By Michelle Naranjo
Consider me a reluctant Pennsylvania tourist who owns a home here in Lehigh County. It's okay. I know that I will never belong.
I moved to Pennsylvania with a sound understanding of risk. I moved for love. Sue me.
From being born in New Mexico into biracial parents -- let's just say that my family has been in what is now the U.S. since my great x17 grandfather -- I think it's cute when people tell me their great-grandfather came to this country. My parents were pretty sedentary but never accepted.
Flash forward: Parents are gone, and I own a house in rural Pennsylvania, and there are days when I drive for glue, or something odd, at one of the local Dollar General stores -- I live precisely three miles between two of the franchises -- and I catch a view of the "blue mountain."
They call everything Blue Mountain everywhere here. There is a road I can drive up and stop to look north or south and hope to see someone crossing as they trek the Appalachian Trail. I yearn to connect with another tourist.
Those hikers probably won’t stay long enough to see the darkness here that you can also find in England, Wales, Texas, Arizona, California, New Mexico, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. That may look like an odd list of places, but it is everywhere I have lived as a tourist.
As an outsider, here is what I see:
Between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, there is wealth. Those people have "green" properties, so pay one-third or less than the people who have homes on hillsides and cannot claim the same environmental tax write-offs. Farmers also get a similar tax benefit, even if they let their land go fallow because they can't sell corn or soy to China.
And there are more people here without any path to wealth. The current jobs are in the distribution warehouses popping up. Forty hours at $15 an hour is a promise that means two or even three jobs for people trying to have a family. Property taxes have disenfranchised homeownership. Landlords are making bank. The worse the school district is, the higher the taxes.
The best of the public schools between the big cities are impressive with sports and labs, but the lucky from them get to attend any one of the plethora of small, liberal-arts colleges, while poorer districts might get wrestlers into a state Pennsylvania school. Yay, team.
And these are proud people who do not leave where they grew up. Coal is dead. Fracking is dying. They can’t let go.
The 1970s and ‘80s efforts to diversify the workforce here ended in an elevated racist culture. Puerto Rican restaurants struggle to identify themselves as "Spanish" to appeal to the euro-centric Penn Dutch descendants. Imagine what it is like for anyone speaking Spanish at a warehouse. Or, for those who don’t?
Like several of my neighbors, I was too scared to put out my Biden signs. We live in a mix of manicured and aging neighborhoods where yard signs say, “Not a Gun Free Zone” all year long. Our homes are all sent The Epoch Times newspaper unsolicited. The latest issue was about the evils of marijuana and Hunter Biden.
All of that is to say that Pennsylvania may have been the deciding factor for our new president-elect, but we have a lot to heal here in the hinterlands. Or, as I learned in Welsh, y gwyll, meaning “the dusk.”
I say "we" like I might stay. There is work to do.
Naranjo is a freelance writer living in rural Pennsylvania.