Where did you come from?

Querida Amiga,

Everyone keeps asking me if I have watched the new docuseries Immigration Nation on Netflix. I can’t bring myself to watch it. The short news snippets I have seen of ICE snatching children from their parents has been enough to infuriate me and also bring me to tears. The tears have been a mix of empathy for the families and also frustration that I can’t do more to change this ugly reality.

Though for now, I have chosen to not watch the docuseries, I am still committed to being in the conversation around immigration reform and learning more about the best ways that I can advocate for stopping family separation. 

Have you heard of Define American? Their work is focused on changing narratives around immigration and citizenship. The organization was founded by the brilliant journalist Jose Antonio Vargas. This week his TED Talk 3 Questions to Ask Yourself About US Citizenship was released. I watched it twice, jotted down the questions, and journaled a little bit with the questions he posed. 

• Where did you come from?

  • I was born and raised in the Central Valley of California, and the blood that runs through my veins was passed from lineages in Venezuela and Mexico. 

• How did you get here?

  • I am a US citizen as a result of the journeys of my father and maternal grandmother. My father came to California following his friends. They all ended up at a community college together and through the foreign exchange student party circuit, he met my mother (they need to write their own cartas about those days). They married, settled down in the Central Valley, and had two children. 

My maternal grandmother was born and raised in Zacatecas, Mexico. Her first husband was a violent man who she knew she had to escape, so her children would have a better life. Holding the hands of two little children and with my mother growing in her belly, she paid a coyote to help them escape violence and find new opportunities in Southern California. She met my grandfather and together they moved to the Central Valley where they found work as farm workers.

• Who paid?

  • There is the explicit payment of money that my father made to buy a plane ticket and to file legal paperwork and that my grandmother scraped together in secret to pay for the promise of freedom. There are also other ways they paid for the promise of new freedoms. My father’s connection to his family and friends has been primarily through phone for more than 4 decades. He was not by their side when my paternal grandparents passed away. My grandmother paid through physical sacrifices from walking a desert for days to walking through fields for years. Both of them (and many others) paid through financial, physical, emotional, and spiritual payments for me to be here.

I come from a lineage who traveled by any means necessary and paid whatever the cost, for the dream of future generations thriving. 

I can’t bring myself to watch Immigration Nation, because I see my family in the people who are too often demonized for making impossible decisions. What would my family look like today if my grandmother had been separated from her children at the border or my father had been deported back to Venezuela?

Honestly, I can’t stay stuck in what could’ve been, but I damn well will focus on what I can do...voting in every election at all levels and then holding politicians accountable once elected, signing petitions, donating to organizations who are at the border (such as Families Belong Together), and signing up to translate for immigration cases in the Bay Area (through Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights).

Reflections on our personal history help us to ground ourselves in the beauty of our ancestors’ dreams and their strength to bring action to those intentions. It is time that we define for ourselves who we are and what we want this nation to become.

Quiero saber de ti. Where did you come from? How did you get here? Who paid? How do you define yourself as a US American?

Un abrazo,

Michelle