Check out first Miami to Orlando voyage on Florida's Brightline Train

Check this out! The first trip on Florida's Brightline speed train from Miami to Orlando was September 22, 2023, and everyone's favorite Spanish-language travel blogger was there to document how everything went down.

Living a Life Under Construction

The first post on this blog was in June, 2004, when I was 32 years old. Today, it is early January, 2023. I am 51. A lot of time has passed. Wow, 21 years. It feels like a blip. Like no time has passed at all.

As I read the fist post, Stagnant and Confused, I am launched back in time to when I was trying to decide the next step in my career. I had been a journalist. Then I sort of let that go, and I was looking for new direction.

Funny thing is, I sort of followed a path after that post that has led me to where I am today. And it seems I have ended up in a place my 32 self would have wanted to be. But I already knew that. I did not need to look back on an old blog post to figure that out.

I know that I felt somehow I would have some huge impact on the world. And maybe I had some impact as a teacher throughout the years. The impact certainly was not to the degree my younger self wanted. Still, I feel okay with the life I have led, even if it has been created by a great many imperfect choices.

Like the cities we live in, our lives remain under construction forever

See, life does not necessarily go where we think it will when we are younger. There is no road in front of us, as Antonio Machado told us in his 1973 book, "Caminante, No Hay Camino". As we take steps, the road is created under our feet.

So it is with my life's road. For better or for worse, it is the road the road created by me. The thing our younger selves do not count on is that our lives will be constantly under construction. Our choices continue to build us. It is impossible not to change.

Choices we make are sometimes hoisted upon us by circumstance. Sure, we have many choices to do was we will with the cards we are dealt. Those choices are limited, though, by our own vision and our own willingness to take risks to pave the road that really matters to us. Some circumstances weaken us beyond our will.

Each life is marked by trauma, and the overcoming of trauma. This is the pavement we lay. Forks in the road do not really exist, then, because the road of the other choice is never paved; we create an image of the fork in our minds where it lingers in our memory as a "could have been".

Today I will make new choices that will continue to pave the road I am on, and I who knows where it will lead. I count myself as fortunate to have made it this far, and I am happy with my life, no matter how imperfectly constructed it may be.

I was desperate to make an impact on the world in my younger days, and that has not changed. I will continue to have hope in the choices I make for as many years as I am given the fortune to live.

I'm obsessed with Novos Baianos A Menina Dança live 1972

I'm absolutely obsessed with the Novos Baianos from Brazil. This video was shot live on film and with all analog equipment in 1972. It's wonderful to see this level of talent and creativity and the music itself is made better by all plugs firing at once rather than each piece being recorded seperately then threaded back together in post production. 

Genealogy: My mother's journey to the dark places of American History

By Brian Schwarz

Researching our family tree was the number one objective of my mother’s retirement. She would fly once or twice a year to Utah on a genealogy vacation where she researched at the Family History Library with a personal librarian. In the beginning she seemed most interested in discovering specifics of her Scottish heritage. She was like a kid in a candy store with each new discovery as she started learning to really dig in to the past. Loaded with new bits of information and random details, she had big plans to visit the ancestral homeland and tie all the ends together in person. She was keen on discovering family churches, specific towns, and possibly finding a castle or two to explore when she arrived in Scotland.

She found everything she was looking for and her discoveries aligned with much of what already had been passed down to her via oral tradition. After her first trip to Scotland – there would be others – she was drawn more deeply into our family’s inception in the Americas. She set out to discover exactly when her long-passed family members made the leap across the pond. Even more, she wanted to locate the towns where they landed when they got here. In short order, she was hunting for their graves.

My mother became a driven and passionate genealogist. in time she would discover a lot more than anyone ever expected. I wondered why she became so obsessed with the hunt for these figures from the past. I assumed she was racing against time. She was a breast and lung cancer survivor and was quite aware of her dwindling time under the sun. Perhaps she wanted to leave something permanent and lasting to the coming generations? “No”, she told me. “I’m doing it for me”.

My mother would often say she was intent on living life on her terms

She would never reveal to me why she was so compelled to research stories of the family's past. She was not one to explain herself to anyone. She lived and died by her own choices and dearly protected her motives. When her research uncovered the truth about our family’s possible involvement in the Middle Passage slave trade and the building of The South on the backs of imported Africans, she seemed unphased. She was in no way a bigot, but she became intent on proving she was a descendent of Confederate soldiers in order to join the United Daughters of the Confederacy. I asked again. “Why are you so obsessed with discovering such tangled roots? ”

She would give up nothing to clarify. My mother was notorious for answering any question I would ask with “because”. In her defense, I always had two follow-up questions for every question I asked. Finding out why she was so fixated on her quest, then, would require a bit of my own research. I started listening and observing more intently what she was doing. Turns out she just wanted to see how far back she could go because she simply wanted to know. There was no deep analysis of the politics or crimes against humanity that served as backdrop to her discoveries. For her, it was research for the sake of research.

