Gina Mijin Kim
Dec. 19, 2016
Dear America,
When I saw you for the first time, I was 24 and pregnant with my third child.
I had nothing on me except my sister’s old Abercrombie T-shirt, but your highways full of Hondas and your cotton candy breath made me feel as though I had the entire world. A world for me and my children to gather, wade our feet into and call our very own. You pulled me in, wrapped me so tightly in your imaginary California king bed that for just a few moments, I forgot what it had taken me to get here. What it felt like to carry a starving baby in one hand and hold a second child in another, covering his eyes as patrol guards beat my husband black and blue. I almost forgot what it felt like to cross Atlantic storms on a wooden boat, spending every minute I was not seasick praying that it would stay afloat.
At least I survived, I tried telling myself. At least I made it this far.
Little did I know, survival wasn’t a box for me to check off, be done with and put aside forever. It was far from over. Survival would be spending the next eight years living in your shadows, and survival would be dropping off love letters for you at the post office knowing that you were never going to write me back. And yet through it all, I still forgave you. I forgave you because you made sure my three kids went to school with the little backpacks they’ve always wanted, and I forgave you because you gave me friends whose shoulders I cried on when it got too much. They were other immigrants, refugees and emigrants that you had forgotten about, and they were people whose words and stories stayed with me, kept me alive on nights I wanted to give up.
On nights like tonight.
♦♦♦
I’m rubbing my eyes. There is a loud banging outside my apartment door, and a voice is hollering that the police are here with a court order to arrest someone inside. Groggy and half asleep, I stumble to the door in pitch blackness, unlocking it and turning the knob halfway before their words finally start to sink in. My blood curdles.
These are not the police. These are immigration officers. I freeze — my instinct to immediately relock the door — but it’s too late. Two men barge in without warning, swinging the door open with incredible force and slamming it into my face. I feel my nose starting to bleed.
One of them tells me that it is time to leave, and I look down at my watch. It is currently 4 a.m.
In between constant “fucks,” “goddamns” and what I think is my name, I cannot process most of what the officers are saying, but I don’t need to. My hands, though numb, know exactly what to do. They reach for my winter coat, working in silence but trembling ever so slightly at the thought of bullet against warm flesh. I dare not say a word, and I gesture for Tommy, Jordan and Liam to remain quiet. It is a moment that I have rehearsed a thousand times before in my sleep, but today I am unprepared. The sight of an officer grabbing my kids by their collars finally breaks me, and I cry. My kids.
It’s 4:03 a.m., and I am thinking about my three boys. I am sitting in the backseat of a car about to pull away, handcuffed. My hands and arms no longer have feeling in them, but that’s okay — touch isn’t the most important sense right now. Sirens are blaring, deafening me, but that’s okay too — hearing isn’t the most important sense right now either. All I care about is that I can still see the silhouettes of my children standing on the streets outside the car window, and I do. Despite the blue and red lights, I see that Tommy, Jordan and Liam are holding hands, and they never looked more beautiful. My kids.
4:06 a.m., and I have no idea where I am being taken, no idea how the officers managed to find out about me. I start wondering if any of this would be happening if my husband hadn’t died.
4:12 a.m., the officers are slowing down the car at what seems to be a police station or a jail. It’s hard to tell the difference when I can’t think.
It’s 4:17 a.m. and I am praying in an empty prison cell. Every few minutes, these people in suits come in with their heads cocked — noses arched — asking me questions and shoving papers in my face. I refuse to say or do anything, and one of them calls me “a cryptic.” He’s not wrong. He doesn’t know that for people like me, our identities are animal hearts, ready to be hunted and served fresh, because everyone visiting the meat market today wants their foot in something “exotic.” Something a little veinier, soggier and more Frankensteinian than usual. But it doesn’t matter what he knows, or what everybody else knows. It never matters anyway, because I fight my battles alone. They will never know what my heartbeat feels like.
4:18 a.m.,
4:19 a.m.,
4:20 a.m. — the minutes tick by and I think I am dying. I can’t die. I need to be here for my kids. I need to keep going. I must keep going like all the other immigrants who made it. I must keep going — like my friend, Chen.
