An immigration reporter’s journey to his Costa Rican roots

Our family name used to rise and fall, like the Costa Rican mountains my great-grandfather talked about crossing. Until, at some point, my grandfather struck the accent from it, leaving it flat, without a crease like the military uniform he proudly wore.

John, my granddad, became instead an American at the best time to be one, enlisting and serving in World War II.

But there’s a violence to cutting off roots, leaving later generations to put it back together.

I cover immigration for the Sun-Times, and as more and more migrants arrive in Chicago, it's on my mind with each mom, dad and child I meet. My great-grandfather’s path was mundane compared with the epic path many migrants take here. But both involve a defining break from the past and come up against the same basic problem of how to hold onto who you were

I traveled to Costa Rica to see what we left behind, the first to do so in an absurdly large Catholic family. Several instead made the pilgrimage to Spain, a nod to our grandmother’s roots. I took the chance to find my great-grandfather Claudio’s grave, the only remaining marker of him that you could touch anywhere and the family’s final hold on that country.

The little I knew about the small Central American country came from the few stories my dad, Richard, passed on.

The one that always stuck out involved Claudio crossing one of the many mountains on his burro.

The day’s hot — a Costa Rican heat I’d learn you almost have to swim through. Claudio’s eager to get where he’s going, but the donkey quits moving.

Stubborn ass, Claudio figures. He digs his heels viciously into its sides, curses it and tries pulling it.

As he does, he spots a viper along the path ahead.

In a wash of relief, he apologizes to his burro and thanks it for saving his life — teaching me to trust in the inexplicable, life-saving wisdom of an ass.

This parable always had such a hold on me, lying tucked beneath a fuzzy blanket in my childhood bedroom. I remember savoring every moment of it.

Partly, it was the connection to family. My dad grew up with his grandfather, and I could tell how close they were by the warm way he used his first and middle names, Claudio Joaquín. Partly, it showed me life was happening beyond our dull corner of Virginia.

My great-grandfather was the first to move to the U.S. and did so after meeting Louise Oedel, a woman from Massachusetts who was traveling in Costa Rica, and marrying in 1921.

They settled near Boston and had three kids, including my granddad John. But Claudio’s feet were never firmly planted in the States.

He often traveled between the two countries, and he died returning from visiting family in 1967 in an air turbulence mishap.

The story landed on front pages in both countries. The Associated Press reported that the plane “plunged 10,000 feet in a downdraft.” My great-granddad didn’t have his belt on, flew up and split his head on the cabin ceiling.

To this day, my dad has trouble talking about it because of an almost prophetic sense an aunt had that Claudio never should have gone on the trip.

At the time, Claudio had been living with my granddad John’s family outside Boston — in a house too small for two huge personalities.

In my dad’s telling, Claudio was a big softy, comforting the kids after nightmares and indulging them with spare change for sweets.

Claudio was warm. John wasn’t. If he smiled, I can’t remember, and his laughter hissed like steam escaping a boiling pot.

Those brief stories about Claudio and the uncomplicated love my dad felt captivated me.

Even John, who shied away from displays of affection, evinces similar feelings in writing about Claudio.

“My father spent his life on his children,” he said in a 100-page family history.

“He would always whistle as he approached the house; a simple two-tone whistle that still resounds in my ears,” John writes. “We would put [on] our coats, scarves and hats and rush out to meet him.”

Those few words say a lot for a man who would sooner turn on an opera and let you decipher the meaning than tell you what was on his mind.

Even in his telling of our family’s history, he wrote mostly about Maria — his wife, my grandmother, whose story of surviving the war in the Philippines is an epic in its own right.

He mentions just three summers in the Central American country: “The point of these trips was to visit family in Costa Rica and to spend the summers there with them. These were the memorable times of my youth; San Jose, Alajuela, and Cartago.”

There’s a wistful sigh behind those words but no details.

I spent hours looking through this document — rereading the minutiae of the geography of the Philippines and invectives about the civil war in Spain — to find exactly this on Costa Rica. And it’s all he has to say on the subject.

The only other time he references his father’s homeland is to explain that his “Latin temperament” got the better of him once when getting angry at my grandmother for showing up late.

When pressed by my dad, John admitted he’d turned the accent mark over the "i" in Loria into a dot, smoothing the "r" so your tongue doesn’t catch. But he never explained why.

It’s crossed my mind to bring it back, as I write about people whose names have accents or are just far longer than we’d ever put up with in English. I don’t want to be the one to strike the accent from their name.

It would be easy, a flick of the wrist when you come to the "i," instead of punching it. But I dismiss it as too pompous, the connection too tenuous, flushing in embarrassment even though I haven’t said the thing out loud.

My dad speculates growing up around Boston in the ’30s was reason enough to make the change. Even now, I can see the indignation in his eyes and sour expression on his mouth as he recalls abuse neighborhood boys gave him for his Spanish mother.

Whatever the reason, World War II came and erased the life my granddad had before it. He went from a “wretched waif of 18 living in a house with no bathtub or shower,” as he wrote, to snaring a piece of the American dream.

He joined the Army Air Corps and, for the first time, he had enough to eat. It led him to meet Maria in the Philippines and eventually to a long, decorated career as a NASA engineer.

Faithful to his task of documentation, John’s family history did include a photo of Claudio’s grave, which I tracked down in Costa Rica with help from family and four dutiful gravehands.

“Loria, well, that’s a very common name, but we’ll see,” said the first. “My name is Laria, so we’re basically related, huh?”

“Maybe,” I said.

But I didn’t feel like the prodigal son, I don’t sound Costa Rican, and the name is so common there it’s unremarkable.

After arriving, I also realized the country resembles nothing like the one Claudio left. Earthquakes and modernization have seen to that. Though at the basilica in Cartago, a well-preserved wonder of exquisitely carved and painted wood, I could imagine Claudio and John inching their way toward the altar together on their knees.

The cemetery has hardly changed, either.

“If you want, you can be buried here too, for a fee,” said Carlos, one of the gravehands.

I shook my head.

I can’t say I felt any closer to Claudio after reaching his grave. Seeing him alongside his siblings and parents, surrounded by the green mountains he grew up with, and seeing him listed as an owner of the plot, it appeared he had chosen to be buried far away from his children and grandchildren.

Looking over the list of relatives laid to rest in the same tomb, I felt the weight of a whole life I knew next to nothing about and saw his life in the U.S. might have only been a small part of it.

There was Ramón, his dad, whose mustache should have been celebrated in pageants; his baby brother Arturo, who fought alongside Claudio in a weeks-long war between Costa Rica and Panama; and Marta, his sister whose kind, plump smile I knew from a photo of her with my grandmother.

Plus, 10 more people.

There was a finality to the decision that felt like a rejection of his North American family, though I can’t blame him for it. Our affections lie where they will and leaving behind loved ones is almost always a tough subject for anyone I write about.

I took in the great green mountains surrounding the gravesite — imagining somewhere coffee growing, pork and beans cooking and the cool pool at the foot of a waterfall inviting passersby — and I wished they were more than just the setting of faraway family fables that I find again in the stories of the people I write about.

I felt grateful for the life I had. But I wished the gulf between where Claudio left and where we came in had never become so big.

Michael Loria is a staff reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times via Report for America, a not-for-profit journalism program that aims to bolster the paper’s coverage of communities on the South Side and West Side.