Colombian Odyssey

"Oh, yes," he said. "My father told me about you."

Funny, I thought. My father never told me anything about him.

I told him that I would be in Pereira and that I wanted to see him. I asked for his address. He said I wouldn't be able to find his home on my own, so I should call once I got there. I agreed, and we said our goodbyes. I called him again on September 9 when I got to Bogota, where I was planning to stay for a couple of days with a friend. I gave him my flight number.

"Don't wear any jewelry," he said before we hung up. "You'll get robbed."

MY JOURNEY TO COLOMBIA BEGAN, IN A SENSE, on the No. 42 Metrobus in Washington. On most weekday mornings, I take the bus from Adams Morgan to The Post's headquarters at 15th and L streets NW. The bus is usually packed with professionals like myself on their way to work, most of them non-Hispanic whites. Then there are the Latino immigrants, on their way, I presume -- and, yes, I'm stereotyping -- to clean offices or bus tables. They sit quietly or talk to one another in Spanish. There is no mingling between the two groups.

I usually spend the 10-minute ride reading the newspaper or text-messaging friends. I speak to no one, unless I run into someone I know from work or my social life. Sometimes, though, I catch the eye of one of the Latinos, and I feel I know what he or she is thinking: She looks like a Latina, but she's got reddish-brown hair and pale skin and freckles, and she's dressed as if she's going to an office. Is she one of us?

The answer is yes -- and no.

Like my father, my mother, Maria Trejos, is from South America. She was born and raised in Ecuador. She and my father came separately to the United States. Both grew up poor, and neither made it past high school. Both thought they would be able to make more money in America.

They saved a lot and eventually bought a house in Queens, which is where I like to think the backbone of New York City lives -- the immigrants who do the jobs the lawyers and stockbrokers don't have to do.

I am the youngest of the three children they had, all of us born at St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital on Manhattan's West Side. That's where my father worked for 30 years serving food in the cafeteria. My mother cleaned Park Avenue apartments during the day, rushed home to pick us up from school and feed us dinner, and rushed back to Manhattan to clean offices until about 1 a.m.

Our house was in Jackson Heights, which has a large Colombian population. The 7 train rumbled above Roosevelt Avenue, the main thoroughfare. On weekend mornings, people formed lines at the bakeries to buy empanadas, bu¿uelos and pan de yucca. Anytime the Colombian soccer team won a match, our neighbors would get into their cars and drive up and down the avenue honking their horns and waving the red, blue and yellow Colombian flag.

My parents felt comfortable there. We spoke Spanish all the time. We went to parties where people danced merengue, salsa and cumbia. We ate rice and fried plantains almost every day. Cantinflas, the Mexican comedian, was our favorite, and we could always count on at least one theater in Queens showing his latest movie.