DOES SILENCIO=MUERTE?

• Author: CAMPO, RAFAEL
• Position: Latinos and AIDS

Notes on translating the AIDS epidemic

Palomita chatters in one of my clinic exam rooms in Boston, her strongly accented voice filling the chilly institutional chrome-and-vinyl space with Puerto Rican warmth. She's off on another dramatic monologue, telling me about her new boyfriend.

"Edgar, he loves me, you know, he call me mamacita. He want me to be the mother of his children someday, OK? I ain't no slut. Mira, I don't need to use no condom with him."

Even the way she dresses is a form of urgent communication--the plunging neckline of her tropically patterned blouse, whose tails knotted above her waist also expose her flat stomach, the skin-tight denim jeans, the gold, four-inch hoop earrings, and the necklace with her name spelled out in cursive with tiny sparkling stones. Her black hair is pulled back tightly, except for a small squiggle greased flat against her forehead in the shape of an upside-down question mark.

"People think bad of him `cause they say he dealing drugs. I tell them, `No way, you shut your stupid mouths. He good to me and beside, he cleaner than you is.' Sure, he got his other girls now and then, but he pick them out bien carefully, you know what I mean. That his right as man of the house. No way he gonna give me la SIDA. We too smart for none of that shit. We trust each other. We communicate. We gonna buy us a house somewhere bien bonita. Someday we gonna make it."

She is seventeen years old, hasn't finished high school, and cannot read English. I have just diagnosed her with herpes, and I am trying to talk to her about AIDS and "safer sex." Her Edgar, who is also a patient of mine, tested HIV-positive last week. It's clear they have not discussed it.

Latinos are dying at an alarming rate from AIDS. And for all our glorious presence on the world's stage--in music, literature, art, from MacArthur grants to MTV to Sports Illustrated--this is one superlative no one can really boast about. Few Latinos dare even to mention the epidemic. The frenetic beat of salsa in our dance clubs seems to drown out the terrifying statistics, while the bright murals in our barrios cover up the ugly blood-red graffiti, and that "magical realism" of our fictions imagines a world where we can lose our accents and live in Vermont, where secret family recipes conjure up idealized heterosexual love in an ultimately just universe unblemished by plague.

Here, loud and clear, for once, are some of the more stark, sobering facts: In the U.S., Latinos accounted for one-fifth of all AIDS cases reported to the Centers for Disease Control last year, while making up only one-tenth of the U.S. population; AIDS has been the leading cause of death since 1991 for young Latino men in this country; in areas with especially high numbers of Latinos, such as Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Los Angeles, and New York, AIDS deaths among Latina women were four times the national average since 1995. While the infection rate among whites continues to decline, today, and every day, 100 people of color are newly diagnosed with HIV infection. Behold our isolated and desperate substance users, the most marginalized of the marginalized, our forsaken impoverished, and our irreplaceable young people.

I do not have to wonder at the reasons for the silence among Latinos about the burgeoning AIDS epidemic that is decimating us. Though I stare into its face every day in the clinic where I work, there are times when even I want to forget, to pretend it is not happening, to believe my people are invincible and can never be put down again. I want to believe Palomita is HIV-negative, that Edgar will stop shooting drugs and someday return to get on the right triple combination of anti-viral medications. I fervently hope that C6sar, a twenty-year-old Colombian man who keeps missing his appointments, is taking his protease inhibitors so that his viral load remains undetectable. I do not really know who pays for his drugs, since he is uninsured, but my thoughts do not dwell on it. In the end, I want to go home and rest after a long day in the clinic, to make love to my partner of fourteen years and feel that I'll never have to confront another epidemic. I want to look into his dark, Puerto Rican...