Salsipuedes: Leave If You Can
By Lorena Hernández
Leonard
Theano Giannezi, My Mind, pencil, charcoal and insects on paper, 27.6 x 19.7 x 11.8 inches, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.
Salsipuedes: Leave If You Can
Lorena Hernández Leonard | Feb 2022 | Issue 13
The immense anthropology classroom was dark, the only light coming from a projector showed images of colorful pastoral houses similar to the ones I had known in my childhood. “Salsipuedes...'' the professor said; my ears perked up. Salsipuedes was a word I recognized despite his funny accent. A phantom name of my past. The professor explained that Salsipuedes was a leave-taking ritual performed in Colombia during social gatherings. An anthropological study in intercultural communication that had been conducted in the late 1980’s had revealed how imperative human connection is to Colombians.
Salsipuedes—Sal si puedes—leave if you can.
These words danced in my mind and nearly escaped out of my mouth.
I was listening carefully as the professor lectured about cultural communication rituals, leaning in closer from the back row of that large auditorium at the University of Massachusetts. At twenty-three, I was older than most Juniors on campus. It had been a long road marked with Detour, Road Closed, and Do Not Enter signs to get to Amherst, where the beautiful flagship campus stood, a place The Globe once described as “a gem between Boston and the Berkshires.”
This was the real college experience I had been yearning to have for years, and while I was glad to be there, I often felt lost, intimidated, and out of place. It wasn’t enough that I was older than all of my classmates, I also felt inadequate in my ability to communicate eloquently in English. After ten years in the US, I still had an accent that became more pronounced whenever I was nervous.
I was often nervous in social situations. I hated my accent. I hated fishing for the right English phrases that were drowning in my head. I hated that I couldn’t fully express myself, that certain words were too difficult to pronounce. Fearing I sounded stupid. For instance, I mispronounced the word vicarious. Bi-curious is what I used to say and those listening inevitably made their discomfort obvious by distorting their faces. Were they confused as to what I was trying to convey or did they simply find my accent ridiculous? It wasn’t until a few years ago that someone pointed out what my mispronounced word really meant, causing a surge of heat to rise from my chest to my face in embarrassment. But if I’m being honest, I guess I was both bi-curious and vicarious then. Though I didn’t care if people knew I was into women, I was mortified by people hearing my terrible mispronunciations.
I had partaken in this archetype of Colombian communication behavior an incalculable number of times. At a Quinceañera party, when the hour of the night seemed ungodly and my parents had guzzled enough aguardiente and their feet were finally tired from all the vallenato dancing, we started to make our way out the door, saying our goodbyes to the hosts, only to be stopped with protest and reasons why we should all stay longer. It didn’t matter that us kids had been passed out on a couch for a while but the hosts wouldn’t concede to us leaving.
“¡No se vayan! There’s still a few unopened bottles of aguardiente.”
They continued to make their case, “¡Quedesen! The girls will be fine on the couch with these warm ruanas!”
In a rhythmic back and forth exchange, similar to the sway of a vallenato, my parents gave excuses for why we had to leave while the hosts continued to persuade them. With one foot outside the door, my parents finally agreed to stay a bit longer and went back to take their places on the dance floor.
The truth was, my parents didn’t want to leave the party either, they were going through the social norms, saying and doing what was expected as guests. And while Salsipuedes—leave if you can—is about not being allowed to walk away from the attention of your hosts, the exchange is also about the guest not wanting to leave the social gathering, whether a special occasion like a Quinceañera or simply an informal visit.
For me, Salsipuedes was more complex. It wasn’t a ritual, nor was it an anthropological research project with the goal of decoding ethnographic information. It had deeper roots. This had been part of my life, part of my culture, and a part of me that had been left behind all those years ago when I left Colombia to become just another mixing ingredient in the proverbial US melting pot. Salsipuedes was also the name of a traditional Colombian song composed and performed by Lucho Bermúdez, his wife Matilde Díaz, the siren on lead vocals. It was recorded in Medellín almost thirty years before I was born. I grew up hearing the iconic melody. My parents and their parents grew up dancing to its harmonic trombones, sliding from one note to another. Decades later the song would resurface, with more modern beats, when Cuba’s Queen of Salsa Celia Cruz, would include Salsipuedes in one of her last albums. Her interpretation was a heartfelt homage to her friends Lucho and Matilde and to the country of Colombia. Listening to this new rendition on Univision, from the safety and comfort of my Boston suburban home, was nostalgic.
