For Guatemalan-born, cross-cultural singer-songwriter David Lindes, moving to the U.S.A. at 9 years old wasn’t the picnic he thought it would be.
“I grew up on American TV dubbed into Spanish and so, yep, I had this sense that the U.S. was where cool stuff happened,” he says.
Lindes, who moved to California’s Central Coast with his single mother and older sister, soon found out that wasn’t the case.
Within the first few months of living there, “I get sad suddenly,” he says. “It was like a very physiological sadness. And I throw up and I faint. At the time, they called that a nervous breakdown. Today, you would call it a panic attack. I can tell now, I’m 42 and I can tell that 9-year-old kid was really struggling.”
While Lindes’ sister went to a school with a bilingual program, he did not and had to bike across town to another school.
A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE
As an adult, Lindes now sees the move from a different perspective.
On the day his family left Guatemala, Lindes’ uncle — who was the closest thing to a father figure he had — was “uncharacteristically somber … he was quiet, which was not his way. And I remember he gave me this hug, he got down on one knee. And he hugged me and he cradled my head with one hand and he pressed his face against mine and on my cheek I could feel his tears.”
Nowadays, Lindes looks back on that and knows what was going on, but he didn’t then — “I was just blinded by hope,” he says. “I had all these narratives in my head about what the U.S. meant to a poor Guatemalan kid. It was like I was dying and going to heaven, and at that time I didn’t even realize I wasn’t gonna see my uncle for years, for example.”
Consequently, moving between countries can be “such a complex thing, because it means a certain set of things at the time, and then with years, some reflection, it comes to mean something different,” he adds.
I had all these narratives in my head about what the U.S. meant to a poor Guatemalan kid.
VISITING ‘HOME’
Over the ensuing years, Lindes had to “reinvent Guatemala” for himself.
While he would visit the country frequently, he would only go see family in the relatively poor area where they lived. It wasn’t until 2023 that he went with his wife and four children.
One of the reasons he was comfortable taking them was that on a couple earlier visits, a friend of his who had climbed out of poverty into the upper middle class took him out to some fancy restaurants.
“A place like this had never been visible to me,” he says. “And over several visits, he took me to so many places and I began to realize, ‘You know what? There’s a side of Guatemala that I do think my kids would enjoy. I bet that we could do this,’ and we wound up doing it.”
The family subsequently spent five weeks there in 2023 and had what he calls the “Disneyland Guatemala” experience, staying at nice Airbnbs and visiting the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, the Atitlan mountain lake area, the Mayan ruins “and all these things that I did not experience as a child.”
“I say all that to say that I love that place now, and I loved that experience and it actually is hard for me today to not be part of that on a day-to-day basis,” according to Lindes.
GUATEMALAN CONNECTION TO HIS MUSIC
In his recently released album “Peace With a Lion,” Lindes looks deep into the meaning of healing. In doing so, he explores two essential phases: honoring wounds and healing them through creation.
With hints of Cat Stevens in his vocals and echoes of the Latin American neo-folk Trova movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, Lindes collects folk elements from across the continent in this deeply personal album. In it, he delves into his efforts to heal three wounds: leaving his native Guatemala as a child, being abandoned by his father as a baby and experiencing physical and emotional abuse.
It wasn’t until Lindes’ oldest son was born that he realized the impact of his own father abandoning the family.
“Suddenly, I had this incredible connection with this newborn baby,” he says. “I could feel his implicit trust, right?… I just, I don’t know. My heart was turned to him. I just loved him. I loved him tremendously, and I understood for the first time what my father had betrayed, and it just broke me. I cried as I was putting my little boy to sleep.”
As Lindes wept in the room of his newborn son, all this pain that he didn’t know was there showed up. He subsequently spent seven years searching for his father, who after finding him wanted zero contact.
“I now look back and I think that my search for my father was a kind of coming of age for me, even though it happened later in my life,” he says. “It started at around 27, 28. It ended at around 35. But when I started this search, it was because I believed the whole thing had just been a misunderstanding. And that somehow at the other side of this misunderstanding was a really nice guy I just had never met. That’s where I was. That’s the truth of it.”
