its presidential candidate, Mauricio Funes, a television journalist turned politician. Fifty to a hundred people were there, depending on whom you ask.

Hoping to scotch anxiety-provoking rumors, the speakers promised listeners that remittances would not be blocked if the presidency were won by the F.M.L.N., an outgrowth of the leftist guerrilla movement that fought the Salvadoran government in the 1980-92 civil war. They also tried to calm fears that an F.M.L.N. victory might mean that the United States would jettison a visa program that gives temporary protected status to 229,000 Salvadorans.

Supporters of the ruling party, the Nationalist Republican Alliance, known as Arena, and its presidential candidate, Rodrigo Ávila, have also campaigned among the more than a million Salvadorans estimated to be in the United States. Guillermo Chacon, secretary of the Salvadoran-American National Network, a 20-year-old nonpartisan group that helps Salvadorans with housing and other social services, said presidential candidates from the smaller parties had even taken flights to New York to rally the faithful.

While Salvadorans who remain here can’t vote in their native country, they can call relatives and press them to vote for a favored candidate. That is what they are doing, Salvadorans here say, and perhaps the reason they do so with urgency and ardor is that homeland politics is not just a matter of sporting interest.

They worry about the declining earnings of Salvadoran farmers because of continental trade agreements, about distances relatives have to travel for clean water, about endemic corruption.

“There’s more of a crisis in El Salvador than there is here,” Daniel Navas, a 45-year-old construction worker in Port Chester and organizer of the Jan. 11 rally, said in an interview two weeks later.

The large number of Salvadorans here translates into a greater number of relatives back home to cajole. The 2000 census reported 600 Salvadorans living in Port Chester and 3,100 in Westchester, though community officials think both figures are significantly undercounted because Salvadorans who are here illegally avoid census takers.

Mr. Navas has three grown children whom he left behind when he came here in 2000 because he could not find a decent job, even with master’s degrees in computer systems and business administration. He hasn’t seen those children in eight years, he said, but often calls, and the topics they bat around include the election.

“My daughter says to me that You’re going to be deported if the F.M.L.N. wins the elections,’ ” Mr. Navas said. “I said: ‘That’s not true. They can deport us if we don’t have a paper, but not if the F.M.L.N. wins.’ ”

E-mail: joeberg@nytimes.com
(... see the complete note in the link provided above :P)

salvadorans
salvadoreño, salvadoreña

remittances
remesas

neighborhoods
barrios

hotbeds
focos

party
partido

drum up
no estoy seguro, pero creo q es "acelerar" o "acrecentar" :P

scotch
parar, detener

outgrowth
resultado

jettison
echar por la borda

earnings
ganancias

agreements
acuerdos

endemic
endemico, relativo a la endemia

to cajole
convencer de algo a alguien para obtener algo, engatusar

undercounted
contados de manera erronea, que arroja un numero menor, entiendase como "menoscontados" jeje

to bat around
se bate en torno a