As A Little Girl Growing Up In Colombia Here
But here is what I also learned: resilience is not a grand speech. It is my mother waking up at 4 AM to sell empanadas at the bus terminal so I could have a new notebook. It is my abuela turning a single chicken into a three-course meal (soup, main, and fricasé leftovers). It is every costeño on the Caribbean coast laughing harder than anyone else the day after a hurricane.
, I didn’t have a phone, an iPad, or even a color TV for most of those years. But I had that. And that was everything. The Myths We Believed We believed that El Hombre Caimán (The Alligator Man) lived in the Magdalena River and would turn you into a reptile if you bathed after 3 PM. We believed that finding a mopa-mopa (a sticky tree resin figure) in your shoe meant good luck for the harvest. We believed that if you didn’t finish your caldo de costilla , the Patasola (a one-legged forest spirit) would lick your ankles at midnight.
The church bells ring, but half the town is already at the market. I hold my father’s calloused hand. We walk past pyramids of lulos , marañones , and curuba . A woman with gold front teeth yells, “ Mamey, mamey, pa’l amor de Dios! ” At 10:00 AM: My cousin steps on my white zapatos escolares during a game of escondidas (hide and seek) behind the church. I cry. She offers me a bocadillo (guava paste) wrapped in a dried leaf. I stop crying. At 2:00 PM: The whole family gathers for bandeja paisa —beans, rice, chicharrón, morcilla , plantain, avocado, and a fried egg looking up at the sky. The adults drink club Colombia beer. The children drink Colombiana soda. There is no such thing as “kid food.” At 7:00 PM: My great-uncle pulls out a worn tiple (small Andean guitar). My great-aunt yells, “ Ay, no otra vez el mismo vals !” But she sings anyway. We all do. as a little girl growing up in colombia
As a little girl, I thought everyone lived like this—everyone knew how to make sancocho from scraps, how to dance mapalé without lessons, how to mourn a loss over tinto and pan de bono by noon, and be dancing by nightfall. Let me walk you through one Sunday.
Every morning , I learned that comfort is not a temperature. It is a ritual. But here is what I also learned: resilience
As a little girl growing up in Colombia , the world felt both impossibly vast and intimately small. Vast, because the Andes mountains stretched beyond the horizon, and the Amazon rainforest whispered secrets in a language I couldn’t yet understand. Small, because everything that mattered—family, faith, food, and the fierce rhythm of cumbia—happened within a few blocks of my grandmother’s tiled courtyard.
To paint a picture of that childhood is to dip a brush in colors that don’t exist anywhere else. It is not the Colombia of news headlines or Netflix narcoseries. It is the Colombia of foggy mornings in the altiplano , the scent of guava and wet earth, and the sound of my aunt’s voice singing while she ironed ruanas . As a little girl growing up in Colombia , my first lullabies weren’t soft. They were loud. Not violent—just vivo . The crack of a chiva bus backfiring on a cobblestone hill. The pock-pock-pock of my mother patting masa into arepas at 6 AM. The metallic cling of an aguardiente bottle cap hitting the floor during a parranda . It is every costeño on the Caribbean coast
The backyard held a guayabo (guava) tree that sagged under the weight of fruit. My cousins and I would climb it to spy on the neighbor’s rooster, whispering about which one of us would move to “the city” first. We believed Medellín was a fairy tale kingdom and Cartagena was underwater. We weren’t far off. Colombia in the 90s and early 2000s was a complicated quilt. As a little girl growing up in Colombia , I learned early that adults spoke in two tones: one for inside the house, and one for when the news came on. I learned to read the tension in my father’s jaw when he heard a motorcycle engine too loud, too late.