4:21 a.m. I am trying to remember the first time we met. Chen’s story starts playing in my head — at first in pieces, but now very clearly:
♦♦♦
Chen, a 31-year-old undocumented woman living in the U.S., wants to keep her first name anonymous for fear of deportation and other repercussions. All quotations were originally in Mandarin and then translated to English.
蛇头 was what her people called them. The phrase meant “snakehead” — used by Chinese undocumented immigrants to refer to those who helped “move” them along the many stops of their trek to the U.S.
As a little girl, Chen was confused by why her older family friends, who immigrated illegally before her, were using such a condemning phrase for people who supposedly risked their own lives to help them. She explained that it wasn’t until journeying to the U.S. herself that she realized that these snakehead “helpers” were oftentimes the same people who raped, robbed and left immigrants murdered in the “middle of nowhere.” Their help was far from voluntary, and they frequently turned their backs on the immigrants for little reason other than the fact that they were in a physical “position” to do it, according to Chen.
“We were helpless. Impregnated when we had nothing. All we could do was close our eyes and just bear it. But that was actually considered lucky,” she said. “Though I was only sexually assaulted, I have heard stories of people who were killed even after paying the snakeheads the full amount they requested. The snakeheads just randomly demanded more.”
For Chen, the “turbulence” she encountered in her immigration is something that she will never forget: plane rides took her from Guangzhou to Hong Kong to Amsterdam to Honduras, where she was then driven to the border of Mexico. Her last stop was Houston, Texas. The entire way, the word 相信, or trust, did not exist — and it still does not today as she continues living in the “shadows” of the country with her husband and two daughters. At 22, she left her rural home in China with nothing, in search of new “opportunities” in the States. She was dragging along a debt of “tens of thousands of dollars in travel fees,” a sum that made up her single father’s life savings and more. He needed to borrow from at least ten other families in the village, according to Chen.
For Chen, this sum had a “ticking time bomb slapped on top,” and it was a sum that needed to be paid back within the next two years of her arrival in the U.S. if she didn’t want her father “beaten,” her village house mobbed. Money was not an “easy thing to come by” in the villages, and villagers took “things like loans extremely, extremely seriously,” Chen said.
“I was always stressed, but my own health was not something that could cross my mind one minute,” she said. “My biggest priority was then finding a husband and paying back my debt. Taking care of my father.”
Still, Chen considers herself among the more fortunate within the undocumented immigrant community. She mentioned villagers who had crossed the ocean by boat. Fearing that U.S. patrol officers were waiting at the docking point, ready to arrest the entire crew of immigrants and snakeheads on board, the villagers decided to jump off when they saw that America was in view. They wanted to try “swimming the rest of the way” instead of risking getting caught, she said. Unfortunately, the distance was much, much longer than they had initially thought, and every single person who made the jump drowned. A few days later, their bodies laid bitten, battered — “unrecognizably human” — in World Journal photos. The images didn’t come as a “shock” to Chen, however, who had accepted that this was an “everyday reality” for people like her. All she did was sit for a moment to process everything, and then it was back to “waiting tables again.”
“Our lives are not human lives. We are pigs.” she said. “But if it means making sure that my children have everything I don’t, it is worth it.”
♦♦♦
The time is now 4:30 a.m. The sentence “We are pigs. We are pigs. We are pigs.” is darting through my mind, making it hard to breathe. Why am I so weak? I cannot be weak.
4:31 a.m., and an officer strides in, telling me that because I already have an existing order of removal, I will be deported without a hearing in front of the immigration judge. “Looking at your records, in 2008, you had appealed to your right to asylum in court, but here you are — having decided to stay anyway in the U.S. after losing your case,” she says. “You made this complicated for yourself.” At least it wasn’t a fucking crime on my record, I want to say.
