“Do you speak English?” I heard his voice behind me and turned around. It was the most unexpected place to hear someone speaking English, though he spoke it tentatively. “Yes, I do,” I answered, trying to pronounce my words clearly since it was obvious his English was not very good. I had seen him when I entered the store. My aunt was looking for ingredients to make my favorite cake. I recorded everything in a sort of diary during my visit to Venezuela. I had not been there i

I was born in a Caracas barrio, and my mom worked in a mayonnaise factory. When I told her college was impossible, she showed me a line in a brochure about a scholarship and said, “Let’s try.” I got in. I graduated. And when I handed her my medal, she said, “I dreamed of that green grass too many times; it had to come true.”

I was afraid of watching this story about a young man navigating the protests and the repression. But I left the cinema feeling proud.

When my grandmother got sick, it wasn’t a politician or a headline that saved her, it was a group of firefighters who climbed fifty-six stairs, carried her down in a stretcher, waited outside a lab in the dark, and shared empanadas with my family. In the middle of a broken system, empathy showed up quietly, without fanfare. This, too, is Venezuela.