For me, however, the expedition she was on filled me with an impending dread for what might be unearthed as she trod on graves in search of the past. As a student of political science and budding journalist focused on the Post-Colonial Americas, I was unable to separate her findings from research I was doing into the underbelly of American history. My focus was on the human consequences of European Colonization and comparing the policies that took hold, which led to the rise of the Confederacy in the South and of the Industrial Revolution in the North. I could not separate my own family’s participation in weaving the delicate but oppressive fabric that formed and continues to form of the United States of America.  

NOTE: This is Part 1 of a planned series. Please leave me a content if you are interested in reading more.

Miami Beach is a Unicorn Vacation Crowd Pleaser

By Brian Schwarz

When planning a group vacation, it is nearly impossible to find one place that satisfies everyone. Some travelers prefer relaxing on the beach while drinking mojitos and listening to waves crash along the shore. Others may be adrenaline junkies in search of the next great adventure. Still others crave the excitement of a city. And no one wants to drive anywhere.

This begs the question, does such a unicorn vacation even exist? In fact, it does. Located along Florida’s Gold Coast, the vibrant city of Miami Beach offers vacationers the best of everything that any group could look for when planning a vacation. Chair rentals with colorful umbrellas and bottle service dot white sand beaches that stretch for miles. Opulent hotels and quaint vacation rentals are all located either beachfront or within a few minutes’ walk. Wave runners, cigarette boats, and deep-sea fishing charters are available in the harbor. And the city itself boasts shopping, walkable promenades lined with shops and restaurants, and access to theater, museums, and nightlife.

What is more, Miami Beach boasts stunning architecture while palm trees, night blooming jasmine and bougainvillea give it a tropical feel. As such, the city is often used as a set location for the film and fashion industries. Offering a diverse international flair that balances vacation relaxation and fun unlike any other place in the United States makes Miami Beach a true unicorn vacation destination. Next time you find yourself in charge of picking a vacation spot for your group travel, choose Miami Beach and you are bound to please them all.

Sticking Out in America

Originally published, September 2004

A few years ago I spent the summer in Mexico. For six weeks I studied the Spanish language and Mexican culture at a school in Cuernavaca while living with a Mexican family. Along with a group of other students from my university I explored the ruins of great ancient empires in places like Teotihuacan, Tepotzlan and Zihuatanejo. In my free time, I spent lots of time in the Zocalos, or town squares, of villages around the state of Morelos observing the rhythm of life and trying not to stick out like a sore thumb amidst all the indigenous people. I'm over six feet tall, blond, with blue eyes. So I towered among most, and because of my light features was usually being stared at by passersby, forced to participate, unable to be an unidentified observer.

My host family - mi primo y mi mamá mexicana - Mexico, summer 1998

I was just as interested in watching folks on the street as they were in watching me, but I had an entire population to diffuse my glare, so faces blended together, became one. Meanwhile, I felt every individual stare. All around me were these short-statured chaparritos, with brown skin, dark eyes, and black hair; their culture was a mystery to me. Everything I'd known before about Mexicans had come from the small communities of apple pickers, the ones I'd visited with my Presbyterian youth group in the outskirts of Winchester, Virginia, in the mid-1980s, a full decade or more before the so-called Latin Invasion of the 90s. I remembered a shy, disoriented people. But here, on the streets of Cuernavaca, I was seeing a confident people, at home with their environment, standing tall and putting me on the spot.

From the time I was a child, I enjoyed anonymity. I was often ignored, blending into crowds. So at first being watched annoyed me. I quickly realized that my presence was always known, and sometimes I would meet someone late in the evening who had observed me earlier that day - buying fruit, sitting by the fountain, or taking shelter under the great stone arches of the governmental palace during a passing storm. Here, I felt totally conspicuous.

In small towns throughout the United States where "The Browning of America" is only now being noticed, I imagine many brown-skinned Mexican immigrants experience the same sense of sticking out I felt in their native country as they begin to live, work and shop in traditionally Anglo areas. In Hanover, Pennsylvania, where I attended an all-white high school for two and a half of my four and a half years of secondary education (go ahead, do the math), I become acutely aware of this.

One afternoon a year or so ago I was out shopping with my mom. We ended up at Wal Mart, as one usually does when in Hanover, and there I saw a small group of Mexicans. I was almost shocked as I saw them congregating before towering shelves of American products trying to select from an overwhelming variety of products. After all, my graduating class, and the graduating classes of all the surrounding high schools, had nothing but white kids.