4:32 a.m., and I check my pockets. They’re empty. My bank accounts are empty. There is no money for an immigration attorney to defend me. All of a sudden, I feel the urge to scream. Words are foaming at my mouth, choking me, but they refuse to come out. I want to call the officers bitches, but I remember that immigrants don’t have the right to say the word “bitch.” Or “fuck.” Or “shit.” Or “mine.” I don’t have the right to scream. Instead, I sit and I look pretty and I nod and I say yes and I smile and I rot. And I fall apart, crease and press the pieces of myself into a paper crane. Except something about this one looks deformed. Broken. It’s a little more Frankensteinian than usual.
4:33 a.m., I am told that the time for my departure is 7 a.m., in another two hours and 27 minutes. Every minute, every second is pulling me apart at the edges, telling me that my life is on the line. Every minute, every second is slipping away, reminding me just how powerless I am.
4:34 a.m., I ask the officers what will happen to my kids. They tell me that they will be taken care of by foster families — and I want to resist. I want to fight back, but the sight of guns innocently tucked in their pockets keeps me quiet. I make the officers promise me that they won’t split Tommy, Jordan and Liam between three different families. “I want them together,” I say.
4:35 a.m., and I am still thinking about my kids. I wonder what it is like for them to grow up with that one Mom who never went to any parent teacher conferences or birthday parties because she is always watching out for immigration officers at every corner. I wonder what it is like to not have a Dad — to not know what we are going to eat today. Any day. What it is like watching all their other friends go on beach vacations and having to stay at home because I don’t have a green card. I can’t go anywhere outside of the States — take a plane without getting arrested. God, how much I wish I could bring them to Cancun or China or even just … Colorado.
4:36 a.m., and I ask myself if their life is anything like Gina Mijin Kim’s.
♦♦♦
Gina Mijin Kim
Gina Mijin Kim ’25 grew up hearing the phrase: 지나야 이것 좀 읽어줘. It means, “Gina, please read this for me.”
The eldest of three children born to Korean immigrants, Kim was translating documents for her parents as soon as she started learning English. It’s something that she always “hated,” but seeing her parents struggle in the workforce with their broken English pushed her to take on these additional responsibilities.
“My parents immigrated here because they were hoping for something bigger than what they had back at home,” Kim said.
The America that her parents thought was brimming with “promises of wealth” did not exist, however. From side comments picking on their pronunciation at the McDonald’s drive-through to every “Go back to your country” thrown at them at the local market, they were quick to learn that opportunities were hard to come by — masked underneath racial violence and subtle xenophobia at best. Kim’s father worked several odd jobs before starting a fabric-dyeing company with his brother, while her mother manages a small video shop.
Kim described living as a second-generation immigrant as walking the fine line between enjoying the opportunities made possible by her parents’ arduous journey and bearing the expectations of “making up” for their struggle. There is a pressure to study “something that makes money,” and everywhere she goes, she carries “this feeling that [she] can’t fail,” she said.
A niche definition of success is not the only weight that the second-generation label carries, however, according to Kim. In her art and prose pieces, which frequently explore themes of home and family, she touches upon the intergenerational, language and cultural walls standing between children and their immigrant parents. 하나, 둘, 셋 1, 2, 3 is a photo series that speaks to an “unsaid hierarchy” between sons and daughters in conservative Korean culture, a gender disparity exacerbated in immigrant households. Sons are “prioritized” in a dynamic that Kim writes “is both entirely personal and universal” at once, a dynamic that should not have any “reason” to exist today — when men and women have potential to achieve the same.
“Between You and Me” features a selection of intimate dialogue with her mother. Lines highlighting intense barriers, such as “I can’t understand you when you speak to me in English / I can’t understand you when you speak to me in Korean,” juxtapose with lines that suggest compromise and harmony between the generations: “We are lost, but we are found in each other.” The lines compete for our attention as readers, capturing a real-life dichotomy between an immigrant parent and their child living at the edges of two very different cultural galaxies.
“There [are] things outside of [us] pulling [us] in certain directions,” Kim said. “More so than if [we] were not a child of immigrants.”
