Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 5
policy how America became the best place for dreams to come true is one purpose of
this book. In my opinion, preserving the conditions that make America capable of
remaining the safe harbor for self-reliant dreamers should be very important to all
thinking Americans. Notwithstanding where one is born, understanding and embracing
this responsibility is an essential step in becoming a useful American.
Nothing in this grand vision of the genius of America had even begun to take shape in
my mind when I first arrived at New York. On a hot afternoon of mid-July 1956, as a
seventeen-year-old dressed in my woolen suit appropriate for the winter season in the
Southern hemisphere that I had just left, I sat on the sidewalk of Idlewild (now J. F.
Kennedy) International Airport with tears in my eyes. I had just left the safe, loving care
of my family for the first time in my life.
Suddenly, I had entered a strange new world for which I was not quite ready. It had
been a sad good-by to Mom, Dad, brothers, sisters, relatives and friends. I had left a
small town where everyone knew everybody and for generations the same extended
families had been neighbors - sometimes friends, often antagonists. Everything was in
walking distance from anywhere. Literally, it was not easy to meet a stranger, there
weren’t many. Loneliness was not common. The memory of the crowd seeing me off at
Cochabamba’s (Bolivia) airport burned in my mind as an indelible picture.
Though when I left home I thought that I knew enough English to get along in an English
speaking country, the reality of this delusion slapped me on the face when I got off the
plane. In New York, as I was surrounded by hundreds of strange new people of whose
existence I had had intellectual knowledge but whose presence I had never experienced
before, I felt very lonely as I began to sample my new reality. My past was now just
memories. I did not understand what was being said, could not read many written signs,
did not know how to use the newfangled machines that I saw working when someone
put a coin in them. I did not know how to make a phone call, could not find the right train
to get to Manhattan, much less tell someone what I needed. I was homesick, lost and
overwhelmed. It almost seemed that the crowd, like a hungry beast, could actually
devour a fresh newcomer.
Lugging my artisan-made leather suitcase, I made my new suit wet with sweat and
ruined my new shirt and tie, which worried me because I had just received them as a
going away gift from my parents. I was afraid darkness would come before I learned
what to do. Fortunately, my best friend of my high school class had preceded me by a
few weeks and, knowing that I arrived that day had come to look for me. Eventually he
found me. With his help, by nighttime I was installed in a windowless room on the 47 th
floor of a building on the Upper West Side. I was very proud to have found a place to
stay. The next morning I began exploring New York.
Neither historical nor geopolitical thinking were in my mind at that time, but my
admiration for America, which had been the moving force that attracted me in the first
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