Against the Silence

 

...And My Life Under Three Flags —

My father’s story begins long before mine, obviously, but in many ways, it was already writing the script for who I would become—not just as his child, but as a trans woman who would one day have to find her own voice against the quiet pressures of conformity. His choices, his silences, and his small acts of defiance shaped more than our family’s path across borders; they became part of the map I would one day follow to claim my own existence.

In 1936, an 18-year-old boarded a ship bound for the United States. He had no fortune behind him, no guarantees ahead—just ambition, good manners, and the kind of determined hope possessed by those who believe the future can be made rather than merely endured. He landed in New York City, lived in a YMCA, and enrolled in a business school, training to become a secretary—a respected profession for men at the time.

He worked hard, learned the language, and eventually secured a position as an executive secretary at the Dayton Rubber Company in Ohio. He fell in love with the United States: its pace, its promise, its belief that a person’s worth could be forged through effort. It wasn’t a flawless country, but to him, it felt solid—like something you could build a life upon.

Then came the telegram: his father was dying. Without hesitation, he returned to Bogotá. He had already enlisted in the U.S. Navy with a friend, but after explaining his situation at the U.S. Embassy, he received written assurance he wouldn’t be seen as a defector. His father lingered, and life shifted on its axis.

That November, at his brother’s birthday party, he met my mother—a high school girl with watchful chaperones and a steady gaze. Their courtship began quietly, rooted in a world where gestures carried more weight than words. A few weeks later, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and the world tipped into war. My father didn’t return to the U.S. to serve; he stayed, waited for my mother to finish school, and in 1943, they married.

But he never stopped loving the United States. That love became a quiet ember, glowing beneath the surface of their lives in Colombia—a light he carried through the uncertainties of a changing world.

In the 1950s, Colombia was once again unsettled. Gustavo Rojas Pinilla had seized power, cloaking himself in the language of order and progress, promising to end the violence tearing the country apart. But like so many strongmen before and after, he turned to censorship, surveillance, and suppression.

My father was no rabble-rouser, but he was a Liberal, and he knew when a government’s grip tightened too far. On certain nights, when the city fell still, he joined others in painting anti-government graffiti—small messages on bare walls that said, in essence: we will not disappear into silence.

It wasn’t grand. It wasn’t meant to be. But in those days, even quiet defiance carried weight. Authoritarianism thrives by convincing people that resistance must be loud and dangerous to matter—and then crushing it. But it also fears whispers, the kind that travel through neighborhoods and across generations.

The unrest grew, and so did his desire to return to the land that had once felt wide open. His dream was simple: to give his family a future where opportunity wasn’t rationed by power, where truth didn’t have to hide in the shadows. That dream eventually carried us to the United States, where my father could finally share with us the country he had fallen in love with as a young man. It wasn’t perfect, but it offered a sense of stability and possibility that Colombia no longer could.

Years later, we made another move—this time north. Canada became the place where we slowly laid down new roots, where the echoes of uncertainty quieted, and the promise of a more secure future took shape. But that’s another story. It wasn’t a dramatic leap but a steady, deliberate step toward a life that felt more grounded. In many ways, it was the final chapter in my father’s search for stability—a search that began with a one-way ticket across the Caribbean in 1936.

But history, as I have learned over time, is not a line—it is a spiral. It circles back, sometimes with new faces, sometimes with old tactics dressed in new language.

My father’s story of quiet resistance became the soil from which I grew, though I didn’t always see it. For much of my life, I carried my own battle silently—the long, private, aching search to live authentically as the woman I am. My father had dreamed of safety, but safety alone doesn’t erase the quiet wars we wage inside ourselves. For me, it took decades to claim the right to exist fully, to speak the truth of who I am without apology or disguise.

Looking back now, I see the thread that runs through it all: a refusal to let fear dictate the terms of my life. It was there when my father dipped a brush into paint and wrote dissent in the night, when he packed his hope into a suitcase and carried it across borders, and when I chose to live my truth—not with fanfare, not with fire, but with the same quiet determination that shaped him.

And now, as I look south, I see a country he once adored—the place that represented freedom, opportunity, and second chances—shifting uneasily under familiar shadows. The language of strongmen is creeping back into everyday speech. Fear is being repackaged as moral clarity. Democracy is being treated not as a shared trust but as a nuisance to be worked around.

I know this story. My father knew it too. It’s the story of how authoritarianism begins—not with a coup, but with a slow erosion of trust, truth, and care. Not with a single villain, but with ordinary people deciding that someone else’s rights are expendable, that cruelty can be justified, that silence is safer than resistance.

He left Colombia because he recognized those patterns for what they were. Now, I watch those same patterns flicker in a place that once inspired him.

But I also know something else: quiet resistance runs in my blood. It does not need a stage. It does not always look like protest signs and slogans. Sometimes it looks like living authentically in a world that tells you not to, or refusing to be silent. Sometimes it looks like a story handed down across generations that says: This is what happens when fear wins. And this is how we keep it from winning again.

My father never became a famous man. His name isn’t inscribed in any textbook. But he passed on something far more enduring than fame: a quiet, steady defiance—a way of standing in the world that refuses to surrender to cruelty or despair.

Today, that inheritance feels less like history and more like a torch being passed. I carry it not as a banner, but as a whisper—a reminder that silence, too, can be resistance, if it is the kind that speaks without permission.

I also carry an awareness that my family’s journey, however meaningful to us, is not the same as that of millions around the world who have moved not out of longing, but out of desperation. We were never running for our lives. We were searching for stability, for opportunity, for a place where hope didn’t feel so fragile. That is its own kind of good fortune.

Our story is just one among countless others—quieter, safer, shaped by choice rather than by threat. And I hold that knowledge with the weight it deserves.

Related Blogpost: https://lisainbc.blogspot.com/2017/02/land-of-free-and-home-of-brave.html