One of the songs on Lindes’ album, “Te Vengo a Perdonar,” means “I’ve come here to forgive you,” according to Lindes. When he realized that his story wasn’t going to end with a montage of a long-lost father and son playing guitar together, whatever healing was going to happen would happen to him alone.
“It was gonna have to be a one-man move because the other person involved wasn’t moving,” he says.
That was when he came across a book by South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu called ” The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World,” which moved him tremendously.
I now look back and I think that my search for my father was a kind of coming of age for me, even though it happened later in my life.
Lindes emphasizes that forgiveness isn’t the only way to heal: “Healing is such a personal thing and sometimes such a desperate thing. We heal however we can. All I mean to say by forgiveness is that Archbishop Desmond Tutu was a leader in the reconciliation and truth commission after apartheid in South Africa.
“I found his ability to love people who had done terrible things awe-inspiring,” according to Lindes. “I found it so beautiful, it stopped me in my tracks.”
The song “Te Vengo A Perdonar” is “really an aspirational song,” Lindes says, adding that he’s still not sure that he’s been able to forgive his father.
“I think that’s a very difficult thing to ascertain, even for me. I know I’ve tried and I know I’m still trying,” he says.
DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
For Lindes, forgiveness is not a gift to the aggressor, but a declaration of independence for the victim: “And that is what I was trying to declare in [the song], independence from my father’s damaging actions.”
As to whether Lindes has been able to forgive himself for his anger toward his father, going through therapy over the past five years has been a tremendous boon.
“It took me a long time for me to realize that his leaving was about him — it was not about me. I have worked so hard to get to that place,” Lindes says. “Do I forgive myself for being angry with him? I do forgive myself. I give myself a lot of grace. I always try to keep moving towards more peace for me, and I find OK, that peace for me can be somewhat linked to understanding his pain.
“Why do I say that? Because, again, his leaving was about him. It wasn’t about me,” he continues. “And the more I understand about his story, the more I will understand it was about him. And the more I’ll be able to feel some grace for the pain, for the decisions that he made and the pain that caused me. So, I would say, yeah, I’ve forgiven myself twice: once for believing this was my fault, and then again for the anger I’ve felt as I approached the wound as an adult.”
It took me a long time for me to realize that his leaving was about him — it was not about me.
A BILINGUAL ALBUM
Half of the songs on Lindes’ album “Peace with a Lion” are in Spanish and half are in English. One of them is a Spanish-language cover of the Beatles’ “Here Comes The Sun.”
“I love to do this because I have a mastery of both languages that allows me to pull it off, but also an intimacy of both cultures that allows me to pull that off,” he says.
The album itself was produced by Cuban Canadian and Grammy award-winning singer songwriter Alex Cuba.
“For me, [the album is] cultural and it’s about language. Alex helped translate that into the musical realm,” Lindes says.
The album features “straight-ahead Americana folk songs” as well as “beautifully lush tropical songs … and we executed all of that using just guitars, bass and hand percussion. So again, musically, you bring in these different worlds,” according to Lindes.
Another song on the album, “Señal” (“sign”), is inspired by Lindes’ oldest son’s birth.
“It’s about the birth of my oldest son and about me feeling this sense of connection, not just to him, but almost to the universe at that moment,” he says. “And feeling a love that I had never felt before and realizing this is the closest I have felt to seeing the face of God.”
WHAT’S NEXT FOR DAVID LINDES?
Now that his album is out, Lindes says he wants to expose it to marginalized communities.
When he was in Los Angeles, Calif., U.S.A. to launch the album, he wound up performing for two nonprofits – Homeboy Industries and the Amity Foundation – that help people who are reentering society after prison or gangs.
“I realized I’m in a sacred space,” he says. “Exchanging stories and songs with this audience was so easy and it just felt like we effortlessly, we just spoke the same language.”
