Paula is a college student at Rosario University in Bogota, Colombia. She works as a clerk at a law firm, and in the following years, as she completes her studies and gains more experience, she'll be a lawyer. In Bogota, like in New York or perhaps anywhere, getting that career "in" is all about connections, and the Rodriguez family is well-connected. They are NOT related to the famosos Hermanos Rodriguez of the Cali Cartel, but Paula has her own story about being hurt by Colombia's conflicto armado.
In 2003 Paula was beginning at the University, and she commuted to school by walking and on public transportation. Then her father received threats that Paula and her brother Alberto would be killed if he did not pay the FARC (a "leftist" guerrilla group) an preemptive ransom. The FARC makes it's money off the cocaine trade, and Paula's father stubbornly refused to pay, declaring his pride and strength at standing up to the criminals. For the next six months, says Paula, the family lived in terror. They received many threats. She had to be escorted by bodyguards and a driver anytime she left the house. One night, two cars filled with men with machine guns surrounded them on a narrow street, and they narrowly escaped when the driver sped down a side alley. Finally the FARC gave up and left them alone, but the fear and pain was inextricably imprinted in Paula's mind. Her country, Colombia, in spite of its natural beauty and smiling people, is shackled by the horror of the cocaine-funded war.
Last week on Mulberry Street in New York's "Little Italy," Paula looked into a t-shirt shop and saw, next to a "Godfather" T, a black and gold XXL with the name Pablo Escobar emblazoned on it. She called me in a frenzy, demanding an explanation. Why is this here? What does it mean? This is a man who brought pain and terror to her country for decades, who slaughtered entire families, who assassinated hundreds of policemen, who was finally killed in 1993 to the collective sigh of her homeland, and here on a street lined with red-and-white-checkered tablecloths is his silkscreened face with the label "#1 Gangster."
Me, I heard shout-outs to Escobar in rap songs long before I heard his true story. If I saw that shirt I would likely think that he was a character from a movie, perhaps from Godfather III or Scarface. In high school, I just thought he was a rapper, maybe from L.A.
The thing is that once a person gains a level of notoriety in this media-driven world, and then the headlines fade and leave only vague memories of who they really were, they become symbols, not people. As symbols, they can easily be used and misused and can organically come to represent many things, likely disparate from their "factual" reality. When a tourist or a rapper dons an Escobar t-shirt, to him the hills of Antioquia mean nothing. When a college student puts on the one-starred mug of Che Guevara, he is not thinking of the capture of the Santa Clara train, or the social system under Batista. Symbols are not meant to remind us of history, they are meant to serve the present. The power of a symbol is its ability to conjure a feeling or emotion that applies to the current situation. A good symbol can become timeless. A good symbol can be used by different people for different reasons, each of which draws back to, not the history, but the emotion or feeling.
That is both the beauty of a symbol and the danger. As the symbol comes to mean different things to different people, it becomes more powerful, because it can effect people in different ways. But putting on a Che shirt does not require taking on the responsibility of that symbol and all its myriad meanings. You may be wearing a powerful thing- an inspiring, complicit, or even hurtful thing- but to you it's just a shirt. "This shirt's cool. Everyone has this. Whatever."
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