In the vastness of the lecture hall I wanted to raise my hand in excitement and say something about what Salsipuedes meant to me. About having been part of the “ritual.” About a town I knew existed near the Caribbean sea with the same name. About the iconic song that put Colombia on the Latin American musical map. Or about the house-turned-museum, just outside of Medellín, where the song was conceived. I felt an urgency to let these emotions spill out of me, but once again I was silenced by insecurity and a hatred for the accent that might have spread like thick butter on my tongue, making my words heavy and inflexible. I kept my excitement to myself, making a mental note that this was the first time since leaving Colombia that I had heard something positive about my country, about my people. Amidst the chaos of the drug war and political unrest of the 1980s, I wondered about how a group of foreign anthropologists managed to conduct research, recording everyday conversations from everyday Colombians. I didn’t have an answer for this, but I was glad they did.
I remember the day I left Colombia remarkably well. It was May 5, 1989. A Friday. I was twelve years old, and I shivered in the new pleated shorts and button-down shirt my mother had made for me. Medellín’s international airport had been built high up in the cloud forest of the Andes, in the municipality of Rionegro. In contrast to Medellín’s warmth, Rionegro was often cold. Mist would cling to the surface of the verdant pastures in the early morning hours like a spectral apparition. Since we had to arrive hours before our scheduled departure at sunrise, and since the trek up the mountain was long, tedious, and nauseating, my family and I traveled to Rionegro the day before our flight and stayed at my grandmother’s farm which was close to the airport.
Mamita Lucia’s farm, with its rustic and charming quality, wasn’t much different from the images shown in my Anthropology class. That last day, I played with my sisters around the giant bamboo trees and tried to catch small lizards, the brownish ones with the pink fleshy crest that comes out of their abdomens. This was the last time we would visit the farm. The last time we would chase lizards. And the last time we would watch the many hummingbirds buzzing just outside the big kitchen, feeding from the striking heliconias my grandmother had planted.
This was my first time leaving the country. My first time on an airplane. And my first time inside an airport. Excitement, sadness, and fear overlapped like tidal waves running into each other.
The airport’s interior felt cavernous but I was struck to see how quickly the huge space filled up with people. Many of the travelers were also leaving Colombia for the first time. I was witnessing an exodus, the Colombian diaspora. Every traveler was accompanied by a large crew, only there for the sendoff. Large duffle bags and suitcases, full of the essential items a person could possibly need to start a new life, lay on the floors waiting to be thrown onto the conveyor belt. Hugs, kisses, tears, all repeating like Salsipuedes; neither party wanting to let go.
The same scenario played out for us, too, as we waited with our many family members who had traveled up the mountain early, before the sun’s rays had cut through the morning’s ethereal fog. They had all made the tiresome trek to hug us one last time—my adoring grandparents, my mother’s cousin and his new bride, my devoted aunt and three of my cousins, and my uncle, who in my father’s absence had become my father figure.
The wait was long, so we killed time by walking around the large waiting area. We window-shopped the little kiosks full of souvenirs—handwoven mochila bags made by indigenous artisans and replicas of pre-Colombian jewelry with birds and frogs and caciques. With excitement, I noticed a small Dunkin Donuts shop. I had seen the commercials many times on TV and had memorized the jingle but I had never been to one. I didn’t know I was headed to Dunkin-land, where they served ridiculously large cups of coffee with an equally ridiculous amount of sugar at just about every corner. These were no café tintos, the kind of coffee we drank at home. I imagine Colombia’s coffee growers might find Dunkin’s an abomination. But most shameful is that since that time, I’ve become a coffee snob, only preferring Starbucks Italian Roast with soy milk. It makes me question the person I’ve become—leaving behind the child who drank coffee black.
