Cilantro, Family, and Roots

“It doesn’t taste the same,” she complains. “The products here are different, and as much as we try, we can’t get the same flavors.” Amanda Yaraldy Romero Chero is 22 years old, and she loves cooking. She’s on a quest to find cilantro, which in Spain “goes unnoticed”, so she can prepare her favorite ceviche – a typical dish made from raw fish or shrimp cured with lime or lemon.

She was born in Santa Rosa, Ecuador. Her parents left her to her grandmother at first, while they were looking for a better life in Spain. Two years later, they brought their baby daughter with them to Barcelona. “They left me in Ecuador so I would soak up the culture a bit so that the change is not so brusque.” Even afterward in Spain, her parents would tell her stories of their native Ecuador, the places they used to visit, the things they liked to do. She would grow up eating Ecuadorian food and listening to merengue, salsa, and bachata.

When she was 12, Amanda returned for the first time to her native country. “At first, I felt rejected. You feel like you are from this place, but they don’t accept you. It puzzled me. My parents had warned me that this might happen – after all, the people didn’t know me anymore as I had grown up a lot. So they made little jokes, like, la españolita. It was like returning to your roots but in a different way. They look at you in a different way because they think you have changed and don’t belong in this place.”

They spent 2 months there and then returned to Spain. “When we returned to Spain, I wanted to stay here and continue living here. Because my family there lives more humbly, whereas here you have it all easy. The security you have here. There you go down the street and you can’t wear valuable things because they stare at you and you’re scared.”

Yet, she remembers seeing people there as happier. “They are very spontaneous, even very noisy. It’s madness. Their way of speaking – they’re very curt and at times it scared me. I thought, ‘why are they shouting at me?’ But they don’t mean it that way. I didn’t notice this distance or seriousness that we have in Spain.”

Amanda’s grandparents still live in Ecuador, while most of her other family has emigrated. She has aunts and uncles in Spain, Italy, and the USA. When they were young, they all went to look for opportunities abroad as in that period there was a lot of unemployment in Ecuador after a severe financial crisis.

She still maintains contact with her uncle and cousins in Italy and says that thanks to them she learned Italian. “It is much easier to board a plane to Italy than to go to Ecuador.” With her grandparents, she also talks via Skype. “On Christmas Eve we sit at the dinner table and do a video and it’s like they’re there on the table, like just another guest. We show them what presents we got, and they show us.”

Amanda’s family celebrates both Santa Claus on Christmas Eve and the day of the Three Wise Man on the 6^thon January. “We do it mostly for our cousins,” she explains. “For us, Christmas is much more important, but they were born here and are used to the Spanish lifestyle, so they celebrate the Spanish holiday.”

She says she would like to teach them about the Latino culture. “What I’m good at is cooking, so I want to at least show them the flavors they have there. I want to make them fall in love with the culture through the food because this is the way I learned most about it.”

When I ask her why she wants to preserve her parents’ culture, her voice suddenly gets low and she turns serious. “I think it brings me closer to my family there. It is my way of connecting with them. Now that I haven’t been with them in years, knowing what they’re talking about, what they’re saying to me… After spending so many years here, you have a different rhythm, a different lifestyle. You even forget this unity they have there. For me, it’s a way to connect with them and remember where I come from.”

However, she didn’t always think this way. “When I came here, I dissociated a bit from my family. I didn’t realize that you need your grandparents or a piece of advice from your uncles or to see your cousins. Until you grow up and become aware. At first, I was a moron, thinking ‘I’m in Spain now and I’m good so I don’t care about the rest.’ But then I realized that, darn, family is important. So, I started talking more with them and they were so thankful. For them, it was like, ‘wow, we have a granddaughter, and she cares about us’.”

Amanda went to kindergarten and started school in Barcelona, where she learned to speak Catalan. Then they moved to Madrid. Then they moved to Valencia. With so many moves, Amanda found it difficult to make friends. “You make friends in one city; you finally feel comfortable with them and suddenly you move to a different city and you’re the new girl. And until they get to know me, I am ‘the Ecuadorian’. At least I went to private schools and there weren’t many foreigners there, so I was the only Latina. At first, I felt like a freak.”

There were other new girls, of course. But they weren’t foreigners. “I was the only dark-skinned, with black hair. So, they would see me and think, ‘you’re not from here’. Until they heard me speak Valenciano in one class and said, ‘okay, maybe she’s not so Latina’. First of all, it is almost the same as Catalan. Second of all, what difference does it make if I’m Latina or not? It doesn’t mean that I can’t speak Valenciano, doesn’t mean that I don’t have the customs and habits that you have.”

Now, most of her friends are Spanish. “I’ve tried to have relationships with Latinos, but it never worked out, we didn’t fit together. And this is something that affected me because I wanted to maintain something, a friendship, but it was like – ‘You were born in Ecuador? So what?’ Like I didn’t belong.”

While Amanda is trying hard to fit into Spanish society, her parents “haven’t changed”. She remembers back in Ecuador how they were in their element, feeling very much at home. “They haven’t adapted to living here. Although they work here and started a family here, they’re still thinking of returning to Ecuador when they’re old.”

On the contrary, her little brother who is 17 now, was born in Spain and is not interested in learning about his roots. “He’s very used to the Spanish ways now. But I think he’ll grow up and one day he’ll want to learn more about our culture. This is what happened to me.”

Amanda is not planning to move from Valencia. She says it is her favorite city and she has arranged her life there. She’s currently interning as a social worker and doing vocational training in the same sphere. And she’s looking forward to visiting her family in Ecuador next Christmas.

This article is part of the Second-Generation Spaniards: A Collection of Stories project.

It was created as a Journalism and Mass Communication Capstone Project at the American University in Bulgaria. The academic supervisor is Professor Laura Kelly.