Walking around the streets of Santa Marta, my rural host village in El Salvador, it was hard to miss the big groups of kids playing around the street. Packs of five-to-13-year-olds walk around, mess with each other's clothes, play with empty bottles and not-quite-inflated soccer balls, laugh and shout like they're having the time of their lives. It is not until you have spent more time getting to know their names, where they live and who their parents are that it eventually occurs to you: Those two are sisters and cousins with that one, whose aunt is the godmother of the one with long hair whose one brother is the compañero (similar to a husband but without the marriage ceremony) of the curly-haired one's half-sister because they both eat lunch at the same grandmother's house down the street, who lives with his aunt because his mother doesn't live here anymore. Slowly, more facts come out about who is related to whom until you figure out an enormous web of family relations. Your cousin isn't just your relative … he's also your best friend. After all, you have been hanging out with each other every day since, well, forever.
This kind of family closeness and neighborhood unity is something I completely lack in my own life. My geographically closest cousins live an hour-and-a-half away, and in truth, I don't know much more about them other than what a Facebook.com profile reveals. Our system of achievement and chasing aspirations leaves us isolated and divided. At least in southern Jersey, our houses are pretty standard: two parents (sometimes one) in each house, a few kids, maybe a dog and, of course, a fence. Family dinners are rare with kids at a million extracurricular activites. We are congenial with our neighbors but don't get too personal. While abroad, I marveled at the closeness of Santa Marta's community, in part because everyone is somehow related, making neighbors inherent friends. Children wander from house to house, following their friends home knowing that they'll be able to spend time with their friends' aunts. The economic realities of El Salvador mean that at least one parent, if not both, is working in the United States, sometimes with the other working weeks in the nearby city. Kids are left to a network of other caregivers: grandmothers, cousins, that woman who sells chickens.
When I look back at my own family's history, I like to pretend we had something similar in the shtetls of Russia and maybe even in the crowded Jewish neighborhoods where my ancestors hopped off the boat in Philadelphia. I romanticize the sense of community and family everyone in Santa Marta, El Salvador must feel, growing up with family not just at one address, but everywhere around you. It seems to me like a nostalgic return to simpler times — when everybody was within a five-minute walk of one another, and family meant more than just sending cards at the holidays; it meant actually sharing the struggle together. Instead, I have five aunts and uncles spread across five states, making interactions less meaningful than congenial. But just as El Salvador's economic realities divide families, American realities and class movement also divide them with job offers all over the map — and the promise of a bigger house with a higher fence.
I know this is several years off (thanks Trojan-ENZ!), but is it too soon to imagine a life close to your siblings, ensuring close-knit family for your children? It makes me think I should buy a house next to my sister and we should raise our kids together. And then I remember that we don't agree on anything, ever.
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Jacob Kreimer is a junior majoring in international relations. He can be reached at Jacob.Kreimer@tufts.edu.
