Immigrant Tuque Chick

Eva Perón came to me in a dream last night to give me some sound, compassionate advice. I can’t remember exactly how it went, but it was something like the country (me) was made up of good parts and bad parts. We (I) had to have more compassion for the bad (which is never really bad) and actively work to encourage the good. A National (Personal) Balance was possible, according to Madame Perón, and I woke up feeling light and ready to heed her challenge.

(Do new Argentine immigrants in Canada dream of Stephen Harper? What symbolic shite would he try and feed them?)

For the first time in my life, after all my travels and all the far-off places I’ve lived and tried to become a part of, I am, here in Argentina, now, finally, an actual immigrant. When I was in the States, I was way too illegal to feel settled. In Europe, no matter what I tried, I was always too New World. In Colombia, I was too drugged out to be truly welcome and in Guatemala, I was too utterly foreign to ever have more than TOURIST stamped in my passport. (I did adapt to Guatemala, but it never adopted me. I managed to live there for years though, but always in a state of happy ex-pat otherness.)

In Bolivia, I came close to settling and getting my actual residency—I spent months going back and forth to the capital, struggling to get all the right papers, going step by step (or more like one step forward, six steps back) through the opaque and illogical third world bureacratic machine. I found a sponsor, paid my dues, even managed to get my INTERPOL clearance. But on the way to hand in the final forms, the ones that would lead to my permanent, legal residency, I got cold feet, stopped at a travel agency and bought a one-way ticket back to Central America. I had this idea in my head that if the shit really hit the fan, and everything collapsed, I’d never be able to find my way back home to Canada to die near where I was born. I’d never make it from Bolivia to the Soo, but I could probably manage it from Guate. So that’s where I went. Back to Guate. For four more years of wishy washy ex-pativity.

These days, I don’t really care how close I am to “home” when I die. The quotation marks symbolize evil anyway. What I do want—it’s very clear to me—is to live out my years here. And if the shit does hit the fan (Oh 2012, will you prevail?!), I’d much rather be in these parts, with these people. In these hills. In this country of immigrants, I am not an ex-pat, but a simple Canadian immigrant, starting a new life, and feeling safer and more at home here than I ever did anywhere in North America.

And ironically (I feed off this shit!), I have finally found and proudly wear, here on the opposite side of the world, the ultimate symbol of my Canadianness: a tuque. It cost two bucks at the corner store and now my life is complete. This is not an exaggeration for an old, cold-headed punker of Northern Ontarian origins. For half the year, I’ll sleep with the thing on, unfolding it down over my eyes like a blinder, then take it off only to shower and work. Or maybe go to a nice restaurant (but in this case, I’ve sent a request that my purple angora tuque be shipped to me from Canada.) Since I lost my original tuque on the bus on the way here, I have for the last seven bare-headed months, felt obliquely empty. This new tuque doesn’t just complete my fall-winter-spring look, it completes me. Like high heels complete a certain kind of woman or a favoured ball cap completes a certain kind of guy.

Big dreamer. Recent immigrant. Tuque chick.

We all eat succotash on this newly autumnal sunny Argentina afternoon.

And the south winds blow.