La Isla

The taxi blasted Reggae like an evacuation siren. 

A strong Black man drives slowly, his forearm—harder than a baseball bat—firmly parallel to the crease where the car window comes up. His smile was softer than the burnt orange velvet of the car seat’s cover. 

Take a deep breath. Inhale. The island flavors will rush your body. Your nostrils are flooded with briny breeze. The breeze cools your skin like aloe. The snare drums and timbales enter through your ears, infusing your body with afro beats. As you look to the coast, the sea looks like Jackson Pollock and blue period Picasso got together to paint the sea in seven shades of blue.

The sights, smells, and sound of San Andrés Island. To most Colombians, this island is a tropical paradise far more distant than typical destinations like Cartagena or Santa Marta. To Nicaraguans, it’s an island that they consider theirs. To most other tourists, it’s a little dot on the Caribbean that makes them say “hmm, why don’t we go there?”

For me, it was my paradise. The setting for my earliest coming-of-age memories. The place where I worked my first job. The place where I put on my big boy pants. The place where I learned about race, class, and privilege. My family ended up here every summer to tend to the family business; a rustic and historic liquor store established by my grandfather decades ago.  

Like most Caribbean  islands, San Andrés was visited invaded by most of the European powers of the time. You had the Dutch, you had the English, you had the Spanish, you even had the Welsh. It was like a Eurovision final. 

San Andrés was the home of pirates. Lots of pirates. Most famously, a fellow named Henry Morgan. Yes, if you are thinking of Captain Morgan rum, that’s him. 

It’s a UNESCO Biosphere reserve; which admittedly, I’m not sure what it means since the UN is as useful as rolling down the windows of a golf cart. 

I learned tidbits of San Andrés history from my parents, from overheard conversations between tour guides and sunburnt tourists, and from the islanders themselves. I didn’t make much of it when I was little. For me, it was an escape from gloomy life in Bogotá. I felt like Rapunzel in Bogotá, trapped in my apartment building, sheltered from the insecurity and chaos of the capital. Here, things ran on island time. And I was able to roam free.

I would wander the streets at 7 years old, passing by the Turks who sold most of the home appliances, the Lebanese who had stores in seemingly every corner, the native islanders who would give me passing nods as I walked by, and the tourists that always let my diminutive figure sneak past them. I could never walk this far, by myself, in Bogotá. It was freeing. It was my first travel experience–an excursion outside my limits, where delving into the novelty and wonder of it all, I became more present, I started to know myself a bit better.

It was in San Andrés where I had my first job. I became my family’s liquor store's newest junior salesman. My Mom and Dad taught me about all our products: 30-year old Scotch tasted smoother than 12 year old Scotch. This is cheap vodka locals like. This is the expensive one we should recommend to tourists. If someone asks for cognac, this is what you bring them. I absorbed all of it. The Canadian tourists were flabbergasted that a 7 year old boy just sold them a bottle of Bacardi rum. I still remember the prices for most items; they were often written on fluorescent yellow paper—the brightest items in our dimly lit store with ashy gray tiles and dark mahogany displays. 

Payday meant a trip to the toy store down the block. I would buy action figures with my own money, and in turn they became the co-stars in all the imaginary action movies I made whenever we didn’t have customers. 

The island was also the place where I also encountered the manufactured idea of race, and the arbitrary lines it drew. One day I was playing marbles with the kids next door to the store. They were native isleños with roots so deep to the island, that you could imagine their house was tied to the coral reefs. 

We quarreled over who won all the marbles. I felt cheated, and proceeded to claim my marbles back. This didn’t sit well with my adversary. After I had stopped playing and hung around the street, I was summoned to the big island shack where his family lived. The house felt haunted, or that’s my impression since I knew being in there was not an act of hospitality. The matriarch of the house, sitting on a large couch, fixed her steely gaze as soon as I entered the living room. This woman had seen decades of abandonment, placating, and discrimination. Her skin, hard as leather, was not only hardened by thousands of days of sun exposure, but by the constant feeling of being treated like a second class citizen in her native land. 

I won’t pretend to recall verbatim what she told me (I mean I could lie like all Netflix shows that say “inspired by,” but that feels disingenuous). What I do remember were the main takeaways: How dare I call her grandson, and by extension her family, cheaters? Why did I insist on taking things like all the white folk she’s encountered? Why was it so hard to just give him all my marbles? After all, I had it all. 

I don’t remember playing with those kids ever again. It felt like I was not liked, not because of who I was, but what I represented. Every so often, I would run into them again. My walking pace would speed and I would give a sideway nod of polite acknowledgement and reservation. Eventually, I became content resuming my solo excursions and making all sorts of vehicles out of cardboard boxes while I wasn’t helping out at the store. 

*****

I may not be an isleño, in the traditional sense. But I credit my summers in San Andrés as foundational to what I am today. I felt autonomous, competent, a participant in the world whereas before I was merely an observer. 

For some that moment comes during summer camp, extracurricular activities, or even traumatic events. My summers in San Andrés were my coming-of-age moments. It’s important we think about the idea of where we are from, not just as a place where we were first conscious, but the environments where we began to engage with the world, where we evolved. These are the rivers that make us who we are. 

To learn about people, you have to learn their rivers; those streams that carry their failures, their successes, their traumas, their core memories. 

What are your own rivers? What are those moments you felt autonomy as a child? So much of our life is focused on the future (What will you do? Where will you live? Who will you do it with?) Yet, our instincts tend to know the answer to this question, and it knows it because of these experiences that carve our rivers. We do ourselves a disservice by not exploring them.   

San Andrés is my river, my island. What are yours?