♦♦♦
It’s 4:40 a.m., and I can’t help thinking about how much my boys liked art, too — just like Gina. I remember this one time Tommy showed me a drawing of a person he made in kindergarten class. The person was lifting up what looked like the Earth, wearing a shirt that said: STRONGERR DAN SPYDERMAN. When I asked Tommy who that was, he grinned with all eight of his missing teeth and said:
“It’s you, Mommy. That’s you.”
4:41 a.m., and I’m tearing up. There are these moments in life that I just want to lock away in a tiny little golden box in my heart. I would swallow the key and burp it out whenever I needed to feel okay and swallow it back down when I am done. No one would be able to take it away from me — not these officers, not my last boss at the restaurant who shoved a metal fork in and out my vagina until the floors turned a scarlet black. Not that lady at Target who told me to go back to my country before screaming that a savage slut was trying to steal from her.
4:42 a.m., and I remember coming home from Target that day and telling Jordan about what happened. The PG-13 version, of course. He said that he wanted to become a lawyer and time traveler when he grew up — just so he could go back in time and take that lady to court.
4:43 a.m., and I’m smiling for reasons I don’t understand. I just know that if Edward were still here, he would be proud of our three little boys. I hope he is resting well up there.
4:44 a.m., two hours and 16 minutes until deportation.
4:45 a.m., and I’m smiling again. I’m not sure if my little baby actually wants to be a lawyer one day, but if he does, I’ll be taking the first seat at his law school graduation cheering him on. Screaming out his name like the embarrassing soccer mom I always wanted to be. At that point, he would be the first in our family to have graduated college, and he would go on to be the first legal worker I’d ever trust. My baby. He would be the Elizabeth Yeampierre of our family.
♦♦♦
Elizabeth Yeampierre
For Elizabeth Yeampierre, a first-generation Puerto Rican emigrant of African and Indigenous ancestry, the sight of Asian grandmothers dancing salsa is a highlight of living in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, New York. She sees it as a hopeful symbol of “solidarity” — of celebrating cultural differences — in a neighborhood where relationships between minority groups are otherwise not as “intimate” as they once were in the 1970s.
Today, the two racial groups that dominate Sunset Park — Asian and Latinx — grapple with a culture of “segregation” and tension. Despite many shared struggles as primarily working-class immigrants, the two communities see each other as competitors more often than as allies in the same oppressive regime favoring “white communities.” According to Yeampierre, the result of this attitude is not only increased racial violence and discrimination on both ends, but an exacerbation of systemic problems that confront both groups. Human trafficking. Domestic violence. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on the undocumented — among others.
“We have to lock arms and take each other’s backs to make sure that none of us are vulnerable to those kinds of prejudice,” she said.
Yeampierre said that one of her first lessons on social justice came from a walk she took to Chinatown with her stepfather as a child. After seeing how clean Little Italy’s streets were in comparison to the rest of Chinatown, she realized that “there was a difference between how our communities [of color] were treated and how white communities were treated.” This would not be the last instance of social injustice that she would come to understand — or face, however.
Yeampierre “grew up amidst racial violence and brutality.” She was frequently on the move, attending five schools in eight years and witnessing family members endure intense factory jobs while facing displacement. Her grandmother lost four children to hunger and disease in one of the worst slums in Puerto Rico after having her land taken away for industrial purposes. She also spoke to what it meant to be the child of poor working-class parents. As the first person in her family to attend college, Yeampierre said that she juggled her family’s increased financial dependence on her with the need to serve as their constant mediator, translator and communicator.
At the end of the day, however, these were the same challenges that made her realize that she “was clearly Puerto Rican and proud to be that,” Yeampierre said. “Com[ing] from struggle,” she emphasizes her motivation to learn, to “change everything,” to leave “fingerprints” on the future.
She also reminisced on parts of her childhood that made her “world … so much bigger than [being Puerto Rican],” such as going to school together with her Chino-Latino neighbors. Dancing with her brothers’ friends, who came from different backgrounds. Learning about the Asian and African diasporas. These memories are among the reasons why she urges the Sunset Park community — and others around the world — to educate ourselves on the unique contributions that all groups of color have made to the social justice movements. That we are part of the same “legacy of community building” and “defiance.”
