Stories of Migration and Absence

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe
Race remix…

Tucker Grams
What does it mean to think of the past or the future as a metaphorical foreign country? In this podcast, our investigations into the pasts of our important family members and of inspiring artists as they have navigated questions of transnational experience and identity work to uncover lost or undiscovered worlds that we hope will impact our present and communicate with the future.

Cruz Ramirez-Ramos
The stories we share will explore the changes that come from moving across literal borders in the past, as well as the metaphorical borders we may cross today. When we choose to immerse ourselves in the stories that remain as evidence.

Sylvia Bermudez
Thinking of history and future as territories to move through and interact with gives a speculative perspective that complicates our experiences of the borders erected in time as well as space leading us to question nationalism and ideas of linear progressive development. First, I will talk about my mother’s experience growing up in a deeply religious household in Colombia, where she followed her Catholic faith.

This continued until she moved to Florida, where, despite my brother and I not wanting to learn much about Catholicism, she never once got upset over our rebellion.

Tucker Grams
Next, I will talk about my encounter with the work of Roberta Bologna, favorite writer whose books deal with his experience as a Latin American of unstable citizenship, who sees an equivalence between the processes of writing and exile.

Cruz Ramirez-Ramos
Finally, I will explore my grandma’s history growing up somewhere that no longer exists, how those memories continue to be passed on, and how it has affected our family to this day. Welcome to Stories of Migration and Absence by Cruz Ramirez-Ramos.

Tucker Grams
Tucker Grams,

Sylvia Bermudez
and Silvia Bermudez.

Faith shapes us in unexpected ways. In Malta, we are raising questions we cannot answer and often bridges the gap between who we were and who we are becoming. Today, I want to explore how faith, memory and identity intertwine using my own story of growing up in the shadow of a devout Catholic upbringing by not mine, but also my mother’s.

Imagine this is an all-girls Catholic school in Santa Marta, Colombia. Rosary scattered around the house. Rituals embedded in everyday life. My mother’s childhood was steeped in tradition. She was baptized as a baby, taking her first communion at age 11 and following every practice her church prescribed for her. The past wasn’t just history. It was a living framework of faith.

As a kid, I couldn’t help but be swept up in some of those traditions, but they were so distant from me. One that I stuck with me to this day had to be Christmas Eve. I remember my mother were with my brother and I up at three in the morning to light prayer candles together. We’d pray in Spanish, and even now I can hear the words in my head.

Though I didn’t fully understand them back then. Santa maria madre videos right up on Nosotros mercado. This hour, I am Laura the Nostra Morti and she said that prayer a lot when I was growing up. I didn’t realize it at the time, but those moments where a bridge connecting my mother’s deeply rooted past to our shared present. Yet even as I recited the prayers, I felt disconnected.

Lost in translation. I was lost in understanding the church with its Spanish hymns, rituals and sermons wasn’t just a physical space. It was a cultural and spiritual world. I didn’t quite belong to. I remember moments vividly, standing up to hold hands with strangers, pulling down those little potted millers attached to the pews, kneeling in prayer with everyone else.

But here’s the thing. I didn’t know the prayers. I didn’t know who to pray to or even what I was praying for. It was a strange mix of belonging and not belonging, of being surrounded by faith, but feeling disconnected from it. I couldn’t help but wonder how much of this shaped me, how much of her faith shaped me.

I asked my mother about her upbringing in the Catholic Church. She spoke of Santa Marta, the small city named after Saint Martha. Catholicism wasn’t just faith there. It was a community rhythm and an identity. It shaped the way people lived, celebrated and understood themselves. My mother has always been deeply devoted to her Catholic faith, but her relationship with it isn’t what you call by the book.

She shared with me that while she still holds onto her faith, there are plenty of teachings she didn’t agree with or follow. For instance, she doesn’t pray every day, not because she doesn’t believe in prayer, but because, as she puts it, life doesn’t always work on a strict schedule. She’s also pretty vocal about rejecting the concept of excommunication.

