Held Hostage by History

That day, the 19th, was my ninth birthday. With my parents hours away, I spent that birthday sunnily skating around a roller rink in Key West with the Hamlin kids, Robin and Sherman, not knowing how much my life had just changed.

After Somoza's flight, my father gained re-admittance to Cornell University, where he had started, but never finished, his Ph.D. We spent four months in Ithaca, New York, while my father and mother--he writing, she typing--toiled furiously on the dissertation that would enable him to work as an economist in the United States. A few months later, he was offered a job in Washington.

I was aware, even then, that, by comparison with many other kids in my position, I was lucky. I'd learned English in school, so I didn't have to fight past a language barrier. My father had found a job, and we'd already managed to crawl back into the middle class--unlike some people my parents knew, who were working in pizza joints and such.

Still, those early years were some of the worst in my life. Back home, I had been the queen bee in a neighborhood of boys. I'd played with them, fought with them, terrorized the new kids and generally felt right with my place in the world. But in the States, I found bewildering rules and unexpected fault lines that could betray me at any moment. On my first day at school in Ithaca, I noticed an exotic animal on the playground and delightedly screamed, "Squirrel!" only to have dozens of unimpressed faces turn to look at me. When we moved to Rockville, I became the only Hispanic kid at Fallsmead Elementary School to help belt out West Side Story's "America" for the spring pageant. ("I like to be in America!/O.K. by me in America!") Worse, I found it impossible to relate to the ribbon-wearing girls in my fourth-grade class, who made fun of my clothes, my hair, the paper bag lunches I packed myself every morning.

In the swift, brutal arithmetic of immigrant kids everywhere, I quickly figured out the basic tenets of my new existence: 1) Terrible things could happen anytime and 2) I was on my own. Weird Nicaraguan-ness--in dress, in lunch food, anywhere, wouldn't help me. The only way to stay safe was to keep my head down and blend in with the crowd. When the jocular son of one of my parents' friends landed in my class, I watched him move silent and alone around the room and avoided him studiously. It would be years--college, really--until I felt any other way.

Whatever the war in Nicaragua may mean to me, for most people in the United States these days, it is a distant memory if it is one at all.

In an archive at the Post, photos from the conflict are bundled into four thick, crinkled manila folders, still marked up with wax pencil where the editors cropped them in the '70s and early '80s. Opening up the folders gave me a strange twinge of recognition. There were the olive-green uniforms, the distinctly Nicaraguan faces, the devastation, death and ruin. Among those of the Palace take-over: a group of Red Cross workers waving a white flag, a handicapped woman being led out, a wounded guerilla on a stretcher, still holding his weapon. Most famous of all, there was the picture taken after Somoza capitulated, freeing about 50 political prisoners and providing the rebels with $500,000 dollars and safe passage out of the country. It was of "Comandante Zero" -- Eden Pastora, who led the raid -- triumphantly waving his gun above his head beforeboarding a plane.

I was amazed too, when I read contemporary articles about those days. The dates and facts cited were often wrong. One story concerned Dora Maria Tellez Arguello, who, as "Comandante Two," served under Pastora in the raid. In 2004, she was invited to teach a class on third-world politics and ethics at Harvard Divinity School. When the U.S. State Department denied her a visa for having participated in "terrorist" activities, controversy erupted.

"We never made attacks against civilians, not in the history of Sandinismo," the Chicago Tribune quoted her as saying. She called being at the Palace "a great honor," adding that, "No one was hurt, not one hostage."

Of course, that's not true. Most of those taken hostage at the Palace were civilians, and the day my mother was released, La Prensa reported five people dead. Fourteen others were reported wounded.

It's as if the war has started melting away, its facts becoming blurred. In a way, this feels like the days when my family first came to the United States. The revolution was on the news then, but not everyone was paying attention.

I remember going to a pizza restaurant on Rockville Pike with my family soon after we arrived in the area, in 1980. The hostess, a husky, cheerful blonde, told us it would be a few minutes until we could be seated. "Where y'all from?" she asked.