
If I’d had my way, I wouldn’t ever have thought about the D.R., but in my household there was no escaping it. Those were the early years of our immigration, when my mother still kept up with the news back home. Every morning without fail, before I even had a chance to brush my teeth, she had me tune my father’s beloved radio to the Spanish stations. And, because I was the curious kid I was, I listened, and, because I couldn’t help myself, I learned.
Maybe it was the stations we were tuning in to, but they made it sound like the D.R. was on a rocket to hell. Nothing was going right: nobody had jobs and there were strikes every day and food shortages and super-sensational murders and politicians accusing one another of all sorts of lunacies. As if that weren’t apocalypse enough, this was a few months after Hurricane David more or less dropped the island on its fucking head, leaving thousands dead, hundreds of thousands homeless, and entire neighborhoods blown to splinters. Forty-plus years later and you still have Domos who can’t hear the name David without breaking out in hives.
Here was the weirdness: it didn’t matter whether the radio was talking about the annihilation of David or some grisly-ass twenty-person bus collision, my mother never reacted. Not with her face or with her words. Just kept folding clothes or washing peas, her thin I-starved-throughout-my-childhood face pinched inward. It was a kind of passivity that I didn’t understand. Why was she listening to the news if she wasn’t going to react?
Denne historien er fra November 06, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra November 06, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Techniques and cIdiosyncrasies

FEAR FACTOR
How the Red Scare reshaped American politics.

PLAYTIME
The old film studios had house styles: M-G-M’s was plush and sentimental, Warner Bros.’ stark and intense.

TIME AND PLACE
“Tatlin: Kyiv” explores a Russian Constructivist’s Ukrainian identity.

MOURNING BECOMES HER
Akram Khan’s “Gigenis: The Generation of the Earth.”

TEXAS ROUNDUP
How Greg Abbott made his state the staging ground for Donald Trump's mass-deportation campaign.

HOUSE CALL
To rent or to buy is the eternal question.

INDESCRIBABLE
The human disaster of the Irish famine.

Louisa Thomas on John Updike's "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu"
The original idea was an assignation. On a dreary Wednesday in September, 1960, John Updike, \"falling in love, away from marriage,\" took a taxi to see his paramour.

LIP SERVICE
Zyn and the new nicotine gold rush.