The weeks leading up to our departure my mother gave away our thirteen-inch black-and-white TV, sold her Singer sewing machine which had so frequently gotten her out of financial binds, and parted with her faithful pet, a green parrot who had the bad habit of pecking at my father, making him bleed. She threw away my kindergarten folder, all my artwork with it, and years of report cards. She packed only the essentials—our clothes, shoes, and toothbrushes—and kept our family album and immunization charts. I was allowed to bring with me the only book I owned—The Little Prince—which seemed fitting.
When our time had come to go through the departure gates, everyone was in tears. Our family wished us well, blessed us, and held on tighter than they ever had. This wasn’t Salsipuedes.
This was Salporquepuedes—sal porque puedes—leave because you can.
No one was stopping us from leaving. No one was making up nonsensical reasons to keep us with them longer and we were truly ready to leave. In the aftermath of the increasing homicides, of which I had witnessed one and got near a few others, and the car bomb aimed at the drug kingpin that had hit so close to home, breaking the windows in my bedroom, it was understood that leaving was not a choice but a necessity for survival. In our shoes, any of our family members would have taken the opportunity to escape to safety too. Their anguish, and ours, was palpable.
But it was my uncle, tío John, who I saw suffering the most. His sorrow consumed him. I can still see his dark indigenous eyes, red and puffy, tears cascading. He howled in grief while hugging me closer, almost absorbing me into his body. As we walked away, I kept looking back to see him; he reminded me of the mothers I had seen in our neighborhood mourning the deaths of their sons, caught up in the storm of the drug cartels. I could taste my own salty snot and tears because I wept for him, too. Would I ever see him again? The uncertainty of this question was excruciating.
In 1988, Time Magazine named Medellín “the most dangerous city in the world.” In 1989, the year my family and I fled the country, 4,141 people had been murdered in Medellín alone. But the troubles with human rights violations spread beyond Medellín. Like a virus, it infected every Colombian across the country. Tortures, disappearances, rapes, forced displacements reaching about 650,000 people, and more than 22,000 homicides were reported across the country that same year. At the turn of the decade, an astounding 925,318 people had migrated to foreign countries, leaving behind their lives for the sake of safety.
In the first decade since our departure, it seemed like no good news could ever come from Colombia; that is, until I heard the word Salsipuedes in a college lecture hall. The lyrics to the song with the same name whispered in my ear its gorgeous tune of love for a land left behind:
Salsipuedes por ti soñé—Salsipuedes I dreamt of you.
Lorena Hernández Leonard is a Colombian native living in the Boston area. She's a storyteller, writer, and filmmaker whose award-winning animated short film, Demi's Panic, was Oscar long-listed in 2021. As a storyteller, Lorena has appeared on World Channel’s television program Stories from the Stage and has performed on Suitcase Stories, a traveling storytelling event created by the International Institute of New England which features immigrant stories. Lorena is a Pauline Scheer Fellow at GrubStreet, where she is currently working on a memoir about her experiences growing up during the Colombian drug war and migrating to the United States.
Theano Giannezi (Θεανώ Γιαννέζη) is a visual artist, born in 1991 in Thessaloniki, Greece. After completing her studies at the AUTH University of Fine Arts in 2016, she exhibited her first professional pieces at the Gallery Zina Athanassiadou and the Macedonian Museum of Art. In 2019, she won the Indonesian Scholarship Darmasiswa and majored in traditional puppetry while completing her studies in ISI Yogyakarta. She attended a residency program in Papermoon Puppet Theatre in Kasongan and, in 2021, created a solo project in Krack Printmaking Studio in Yogyakarta. Her work has been in solo and group exhibitions in galleries and cultural institutes in Europe and Asia, and she has participated in art seminars and residency programs. Her art practice focuses on exploring and incorporating various elements of nature and human psychology. These elements helped her observe the close relationship of culture with fine art and the transmitted human mindset, by creating artworks consisting of naturally occurring repetitive forms and conceptual figures.