This theme of solidarity follows Yeampierre throughout her career, which saw her as an attorney and the dean of Puerto Rican Student Affairs at Yale. Today, she serves as the executive director of UPROSE, an intergenerational, primarily BIPOC female-led organization working at the intersection of racial justice and climate change. Despite UPROSE’s unique environmental angle, Yeampierre always brings her mission — and story — back to “cultural brilliance as a solution.” “This build[ing] of relationships across ethnicities and across languages,” she said.
♦♦♦
4:50 a.m., and Yeampierre’s description of Puerto Rican slums floods me with images of childhood I never wanted back, reminding me of the village I was raised in back home. For me, the word “home” never evoked memories of warm chocolate chip cookies after-school. Home was never Saturday evenings reading on a parent’s lap. Instead, it was a place deprived of any freedom or opportunity outside of the farm. Home was a place where family farms stretched into fields that stretched into mountains, but where nothing ever, ever stretched into hope. Village life was a life where people were born to work – and worked to die. Heads always pointed down at the soil, never to look up at the sun. Never to ask questions or to dream of anything beyond.
4:51 a.m. I lived with a brother and seven sisters — five of whom are still living. Dad drowned my twin sisters the moment he saw that they didn’t have an extra flab of flesh in between their legs, holding their heads underneath buckets of blood and umbilical cord pieces before they had the chance to open their eyes. I remember sitting quietly with my other sisters in the room next door, hearing gurgles and screams. And then silence. He couldn’t afford to have more daughters — I later overheard him saying to Mom one night. He needed a second son, a breadwinner. When my husband died from cholera earlier in 2016, my father gave me a choice: I could join an underground prostitution network or I could go to the U.S., find a job and send back money for my brother’s education. I left that night, refusing to believe that true sin had wrinkles on his forehead and a breath that smelled of cheap beer. I was made from his bone and flesh.
4:52 a.m. I grew up always in debt to the men around me. Always watching my brother go to school while my sisters and I stayed behind. The word education hangs around my neck like a noose — not tight enough for me to die but not loose enough for me to breathe comfortably. Maybe it’s because I never had an education. Maybe it’s because I gave up everything to make sure that my kids could have one. And I’m still not completely there yet. I wake every day thinking that if maybe I had worked just a tad bit harder, Tommy, Jordan and Liam could have working pencils and write on actual notebook paper rather than on the margins of free newspapers I get from the supermarket.
4:53 a.m., and the realization suddenly dawns on me that I probably cannot afford even a tenth of my children’s college tuition, let alone watch them walk across the stage getting their diploma. I disappoint myself, but I don’t know how to fix what I’m breaking.
4:54 a.m., two hours and six minutes until deportation.
4:55 a.m., and I wonder if my children’s path to education is going to be anything like Fereshteh Ganjavi’s.
♦♦♦
Fereshteh Ganjavi
Three days and three nights of not eating are what took Fereshteh Ganjavi to finally get an education. She had finally convinced her father to create a fake ID for her so she could go to school.
It did not come without a cost, however. “Every time someone opened the door, I was shaking that someone found out about it,” she said.
At the time, Ganjavi was living in a neighboring country of Afghanistan, whose name she had asked us to withdraw for fear of repercussions. Political unrest had prompted her parents to move there before she was born, but a lack of documentation in the new country introduced unforeseen challenges — education among them. When she was around 12 or 13, Ganjavi’s father told her about all the other young women who wanted to learn but could not — and that was when Ganjavi decided to help her family start a school for their fellow Afghan refugees. A small classroom of less than 30 soon grew into a basement of over 300 students and 10 teachers by the time she had left the country for the U.S.
In 2011, Ganjavi and her mother arrived in New Haven, where she immediately learned that opportunities were hard to come by, that it was not the easy pathway to becoming a “doctor” or “engineer” that she was once led to believe.
In America, “there’s a lot of fish, but no one knows how to get the fish,” she said.