She believes that forgiveness is God’s job, not the church’s. If someone regrets their actions and seeks redemption, she feels that it’s between them and God, not a decision for priests or institutions to make. And then there are the more personal stances. She doesn’t agree with the church’s teachings on premarital sex or contraception. For instance, when I started dating, she encouraged me to go on birth control, defying what many would expect of a Catholic mom.

She also questions why divorce should be labeled as a sin. After all, she’s divorced herself and wonders how something as complex as leaving a harmful or unhappy marriage can make her unforgivable in God’s eyes. Her approach to faith also influenced how she weighs my brother and I as kids we know in church and lit candles. But by the time we were older, she didn’t push us towards Catholicism.

She saw our struggles, the language barriers, the cultural disconnects. And instead of insisting we follow her path or God’s path, she let us find our own. My brother, a native Colombian fluent in Spanish, also drifted away from Catholicism after we moved to Florida. I asked her why? Why did she stop trying to teach us Catholicism? And she told me there were a lot of reasons.

One was the environment we were in. For me, living in America, sitting in Spanish speaking churches where I didn’t understand the language, made it hard to connect. My brother, on the other hand, was born in the same city as my mom, Santa Marta. But even he struggled with the faith as a kid after we moved to Florida. At first, my mom said he was a model Catholic child.

He prayed every day, read the Bible as a bedtime story, and even follow the faith better than most adults. But when we got to Miami, something shifted. He wanted to play outside with friends, dive into sports and focus on schoolwork instead of prayer. My mom noticed a change in him, but she wasn’t upset. She told me he was still a good kid and that’s what mattered.

Watching this, my mom didn’t judge, but rather, she reflected. Slowly, she to step back from the rigid rituals and the Sunday mass. Part of it was a busy pace of life, but it was also because of the churches she went to weren’t teaching what God intended. Instead, they seemed to be using Catholicism to push their own agendas. Her evolution mirrored a broader truth.

The landscapes of the past, no matter how foreign, does shape us, but they don’t define us. My mother’s faith was born a tether to her origins and a springboard for questioning growth and adaptation. And in her journey, I began to see my own faith. Much like identity isn’t static. It’s a negotiation between the traditions we inherit, the questions we carry, and the futures we envision.

My mother’s faith, with all of its complexity, taught me this. Who we are is shaped as much by the places we come from as by the places we’re trying to reach. It wasn’t a sudden break, but a gradual evolution. My mom didn’t completely abandon her faith. She still believes in it very deeply, but she let go of the rigidity for her.

Faith isn’t about checking boxes or following rules to the letter. It’s about connection, forgiveness, and living a life that reflects God’s love in her own way. So now, when I think of those early morning Christmas prayers, I see them not as relics of a distant past, but as moments of connection between her world and mine. Her faith in my searching.

And maybe that’s why faith, memory and identity are really about navigating the spaces between what was what is and what could be.

Tucker Grams
Driving down a two-lane highway in the desert, all the sunsets and night falls can produce many different feelings in me, depending on the context. If this driving streak through the desert is prolonged, though, there’s always a strong feeling of departure in the sense that I’m approaching something undefinable on the horizon. This feeling brings me close to the present moment.

At the same time, it gives me a chance to reflect on the past and dream about the future.

When I was 16, I spent my summer break in Argentina. I was a short-term exchange student and it was my first time leaving the continent. And besides a few short trips to the beach in Mexico, the country I lived was a welcoming family in Misiones, Argentina’s northernmost state on the border with Brazil. And I went to school with young people my age, trying to learn to speak Spanish.

Along the way. When I came back to my home in Flagstaff, Arizona, I was able to converse in a basic manner and I had painstakingly read half of Gabriel Garcia Marquez as a L’Amour and lost him. Posted Cholera. Still struggling to understand many words and turns of phrase, I returned to Spanish class. I also wanted to find some more books to read, and I remembered a strange short story from our textbook called Yamada Telephone calls or telephone calls, which used a log of phone calls to relate a disastrous series of events in our relationship between romantically involved characters on the fringes of society.

I looked up the author, Roberto Bologna, and started reading a dark and heartfelt collection of short stories in Spanish. Often dealing with characters of transnational identity. I think of those stories often. My real bewilderment began when I got his famous novel Those Detectives Salvatore’s or The Savage Detectives, which was published in 1998, just five years before Bologna died.

