VivirLatino

I have written about 9-11 for as long as this website has been in existence. I remember to write about it every year because my head and my heart do not forget. They are two separate things – remembering and not forgetting but they are the same in that they are both subjective, victims of our own age, our biases, our challenges.

I remember being stuck underground for hours in a subway car that filled with smoke and darkness, not knowing that the World Trade Center was collapsing above me and that my mother was running just ahead of it.

I remember walking the streets from downtown to Queens, half crying, half in a daze because an officer has told me at 14th Street that there was no more World Trade Center and I remember hearing that as there is no more mommy.

I remember my mother and I finally finding each other back home – she walked out of the World Trade Center and on that walk to Queens she thought I too was dead.

I remember kissing my then 4 year old daughter and trying to call Chile to let her father know we were ok but I will not forget that I was also checking to see if he was ok because his September 11th had happened already. He knew already of searching for bodies with pictures in the hands of mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, and children. He knew of checking and rechecking lists of names.

On 9-11-96 I will not forget that I first tasted and absorbed tear gas by the Universidad de Chile, surrounded by students whose families had their own planes, their own dead and disappeared. I will not forget that they eyed me with suspicion – gringa – Norte Americana – representative of the sponsor of their 9-11.

I will not forget how I have a whole generation of students who have grown up in the last 10 years being told to fear terrorism and that they, as Muslims, as brown are the terrorists.

I remember all the dead – the men and women I used to call almost on a daily basis from work who would answer from their top floor office in the WTC. The lists stacked floor to ceiling in the Vicaría de la Solidaridad de Chile of names, some shared by my Chile-Rican daughters.

They do not remember. One was a pre-schooler. The other wasn’t even a thought But they cannot forget that histories like memories are subjective and layer upon one another to form identity and policy and the space between truth and lie. I will not let them forget.