Sending Videos Home.

Jordan Salama writes for the New Yorker (archived) about Andean immigrants in New York and how they keep in touch with the folks back home; here are some especially Hattic bits:

Doña Elvira, who lives eleven thousand feet above sea level in Ecuador, wakes up before dawn. These days, the first thing she does is check her phone. […] Elvira, a forty-nine-year-old mother of eight and grandmother of five, didn’t use social media before María and another daughter, Mercedes, left home. She didn’t even have a smartphone until the pandemic, when Ecuador switched to virtual schooling, bringing widespread Internet service to her impoverished area, in the mountainous center of the country. She doesn’t post comments on TikTok; she hardly knows how to write. Nor does she read or speak much Spanish—her native tongue is Kichwa, an Indigenous language spoken widely in the upper Andes. Nonetheless, whenever one of her daughters posts a video, Elvira watches it over and over. […]

At first glance, the videos are fairly unremarkable. They often feature shaky, low-quality camerawork and use kitschy stock effects that give the people in the clips glittering faces or puffed-up lips. But overlaid on the group choreography and the street scenes are grainy, scrapbook-style photographs of relatives still back home in Ecuador, to whom the videos are dedicated. The captions and onscreen text are messages to loved ones, often in poorly written Spanish: “Me duele estar lejos mi kerida familia. . . . Dios me los vendida” (“It pains me to be far away, my dear family. . . . May God bless you”), “Tu y yo por100pre juntos los 3 luchemos por nuestro sueños” (“You and I together forever, the three of us, let’s fight for our dreams”). The clips almost never use camera sound. Instead, they are set to chicha music, a popular genre of cumbia that combines traditional Andean sounds with techno-psychedelic instrumentals, and is known for lyrics about heartbreak and migration. Many previously unknown chicha artists have become famous in recent years because songs of theirs have gone viral on TikTok. Some artists—such as Ángel Guaraca, who sings the hit “El Migrante” and calls himself the Indio Cantor de América—have even embarked on U.S. tours, stopping in places with large Ecuadorian communities, such as Queens and Brooklyn; Fall River, Massachusetts; and Danbury, Connecticut.

The most popular videos have hundreds of thousands of views. It is clear that users are emulating one another, particularly given that certain errors are repeated so often that they become trendy. The emoji of the red-white-and-blue Liberian flag is regularly used instead of the American one, and places in the New York area are spelled as they would be pronounced by Spanish-speaking migrants. (Junction Boulevard in Queens is called “La Jonson”; Roosevelt Avenue is “La Rusbel.”) […]

A strong culture of rootedness and family ties among Indigenous communities adds to this dynamic, Berg, the anthropologist, told me. “It is a social norm in the Andes, in terms of kinship and expectations, that you will take care of your relatives and you will be in contact with them no matter what,” she said. These values do not fade easily, even if someone is thousands of miles away. “How do you perform your role as a dutiful daughter or a considerate son when you’re abroad?” Berg said. “By performing these emotions and saying, ‘I’m missing my mother. My mother is the most important.’ ”

Berg added that, though migrants from other backgrounds have traditionally sent letters home to loved ones, writing has never been a preferred mode of emotional expression for Indigenous people from the Andes. The legacy of Spanish colonial rule in the region left a strong negative cultural perception of the written word, linking it to powerful bureaucratic authorities; moreover, Kichwa is historically an oral language, written down only in recent centuries, using the Latin alphabet. As a result, migrants have long gravitated toward other kinds of communication. “When I started my research in Peru, in the nineteen-nineties, people were sending VHS tapes,” Berg said. The tapes, not unlike posts on social media today, showed mostly happy occasions, like patron-saint festivals and other celebrations. “The technologies have been changing, but the need to be in contact, and the expectations that people will continue to be part of these social groups and families, continue no matter what,” she said. […]

During the sisters’ first few weekends in the city, they tried to see the places that everyone had told them about. María filmed in Times Square on a day when the sky was a cloudless blue. She recorded the autumn colors of the trees along a stretch of Morrison Avenue near the Bruckner Expressway. Once, before the babies were born, she and Mercedes and Jhuliana went all the way to Flushing Meadows Corona Park, where hundreds of Ecuadorian migrants gather every Sunday to play soccer and eat street food such as choclo mote—potatoes, corn, and fried pork. […] The young women socialized along the sidelines in Spanish, toddlers tugging at their leggings or the occasional anaco skirt; switching to Kichwa, they joked about the elderly Chinese ladies who came to collect the empty plastic water bottles that the teams left on the ground. […]

“My husband is already in the United States,” a twenty-two-year-old woman named Manuela told me one afternoon as we stood by the tomb of her grandparents in the hamlet of Guaylla Grande. The cemetery sat on the edge of a cliff, overlooking a long valley filled with swift-moving clouds. “He left three months ago. Soon I’ll follow him.” […]

The deluge of content from other Ecuadorians had clearly shaped her understanding of life in the U.S. When I asked her where her husband was living, she said, “La 103.” Many people I spoke with in the highlands seemed to know the area around 103rd Street in Corona, Queens—home to thousands of Ecuadorians—as well as “La Jonson” and “La Rusbel,” the neighborhood’s noisy, chaotic thoroughfares. Official place-names such as Corona or Soundview or Brooklyn were less familiar to people in Ecuador; more famous now were the landmarks and other emblems of the city which migrants posted about, like subway lines, parks, the place with the screens. Soledad Chango, a graduate student in linguistics at M.I.T. who is from Salasaka, Ecuador, told me that this is a matter of cultural norms. “In our Kichwa language, places are not described in the same way as in many Western cultures and languages,” she explained. “We won’t say, ‘Go to this address.’ It’s more like ‘Next to that four-story red building, there’s a white house, and across the street . . .’ ” A place, she said, is defined less by its name and more by how to get there.

Manuela, who has a two-year-old named Nicole, wore jeans and a long-sleeved shirt and spoke in Spanish; her mother and father stood beside her in traditional clothing and spoke in Kichwa. […] We stood in silence in the cemetery for a few minutes. Manuela and her youngest sister picked yellow wildflowers and placed them on the tombstones. Manuela’s mother sat on the ground nearby, and her father paced a bit farther away. I imagined the funeral procession that had arrived here more than two months after the landslide, when the bodies of Manuela’s grandparents were finally pulled from the rubble—the family moving slowly up the mountain, first by car to Guaylla Grande and then silently on foot to this cliff above the clouds. The wind made an eerie noise as it rustled through the graveyard grass. Later, I learned that there was a saying in Kichwa for that sound. Wayra wakashpa rishpa, shamun y rin. The wind, crying, comes and goes. […]

“Nada bien pero Aii boii así mismo es el sueño americano,” she wrote. “I’m not good at all but I’m keeping on—that’s exactly the American Dream.”

I take it on faith that “Aii boii” is appropriately rendered “I’m keeping on” — I can find nothing online except the moniker of somebody who posts on Facebook and Instagram. A few interesting Spanish words from the article: choclo ‘corn(cob)’ is from Quechua chuqllu “fresh maize” and mote “(South America) hulled cereal, especially pearl barley and hominy” is from Quechua mut’i, while anaco is in neither Wiktionary nor my Oxford Spanish Dictionary, though my Collins dictionary has it as “(And) poncho, Indian blanket.” Wiktionary has a Galician word anaco meaning ‘piece, fragment, portion; rag’ which might be the source of the regional Spanish word.