The book, which explores a world of disaffected young poets living in Mexico City in the 1970s, and their search for a lost idol from the city’s literary scene of the 19 tens and twenties is a dreamy window into its author’s past. Bologna was born in Chile in 1953, but moved with his family to Mexico City in 1968, where he joined a group of young and rebellious writers active in left wing political causes to create a movement.

They called in for a really small list. Detectives of Vargas is a literary Omar’s. To that period of bologna’s life, and most importantly, to the lively, desperate and forgotten young writers who were his friends during that formative time. It is also an exploration of the desperate subjectivities of those young writers, many of whom were exiles from across South and Central America as they searched without reward for a home in Mexico City, where the literary and political establishment kept them from participating and belonging.

The book begins and ends with the diary of a 17 year old Mexican poet, equally disenfranchised, who joins the group of viscerally stars, eventually joining the group’s leaders, Arturo Bolano and Ulisses Lima, as they flee the city with the young prostitute Lupe, heading for Sonora, both to escape her murderous pimp and to look for Cesareo Tinajero, an unimportant writer from the past who has become an obsession for Belen in Lima.

Unwelcome in the nation’s capital, they escape into its fringes, crisscrossing Mexico’s northernmost state in a borrowed car in 2000, when Bologna was asked to give a talk on the topic of literature in exile, he proclaimed that he does not believe in exile, especially when it is paired with the word literature. During the talk, he shares the story of the time his friend, the poet Maria Santiago, so widely accepted as the basis for the character Ulises Lima, from the static device of his, was banished from Austria in 1978.

Santiago never returned to Austria, a fact which, according to Bolano, would not have mattered to him in the slightest. A quote from Natasha Schwimmer’s translation of the talk. Maria Santiago, Mexican poet. Expelled from Austria in 1978 and forbidden to return to Austria until 1984, that is to say, banished from Austria to the no man’s land of the wide world.

And who, anyway, could care less about Austria and Mexico and the United States and the happily defunct Soviet Union in Chile and China, among other reasons, because he didn’t believe in countries and the only borders he respected were the borders of dreams, the misty borders of love and indifference, the borders of courage and fear, the golden borders of ethics.

Bologna also disregards borders in his own work. He presents the continuous exile of writing as a vehicle for escape from borders imposed in time and thought as well as space in lost. As activists always lost young poets search for identity in the forgotten literary figures of the past. Similarly, Bologna’s reconstructions of his past reach into the future, giving stories of radical identity on the margins of nationalism and historical categorization to the young people who read them.

When I started reading his books at 17, the same age as the narrator of those activist surveys, I was totally enamored with the rebellion and sentimentality of the work. At the same time, I found a deeper understanding of the Spanish language as I crossed a sort of border into its more poetic, untranslatable form. I still remember the wonder I felt as I was emotionally transported to the book’s romantic past in a language I was learning along the way.

When I reread the book this spring, I was equally enchanted with the stories of past and present I found in its pages. Though my grasp of the language was better, I also had a different experience in my imagination as I pictured the parts of the story occurring in the Sonoran Desert, or have now spent considerably more time. I fled the city of Tucson, driving mindlessly out into the desert, and it didn’t matter that I was on the other side of the border with Mexico.

Then the book’s events. I used photography to help me inhabit the subjectivity of someone moving desperately from the center to the periphery. As night fell, I turned off the two-lane highway, hoping to experience something of the sublime exile on the other side of IDs with nation and large scale social movements that I found in the pages of one of my first favorite books.

Cruz Ramirez-Ramos
When exploring how the past and future are lost world. Ghost Towns immediately came to mind. A ghost town is described as having few or no remaining inhabitants. My grandma moved to the now ghost town of Sonora, Arizona, around the age of four, attending a local school run by nuns. When googling these towns, little information can be found senores Wikipedia page as a single paragraph stating the town was demolished to expand the remaining.

The only stories of these towns that still exist come from those who lived there and can still pass them down today.

