Standard.

You never realize how isolated you are until you encounter what’s outside of your view. My mind, my ears, my eyes and sensibilities have been, to say the least, consumed with the Afro-Venezuelan experience since I’ve been here. I’m fortunate enough to spend every second of everyday surrounded by people who look exactly me and have many things in common with me. I’m the norm here. I’m the standard. I’m regular. I’m ideal, and it’s extremely new for me. Needless to say, I’ve gotten very comfortable in this environment. 

I spent last weekend in Caracas (the capital, and much larger than Higuerote), and once again, I felt that shock. That feeling of being the minority, and being different in the most obvious of ways, came back with full force. Caracas is not only much larger, it’s 2 hours from the bulk of the Afro-Venezuelan population, and the Western influence (forget what you’ve heard) is just as obvious as my brown skin. While I enjoyed the nicer restaurants, the waiters who could *sort of* understand my English, and the chance to visit the largest mall in all of South America, I had all of these things at my comfort’s expense. Caracas really is another world. And I honestly found myself wondering if the young pale-faced Venezuelan teens in goth attire ever stopped to think about the people in Higuerote. If they had ever been there. If they knew what it meant to be afrodescendiente, or if they even cared. Perhaps from a nice hotel in Caracas it’s easy to lose sight of Barlovento and think of other things instead, but I found myself always going back to that. Back to our neighborhood, the young guys who run the bodega on our street who have been in Higuerote for all of their lives, the IUB students who have a totally different view of Venezuela than those of Caracas. 

Don’t get me wrong, Caracas is a fun place. Great clubs, a great subway system, a lot more developed and modern, sure. I guess I just realized, even if on a small scale, just how “out of sight and out of mind” the Afro-Venezuelan population really is. The only black people I saw in Caracas were pushing ice-cream trucks or cleaning streets. Meanwhile, whenever Higuerote is even mentioned, the response is “Why are you studying there?”, “Why not in Caracas?”. Not that I didn’t expect that in some respects, because I absolutely did. Perhaps I’ve just realized that the beauty and significance of this land isn’t appreciated by all, and it only makes me want to stay immersed here, where I’m ideal.