Casa Gutierrez

I am writing in the near darkness of the dawn after another night, the third one in a row to be exact, of painting the Gutierrez House which lies about 600 meters of the house where I grew up. This old traditional coffee plantation is an important building in the history of Medellín for its age and exemplarity, as it has appeared in various historic documents about the city for being an axis of development around the area, and for its very specific architectural design. While painting it, and as a result of a conversation I had with my father about it, I have come to realize there is a possibility that after ten years of abandonment, it might be safe again to move back into the house. It has been for sale since we left and there have been various offers including one by the state itself to turn the house into some sort of museum, but either the distance from the city center or the danger related to the Colombian countryside have always prevented the transaction.

Personally, this topic has always affected me, I never wanted the house to sell not only because I have a familial connection with the house and therefore a sort of romanticism about it, but also because I do sincerely consider it national heritage and I think most people who want to buy it don't realize that. Of course, I need to make the exception of when the state wanted to buy it to integrate it to Arví Regional Park in a project that I alluded to already.

I was 13 years old when we left and I thought it unconceivable that the area was out of bounds indefinitely, yet I have only been back once since for a very hurried and paranoid visit in 2008. My family was virtually banned from that area since 2000, when we migrated to the US due to the armed conflict. Since then it has been considered imprudent and dangerous to go there, but things seem to have finally changed for the better and my father suddenly seems interested in Colombia again. He is even talking about starting a business of agricultural sort within the grounds of the property. In any case, the possibility of putting the house to use is relieving because it means that perhaps the house will be properly looked after, and that's what's most important.

I will now describe my personal relationship to that house, and where the romanticism towards it comes from. Let me clarify before I go further that I did not grow up in the Gutierrez Household, but in another house near it of far less historic importance if any, which is now inhabited. The area was however, all around part of the Gutierrez estate at some point, and to my understanding, it encompassed a vast area including Las Mellizas, which became highly populated within the last two or three decades as a result of forced migration from the countryside. But those are other stories that are not part of mine (at least yet).

Due to my own displacement, I became obsessed with memories of that lost, out of bounds piece of land, and was so preoccupied with them, and with the emotions attached to those memories, that I was in a sort of dream state for many years while dwelling on the past. Being still a child, I made a promise to my brother that one day we would go back to our motherland and that it would be as before, and for a while I was stubbornly committed to that promise. Everything else in my perception was as inconsequential and as ephemeral as the things that a suicide bomber must endure in order to ensure his last mission securely. In other words, the real importance of my existence lied somewhere in my future and my current situation was nothing but a means. With such a mentality, it was very difficult for me to let myself enjoy life or to even look at it objectively.

That consistency of thought however, convinced me that it was my destiny that I would eventually return to the land that I believed created me (and perhaps that I created too). That enclave, which is an area that is real, and is called Santa Helena in the outskirts of Medellín, was nonetheless reinvented and idealized. That world was my past and my future and during my teenage-hood it represented my reality and my purpose. I often feel, when I allow myself to look back into those days, that I was living in a half-reality composed of a fantastical mixture of the future and the past and too little of the present. The future, being a mirror image of the past, was not always a consequence of the present but rather subconsciously I understood it as fate, so I never considered the possibility of failure in this business of “obtaining my life back.” I understand now that the persistence of that half-reality also came from denial. Namely, I revoked the idea that my “real life,” or that one that was not the present one, that one of my childhood, was gone forever. Hence I say that my experience being an emigrant in the United States was somewhat like a dream, or like death, or like a virtual reality, miserable, inconsequential, vain. I had to remove myself completely from the situation in order to understand the grave dangers of idealizing and dwelling. It took ten years.

Living in Korea has given me the time and the discipline I needed in order to achieve some degree of sober introspection. I know that going back to Colombia will not be as I once imagined it, but I think I am more ready to return now than before when everything was so muddled and so passionate, and I trust that by having access to that place again I will finally close a chapter, the one titled The Emigrant Dream. After all, it is the realization of a dream to go back, and it is really rare when a dream comes true, especially this one, because in most cases it is impossible to build out of ash, but the fate of this home was different. I don’t have too much time here and I am anxious, still crossing fingers for the house not to sell and for the violence-factor to keep quiet.

Written 6-30-2010, revised 9-04-2010, revised 3-14-2011.