Villages and Dances

She has the sweetest voice I’ve heard. She picks up the phone in the middle of the night after a long day at work and greets me with the typical Spanish “Hi, what’s up?” Despite the late hour, she sounds excited to talk, but also a bit nervous.

“It’s complicated,” she says when I ask her where she’s from. Because Mónica Daniela Ramos Flores was born in Madrid to an Ecuadorian mother and a Peruvian father. Her parents came in 1994 to Madrid in their maturity. They didn’t know each other – the mother came from her hometown Quito to try her luck and her father came from Colombia where he had been working for years. They met at an NGO that offered help to newcomers in Madrid, and this is where “love was born”.

Two years later, Moni was born. She grew up in Madrid, where she graduated with a tourism major and started working. She says she feels at home in Madrid and can’t imagine building her life anywhere else, not even in her beloved Paris.

Growing up in Madrid, Moni didn’t feel any different from the rest of the kids. “From kindergarten, I started making friends,” she says. “When you are little, you don’t really pay attention if someone is Spanish or German or Ecuadorian. All you want is to play. Then when you grow up, you start noticing the color of their skin, how they speak, their features, their parents when they come to pick them up from school. Yet, I didn’t see any difference in the way they treated me, because I already had friends from kindergarten. I was friends with everyone. I didn’t care – I only wanted to play.”

The first time she realized she wasn’t “entirely Spanish” was when she was 6 years old. “The other kids were talking about how they were going to their village on the weekend to visit their grandparents and, of course, I couldn’t say that because my parents aren’t Spanish. And I thought, ‘Why don’t I have a village?’ And when I asked my mother, she said, ‘it’s just that we’re not from here, that’s why we don’t have a village here.”

Around the same age, Moni returned to Ecuador for the first time, but she remembers very few things. She noticed how people in the mountain speak differently from the people from the coast. “It seemed to me like something very beautiful, very enriching that it’s such a diverse, unique country.” She hopes she can go back once again soon.

She hasn’t been to Peru and does not have much of a relationship with the country. “I still have family there, but I’m not in touch with them. My paternal grandmother is there but I don’t really get along with her. Things turned out in such a way that she wasn’t a very good… well, I can’t say she wasn’t a good mother because who am I to judge but… I don’t know. My father always considered his grandmother as a mother figure, and she was the one who raised him.”

Moni grew up exposed to three cultures, but she claims that that of her father and that of her mother are very similar. “I think, and I would bet my life on it, that practically all Latin America has lots of things in common. Although we want to differentiate ourselves because everyone belongs to their country and has their own festivities, their culture, their music, and, well, their own patriotism that makes them special. But we have many things in common. It seems beautiful to me that Peru and Ecuador share so many cultural features.”

At home, they used to prepare both typical Mediterranean and Latino dishes. “I have a big mixture, I consider myself Spanish because I was born here and have a lot of Spanish influences from my friends, my teachers, my colleagues, but really, I’ve lived with my mom and my dad. And since they’re Latino, we would do Latino things that are their own. For example, we would eat assorted food, but predominantly Latino – rice with some stew, some salad... In all of Latin America, we eat rice.”

In terms of festivities, her parents would celebrate the traditional Spanish holidays and not so much their native ones. “Neither of my parents was very patriotic, they loved their countries very much but after having lived in Spain for so long, they considered it their country,” Moni explains. She recalls only one traditional holiday that her father celebrated. “My father believed in a Peruvian saint called The Lord of the Miracles. They pray to him and there was this holiday of the Peruvians, where they do something like the processions for the Holy Week.”

An aspect of Latino culture that they preserved very well, however, was the music. “There is something very Latino that mothers do and it is when they are cleaning, they play their typical bachata, merengue, their very sad cumbias, thing like that. And now when I listen to this music, it reminds me of when I was little. And since my dad lived in Colombia, the Colombian salsa is extremely good, and I listen to it a lot.”

Moni also likes dancing to this music. She says they don’t teach you – it is something you have in your blood. “We Latinos celebrate birthdays, baptisms, or anything by dancing. So I think all Latinos and all people, in general, have this rhythm inside. it is just that we Latinos pay attention to the way our parents dance and that’s it, it comes naturally. One day you go out to dance, and you already know how.”

She remembers when she was invited to a Romanian wedding with her boyfriend. She found it strange that people didn’t dance, so when they put a bachata song on, her boyfriend and she used the opportunity. “We were dancing, and everyone was staring at us and only the two of us were dancing. But that’s just our way of celebrating, of showing that we’re happy.”

Although she grew up in Spain, Moni talks the way her parents did. She says she feels uncomfortable pronouncing the typical Spanish sound th, although she realizes she shouldn’t feel that way. “It is weird because I have Spanish friends and I have Latino friends that speak that way but for some reason, I can’t explain I don’t do it.” She also uses some of the phrases that her mother “brought with her” from Ecuador, mixing them with typical expressions from Madrid. But the thing that differentiates her the most from other Spaniards is the diminutives. “I use that a lot. There you would say, ‘Qué cosita más bonita’ and here it's more direct, stiffer.”

“It’s complicated. Really,” she says again when I ask her whether she feels more Spanish or more Latina. “I couldn’t say one or the other."

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.