A Story of Conversion
I grew up in Los Angeles. Perhaps “grow up” isn’t the right word. I inhabited the tiny world known as North Hollywood, until I was ten. Or eleven. The years become blurry.
We moved back to Chile and I had to learn Spanish. I did. No accent (you don’t develop an accent in your second language until you’re fourteen). So, I sounded Chilean in Spanish and I also sounded American in English.
Chile wasn’t home, but neither was Los Angeles. Not anymore, at least. And it hadn’t really felt like home. Though my father had lived around thirty five to forty years in the US (and never spoke Spanish to us), there were Latinamerican sensibilities to be found in the way my parents moved, spoke and how they inserted their be-ing into the city.
Already established as a Chilena, though not feeling like one, you could say I thrived.
Until 1994.
April 9th, 1994 was the year my father died of a broken heart. He died in bankruptcy, losing all his wealth (and he had amassed plenty of it).
Had it not been for relatives, we would have gone to the streets. We were left with the clothes on our backs and in the closet, and five hundred books plus eight hundred vinyl records. I know because I counted them while my father was alive. I cataloged them. These things were important to him, and so they were to me.
Because I loved him more than I’ll ever be able to put into words, you see.
We sold it all. And I cried the day they took my father’s books and records away. It was as though he had died all over again.
The relatives treated us poorly. Kenita (my mother), who had once had two nannies, became one herself, her heart in her work because my brother and I existed. We had to move forward. She never complained.
I once heard that at the crossroads, you have no other choice but to stay alive for those you love.
This is what she did.
She stayed alive and she smiled through it all.
For years she cleaned other people’s homes. She even raised a baby, who calls her to this day to say hello.
CS Lewis says that pain is God’s megaphone to a deaf world.
And in my pain, in my family’s pain, we found God. I was 18.
I’m 48 today.
It took twenty long years to climb out of the financial (and emotional) wreckage my father’s death left behind. I carried around a litany of broken dreams and many times, life, the struggle to put food on the table and the hopelessness of a future, a real future, became a load that would have broken me; us, had it not been for God.
I never wed, never had children. Life was always about making ends meet (Bittersweet Symphony by The Verve puts it so brilliantly). I didn’t mourn these things, it was what it was: a season of working to survive and of finding God in the midst of pain.
In finding God, I found myself.
Most of the photos below were taken in 2025. The smile you see is the product of Grace.
And music.
And Buenos Aires.
And new dreams in the second half of my life.
Joy.
