Carrying the Fire: Memory, Migration, and the Weight of Freedom

It was Saturday December 13th of this past year, 2025, where I found myself in the motherland sitting in a park, embraced by a friend, overlooking families and couples enjoying the festivities of the day. The parade of old cars had ended and faintly you could hear some orchestras but more so the old latin melodies blasting from viejotecas around the city. 

The park was draped in gold glittery lights. The palm trees that towered over the park seemed to glow against the darkened sky. It was hard not to fall silent and watch couples kissing, families taking portraits in front of the Christmas tree, the holiday jokers and costumed bystanders waiting for coins tossed to entertain, kids running and laughing and people drinking and smoking. 

The air smelled of cigarettes, marihuana and fried meats but still, in the midst of a city– the air felt fresh and lively. Nothing compared to it, not even my six years in New York City could compare to what Pereira feels like during Christmas.

After a while of sitting on these steps and sharing a small intimate moment with a friend, I realized I didn’t know where I was. He laughed and stared at me incredulously and begged me to guess. I contemplated and looked around again. I blame it on el alumbrado and the multitudes of people for obscuring and disguising what I should have known to be el Plaza de Bolivar. We laughed and joked and I scoured. He then pointed out that hidden behind the huge christmas tree and all the bright lights was the famous naked statue.

El Bolívar Desnudo de Rodrigo Arenas Betancourt. 

"Quedó desnudo el hombre, tal un Cristo a caballo. Desnudo el caballo, desnudo el fuego - como en las manos de Prometeo - desnudas las banderas. Nada más, nada menos que un Prometeo: el hombre volando con el fuego sobre la bestia y sobre las montañas en donde los hombres duermen y engendran. Ciegos que buscan la luz. Esclavos que buscan la libertad. Bolívar - Prometeo. Bolívar - tempestad. Bolivar - incendio. Tal es mi estatua. No otra cosa fueron las guerras de independencia ... un anhelo de libertad para conocer, para vivir, para crear."

Roughly translated, less poetic in english than in spanish but in the same tone:

The man was left naked, like a Christ on horseback.

Naked the horse, naked the fire, like in the hands of Prometheus.

Naked the flags.

Nothing more, nothing less than a Prometheus:

the man flying with fire over the beast and over the mountains where men sleep and beget.

Blind men searching for light.

Slaves searching for freedom.

Bolívar, Prometheus.

Bolívar, tempest.

Bolívar, fire.

Such is my statue.

Nothing else were the wars of independence…

a longing for freedom in order to know, to live, to create.

That is what Rodrigo Arenas Betancourt reflected on his statue of Simón Bolívar. And it was poetically realized, this ode to freedom, as I watched families, poor and rich alike, gathered beneath the lights, the park glowing almost heavenly against the dark. They celebrated life and the coming birth of Christ, unaware perhaps that behind the tree, behind the ornaments and the noise, a naked man still flew with fire.

I wondered then what freedom meant in this moment. Not the freedom of independence wars or heroic sacrifice, but the quieter kind: the ability to gather without fear, to kiss in public, to laugh loudly, to linger in the night air without urgency. Bolívar’s fire once promised the right to know, to live, to create. Now it hovered over children chasing each other through cigarette smoke and tinsel, over couples posing for photos they might never print, over vendors counting coins and dreaming small dreams.

The statue did not dominate the plaza; it waited. Like a memory half-buried beneath celebration, it reminded me that freedom is never finished. It is rehearsed nightly in public spaces, tested in who is allowed to rest, to gather, to belong. Watching Pereira glow, I felt both pride and unease. The fire still burns, but it asks to be carried again, not by heroes on horseback, but by ordinary bodies moving through the light, insisting on joy in a world that often denies it.

As I sat there, I became acutely aware of my privilege. The quiet, undeniable privilege of belonging to more than one place, of being able to move between two homes. The thought settled heavily in my chest. The return to the United States loomed like a waking nightmare, inevitable and unsparing. I wondered if it was selfish, as the child of immigrants, to long so deeply for the motherland rather than for the country where I was born.