I'd been away for a few years, living in Miami where the majority is "Latino" (with relatively few Mexicans - they stick to southern Dade County around Florida City and Homestead). So I hadn't gotten used to this new demographic shift in Pennsylvania the way my mother had. She was almost eager to point out the novelty to me since she knows such things pique my interest. They were speaking Spanish, and I eavesdropped a bit to let my mom in on some of a conversation that probably just sounded like gibberish to her.

These Mexicans were sticking out as they were adjusting to life here in my country just as I had stuck out while I was living in theirs. Still, even I couldn't help but stare as locals became distracted from their shopping to watch with wonder as a stout but diminutive woman with jet-black hair down to the small of her back carried a super-duper-jumbo pack of paper towels, almost as big as she was, down the aisle to the checkout line.

Later reflecting on the incident, I began to think of how futurists' predictions - they're calling for a stark rise in the number of immigrants over the next twenty years - might not only mute our perception of them as being different, but may also diffuse our image of our traditionally Anglo-dominated culture making it progressively less recognizable to ourselves.

Will they assimilate? Or will we just adapt? And I wonder who, if anyone, will look conspicuous then?

*Originally posted in the summer of 2004.

Changing to learn, learning from change

I’m in the middle of a career change. I graduated with a BA in Political Science with a minor in Journalism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 1998, and since then my primary occupation has been as a journalist. In 2001, the event that changed the world changed my world as well. I had been freelancing in the New York area, mostly covering international trade economics and politics. In May of that year I began teaching a couple of classes at a local language institute in the Ironbound, a predominantly Portuguese-speaking neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, where I lived at the time.

I had planned a field trip with my level II students to visit the World Trade Center and the United Nations on September 11. I thought it would be a good idea to elevate the class discussions we were having on immigration and working in the U.S. by doing a lesson on international integration and cooperation. This soon turned out to be an ironic subject as the PATH train we were on stopped just before reaching the WTC (just as the first plane hit). We were re-routed through a maze of tunnels to Sixth Avenue, a.k.a. Avenue of the Americas, and the lesson plan was changed as we unfortunately experienced the failure of world cooperation up close instead.

For the next few months I began to analyze my chosen career path. I was no longer satisfied in my journalistic writing and began to write journals reflecting on the role I was playing in the world. I began to feel the need to make a greater impact on my community at the local level, so I took a job as managing editor of three local weeklies in Newark’s urban rim. This meant a huge pay cut, but it gave me the perspective I needed to digest all my experiences up to that point and make a decision about my future. I became keenly aware of the growing division between immigrant and native-born populations, which I envisioned as a crack on the wall of American solidarity that could surely split our nation if nothing significant is done to begin repairing it.

I began to reflect on my experience years before when I had lived in Miami. In order to become fully involved in that community I taught myself Spanish while volunteering as a language tutor and while living with a group of Cuban political refugees and a variety of other recently arrived economic immigrants from Venezuela, Colombia, Chile, Brazil and Argentina. At that time, I saw that access to education was the only thing that could help immigrants (or intra-national migrants, as I viewed myself) successfully cast off disenfranchisement and become fully involved in a “foreign” society. It was then I realized I needed to be a part of the process of building stronger local communities through education. Children of immigrants were suffering in the wake of increasingly weighted outcome based education standards and education for their parents is the only way to fill the gap for these kids.

I have since returned to South Florida, where I began working at Miami Dade College earlier this year as a lab instructor in the EAP department (English for Academic Purposes). Many of these adult learners cite the need to cooperate more fully in the education of their children as a reason for studying English, especially since work in many areas of the United States frequently does not require this skill. This fall I will also teach a vocational English conversation course in the community education department for those seeking work in English-speaking environments. I may also become more involved in academic advisement, helping immigrant students decide on career paths that require an associate’s or bachelor’s degree. MDC was recently designated a four-year college after adding four bachelor’s degree programs in teacher education. It remains, however, a traditional community college in many respects. The multicultural dimension is especially significant here, as MDC serves the largest population of Latino students and the second largest population of African American students of any college in the United States. It is also well-known for its adult education programs for refugees, serving large populations of Cuban, Haitian and other Caribbean students.

My principle goal in studying in the MAED/AEDL program at University of Phoenix is to gain the knowledge and experience necessary to assist in the development of online classes for students of English as a Second Language. While MDC already utilizes online instruction for many of its classes, there are no such options for students in MDC’s language programs. Online options would especially aid student retention rates, since a majority of second language learners in the United States are working adults, many of whose frequent schedule or lifestyle changes during a semester may force them to withdraw or fail due to difficulties with attendance.

For me, changing careers doesn’t mean I won’t continue to work as a writer and a journalist. In fact, I know from experience that working with adult learners inspires me by giving me a clear glimpse into the true heart of humanity.