For Ganjavi, one of the most eye-opening realizations of this “nothing comes at your door for free” rule was also the most painful. While working as a medical translator for Yale New Haven Health, she once met a mother who had walked her two disabled children to the hospital in the freezing cold. Her case worker had pulled out of driving her at the last minute, but this was an appointment that she had scheduled four months in advance for her kids — and she couldn’t miss it. When Ganjavi asked her if she had ever considered seeking resources to prepare for the driver’s license test and get a car herself, the mother scoffed at the thought of someone who would teach her for free. Not to mention, she couldn’t speak English.
It was this response, combined with the help of her students at the University of New Haven, that motivated her to found Elena’s Light. Today, the New Haven-based organization offers free English tutoring services to refugee women and children, designing customizable options that cater to client needs. According to Ganjavi, every semester enrolls about 20 women and 20 volunteers from all over the country — with ongoing programming during the pandemic.
Beyond its mission of education, Elena’s Light also pushes to promote core values of compassion, self-empowerment and friendship within refugee communities. The Taliban’s recent takeover of Afghanistan has only given the world further opportunities to exacerbate prevailing stereotypes about refugee communities, revealing the toxicity and disrespect behind a modern media culture that pokes “fun” at their struggles. Stampedes at the Kabul airport, people’s screams begging to leave the country and Afghan men climbing on top of overcrowded U.S.-bound planes are reduced to entertainment in the public eye as death and torture become desensitized. Blurred. Forgotten about. In reality, Americans and global news reporters were laughing at the same people who wanted nothing more than to escape a country in pieces, the same people who saw “their parents killed [and] wives beat[en] before them” by the Taliban, according to Ganjavi.
Today, nothing makes Ganjavi happier than hearing the success stories of people who find themselves in the same situation she once was. Every incoming phone call about to tell her “I’ve found a job!” and every message from a past client letting her know that their families are finally safe pushes her to keep tearing down the belief that “education is something higher than what the refugee can ask for.”
♦♦♦
5:00 a.m., and I remember it like it was yesterday. I will never forget what it felt like watching that YouTube video. The nonchalant whirring of the plane as it prepared to depart Afghanistan, drowning out the piercing screams of men as they tumbled from the skies.
5:01 a.m., and I remember showing the video to Tommy, Jordan and Liam. At first, they thought it was a scene from the movies, asking me how the film directors were able to capture the special effects. They asked me if there were hidden trampolines on the ground that we couldn’t see, trampolines to catch the falling men.
5:02 a.m., and I am scared for the day that my babies learn just how fragile life is. I am scared for the day they learn that some lives are protected in titanium boxes, while others lay in barren fields, ready for the birds to pluck from and eat. The vultures leave nothing behind, not even hearts that look soggier, veinier and more Frankensteinian than the ones they’re used to tasting. Those people who fell from the planes — I wonder if anyone remembers them. If anyone knows their names. I wonder if they had graves, if they had a history.
5:03 a.m. and deep down, I already know what the answers to my questions are. People like us — our names are valued less than our histories.
5:04 a.m., and I am thinking about all my ancestors who died working on the railroads they were enslaved at. I am thinking about the Anglo lynch mobs across the West that left Latinx immigrants burned and hanged in the streets. I wonder if they ever teach Tommy, Jordan and Liam that in their social studies classes.
5:05 a.m., one hour and 55 minutes until deportation.
5:06 a.m., and I am a historian. I have work to do. I can’t give up, and even if other people don’t think so, I know that I am a survivor with a story that needs to be heard. I’m going to be a historian. If no one remembers my name, then it is my job to make sure that it is heard. If I can’t have happiness, then I want history. If I can’t have the American Dream, I want my name plastered where it is supposed to be, where rain and blood alike cannot wash it away. If I can’t have my life, then I want it written. In words, in my children, in history. I’m going to be a historian, like Djali Brown-Cepeda.
♦♦♦
Djali Brown-Cepeda.
Three years ago, Djali Alessandra Brown-Cepeda was exploring photo archives and passion projects on the Internet, hoping to find one that lent to her experience as a Black, Indigenous and Latina woman growing up in New York City. She found none.