Sylvia Bermudez
But in Arizona, all angels lived in great and all-American people, or Hispanic people lived in senores. So when the town got truly great, since we didn’t have our high school Laura, I wasn’t ready. We had to commute to high school there and it was very different because we didn’t grow up with Anglo people. We grew up in a little town with just all Mexican people, so it was a different world.

I was 14, I guess, when I started ninth grade and it took a little getting used to because we spoke Spanish all the time, and by the time we got to high school, they’d let us polish. And then we were taught. They gave you what they called a merit, and they gave you ten or 15 demerits. You are expelled from school for, I don’t know, two, three, four weeks.

Anyway, it was true and there had to do that. But of course it only happened to kids in school. Spanish did not happen to Naples kids, but they didn’t speak another language. It was very strange to see white people, to be honest with you. I was never around and never going around them. So it was a very strange experience.

But I like to make friends. So, I always was trying to. I made a lot of good friends with them, but it was uncomfortable, and it was a hard, difficult thing to get used to seeing people of different color or different, you know, just different people. I remember here in English well, we had a very good teacher, Mrs. Case, and we had to give a speech on whatever topic you chose. And my topic was the unfairness of giving us demerits if we spoke Spanish and how that was our first language. And we love people, we love speaking Latin, and we didn’t do it like in front of it and didn’t understand it or whatever. It was just come on us and how unfair it was. And I think it was kind of a laugh show, a showstopper, an accent, because that was spoken out loud.

And I did. I spoke it out loud. I told them how I felt and how things were not fair with what they had been doing to us and with us. I spoke up. I spoke up. And I know that a lot of teachers did not like that, but I did it anyway. Loyalty to that creative mediocrity, to the Mexican, you know, to this country that we should be accepting of what people whatever language they spoke or how I the color of their eyes.

And they were slanted or black or black hair or hair or linear or whatever, even that I thought that America should be more open and supportive to all kinds of people. So, I guess I consider a rebel in my face.

Cruz Ramirez-Ramos
Despite my grandma struggles with going to a school not meant for her and at times actively working against her, she was determined to succeed. She received a scholarship for beauty school and became very successful in that field. Her true passion was to become a teacher, and over the course of ten years, she managed to continue working with a family of three kids and took one class at a time in order to earn her bachelor’s degree.

Sylvia Bermudez
My mother kept telling me I wanted this one on my seven kids to get a college degree. So, she kept telling me, “You can do it.” How you could do it. Basically, only took my class because I didn’t have enough money to take more that than I did. I graduated for me, a few very good grades, and after I started teaching for a while, I decided I wanted to get a master’s degree.

So, but I thought, this is not going to take me ten years. So, I got a master’s degree working, teaching for four days and going to school at night. And I managed to do that in a year.

Cruz Ramirez-Ramos
Although the physical borders my grandma passed were not very big or far. The social borders of going to this very white town felt like a completely new world to her being raised in these two ghost towns, Sonora and Ray is what made my grandma into the person she is today. The determination and drive it gave her has been passed down to the rest of my family all the way down to me, despite this area being very distant to me and not being a place, I can currently see.

The stories, memories and people from this area continue to affect and inspire me every day.

Sylvia Bermudez
I wouldn’t mind going back there. I learned a lot. I happy. I know there was a lot of injustice, but I knew about it, and I was smart enough to recognize it. But no, I loved it. I enjoyed it. It felt safe. I, I had confidence. I was strong in what I knew. I wouldn’t mind going back, even though I wish I was actually kind of outspoken, you would say, against the injustices that they were doing with us.

Not that anybody would make changes, but they were good teachers that that, you know, love doesn’t care about us. And amongst those that didn’t, you know, that were prejudice, but in that they were good teachers that, you know, helped us and guided us and talked to us. And so, for those teachers, I am very grateful.

Tucker Grams
Thank you for listening to stories of migration and absence, knowledge, ritual and language all move between generations, passing through immediate family connections and the media of writing and photography. This knowledge migrates across and around borders in time, as well as space, creating a transcendent web with the power to connect our present identities to important pasts. And the possibility found in dreams.