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My family is from a shithole.
Author: TriSec    Date: 01/13/2018 12:36:14

Good morning.

Unless your veins are coursing with Native American blood, you are from a shithole, too.


I am here in a suburb of Greater Boston, in the Northeast corner of the United States. I could just as easily be halfway around the world in either direction.

My Great-Grandmother, Angelina Grandolfi, came to these United States around 1909, at the age of fourteen. Her home village of Messina looked something like this at the time.

http://www.iiees.ac.ir/en/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/adg.sized_.jpg


The year previously, a devastating earthquake destroyed much of that region of Sicily, and prompted a mass exodus to other places in both Italy and around the world. My great-grandmother was one of the lucky ones. She was able to find transport to the United States, and indeed passed legally through Ellis Island (her name now on the wall of honor) and made it up here to East Boston to start again.

But that's not the only shithole I can trace my family lineage back to. Across the vast Pacific, we'll run into the island of Mindanao.

http://tourism-philippines.com/images/misamis-oriental3.jpg


The family lore is somewhat murkier from this side of the world, but we know my Grandfather, Macario Matayabas, left his home island sometime in the 1920s to emigrate to the West Coast. As a young man, he initially married and started a family, but traveled for work. Somewhere along the way, he met a woman he liked better and got divorced to remarry, eventually settling here in Boston when my father was about to enter High School.

You know the rest of the story - the melting pot did its work, and my parents managed to meet each other and let nature take its course. A generation later, Mrs. TriSec and I have our own stories to tell - and her parents too come from a shithole. This would be Mrs. TriSec's ancestral home of Cienfuegos, Cuba.

https://thumb9.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/275071/606684752/stock-photo-cienfuegos-cuba-january-governor-s-palace-along-the-plaza-de-armas-in-cienfuegos-cuba-606684752.jpg


We all share a common bond - wherever we came from was dismal enough that our forebears looked to that shining city on a hill, and had hope and dreams for a better life for themselves and their posterity.

We all know the "New Colossus", so I won't quote it today. Instead we should just ponder that the anal sore that passes for a leader has just slammed the door in the face of anyone else who would dream of a better life on these shores.


 
 

3 comments (Latest Comment: 01/14/2018 17:18:22 by velveeta jones)
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Comment by Raine on 01/14/2018 01:40:44



Comment by BobR on 01/14/2018 01:44:20


Comment by velveeta jones on 01/14/2018 17:18:22
Perfect!!