My parents crossed borders out of necessity, not nostalgia. They fought for safety and dignity in a country that did not want them, and somehow they won. They built a life through endurance and sacrifice. And here I was, their daughter, aching to remain in their land, in my land, held by familiar faces, by language, by customs, by the spirits of ancestors who shaped me long before I knew their names. I asked myself if this longing was a betrayal of their struggle, or its inheritance.

I held my friend a little tighter, as if proximity could delay departure. I tried to absorb everything: the warmth of his body, the hum of the park, the glow of lights against palm leaves. I knew I would soon be leaving without fire in my hands, flying north toward a country that speaks endlessly of freedom while practicing its absence.

Back in New York, the fire would feel distant. I would return to a city braced in fear, where immigration raids ripple through neighborhoods like aftershocks. Where parents disappear on their way to work, where children learn early to memorize phone numbers, where doors are opened cautiously, if at all. The language of liberation here in the States is bureaucratic, sharpened into acronyms and uniforms, rendered faceless. Fear becomes routine. Indifference becomes policy.

I now walk these streets again carrying the memory of Bolívar naked and burning in the dark, and feel the dissonance sharpen. The fire was never meant to be carried alone. It was meant to be shared, to illuminate, to unsettle. And as I boarded the plane back to the United States, I understood that my longing was not selfishness but grief: grief for a world where freedom is unevenly distributed, where belonging is conditional, and where the most vulnerable are asked to prove their humanity over and over again.

I arrived in New York with no fire in my hands, only the memory of it. But memory, I am learning, can still burn. 

When I returned to New York, winter had settled in, and with it the familiar quiet panic that moves through immigrant neighborhoods when rumors begin to circulate. A van spotted on the corner. A knock too early in the morning. A workplace raid whispered about in Spanish and passed from phone to phone like a warning flare. 

I sought refuge and contemplation in my books of Goya and I landed on a painting that I had the honor of seeing once and sitting with at El Prado in Madrid in February of 2019. 

El Prado, Madrid taken in February of 2019

Francisco Goya painted El tres de mayo de 1808 not as a moment of war, but as a moment of exposure. The men about to be executed are illuminated, stripped of anonymity by a brutal lantern. Their faces register terror, prayer, disbelief. The soldiers, meanwhile, are turned away from us. They are uniformed, mechanical, interchangeable. Goya makes a choice about where humanity lives in the frame and where it does not.

The 3rd of May 1808 in Madrid, or “The Executions” Goya y Lucientes, Francisco de. ©Museo Nacional del Prado

That imbalance feels painfully familiar.

In modern immigration raids carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the same visual logic persists. Agents arrive masked, armored, faces hidden behind bureaucracy and law. The people taken are exposed fully. Their names, their tears, their fear circulate publicly, while the machinery that removes them remains faceless and protected. Violence today rarely needs a firing squad; it only needs paperwork and plausible deniability.

Goya’s victims are not shown resisting. They are not armed. They are not guilty in any moral sense. They are simply in the wrong place under the wrong authority. That, too, echoes now. So many targeted in raids are workers, parents, people who have lived quietly and contributed for years. The state reframes their existence as a crime, just as the empire once reframed survival as rebellion.

What haunts me the most in Goya’s painting is not the moment of death but the inevitability of it. The pile of bodies already executed at the edge of the canvas tells us this violence is routine. Rehearsed. Efficient. And that is what makes it modern. Today’s raids function similarly. They are not exceptional events; they are scheduled, funded, normalized. Trauma is administered systematically.

As the child of immigrants, I move through this landscape with an uneasy duality. I carry the privilege of return, of documents, of mobility. I fly freely between countries while others are trapped in the glare of the lantern, praying not to be seen.

I think back to Bolívar flying naked with fire over the mountains, and to Goya’s man in white with his arms raised, illuminated and doomed. Both figures are exposed. Both burn with meaning. One represents the promise of liberation; the other, the cost of power. Between them lies the tension of history repeating itself under new names.

Goya was not painting the past. He was warning the future.

And so I carry these images with me: the glowing park in Pereira, the faceless soldiers on Goya’s hill, the early-morning sirens in New York. I understand that memory itself becomes a form of resistance. To remember is to refuse the erasure that power depends on. To witness is to insist on humanity where systems insist on silence. And once you have seen the lantern for what it is, you cannot mistake it for light again.