Nuevayorkinos was born shortly afterwards. Today, family photos, lost memories, and stories of love and struggle alike find themselves celebrating a new life — and new audiences – on the Nuevayorkinos Instagram page.
Brown-Cepeda’s decision to found the archive was a result of her love for “history … her city … and her people.” She sees storytelling as a “radical simultaneous act of decolonization and liberation” for communities of color and low socioeconomic status. This is especially the case in a current political climate that is spawning “rampant,” “visual,” “in your-face” xenophobia, she said. It is a climate exacerbated by Trump’s presidency and its onslaught of anti-immigrant values.
At the heart of her work is an attempt to preserve and recognize “the trials and tribulations [of] being an immigrant in a new country,” according to Brown-Cepeda. Born and raised in upper Manhattan, she grew up listening to the stories of her parents and grandparents, particularly those of her maternal grandparents who took care of her as a child. Both were victims of countries enduring intense political violence and unrest.
The people around her called her grandfather a “recogido,” meaning “one raised by the community.” After fleeing with his father from Rafael Trujillo’s brutal 31-year dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, he braved homelessness as a kid and teenager in New York, through everything from “not knowing what snow was” to “not knowing what English sounded like,” she said.
Her maternal step-grandmother immigrated from a war-torn Finland by boat, and despite being phenotypically white, she found herself confronting many “cultural” barriers that ultimately prevented her from various opportunities, including graduating school. Brown-Cepeda’s own mother was always “one foot in” and “one foot out” of the United States, traveling back and forth between the Dominican Republic in an arduous growing-up journey.
Beyond her own family’s migration history, she is always thinking of ways to amplify the “visibility” of another group swept underneath the shadows of communities around the world: undocumented immigrants. “They are the arms and hands of this country — of railroads or construction or harvesting,” she said. Yet these are the same people put in a position where they are “rightfully nervous to speak up, to march, to tell people this is [their] name.”
As a second-generation woman of multiple racial identities, Brown-Cepeda described that some of the most intense racial discrimination she encountered as having “c[o]me from her own people,” however. She often finds herself in situations where others question the legitimacy of her “Blackness.” Tangled in lines of division drawn within the Hispanic community, she wants to know why Puerto Ricans and Guatemalans cannot be considered part of the same family — why Mexicans and Colombians cannot laugh over the same dinner table.
“I had to defend myself growing up every single day,” Brown-Cepeda said.
She hopes that one day, we will free ourselves from the “crabs in the barrel mentality” and the “Stockholm syndrome” of engaging with oppression to not be oppressed ourselves. From letting ourselves fall victim to the “hierarchies” put in place by the ruling class — the same hierarchies that guarantee that the folks of color at the “bottom” always remain “scuffling” among each other, she said. She mentioned rainbow coalitions — the coming together of groups like the Young Lords, the Brown Berets and the Black Panthers — as a model for what communities should be pursuing as they move forward.
“Let us come together and let us see what we can do,” she said.
♦♦♦
It’s 5:30 a.m., and the thought of Tommy, Jordan and Liam becoming recogidos is paralyzing. They cannot become recogidos. Mommy’s going to fix everything. Mommy’s coming. Mommy needs you three to stay strong. I glance out the prison window, and just for a moment, I swear I see my three boys running around, smiling and laughing. But it’s not my three boys. Instead, the street lamp outside is illuminating a sky of snowflakes with more freedom than I’ll ever have — albeit a short-lived freedom. One, two, three, 10, 20 snowflakes start overwhelming me with a feeling I cannot explain. I’m not sure how long it has been snowing for, or if I’m supposed to be feeling cold right now. Thinking is exhausting when it is all I can do.
It’s 6:14 a.m., and I should be tired but I am not. Instead, I am seeing colors. I am seeing things that are not real, but they are things I know are happening. I think I am hallucinating.
6:15 a.m. My mind starts picturing a white gunman loading his .303 somewhere in New York, writing in his composition notebook that he plans to shoot 14 kids today at the local P.S. 117 Elementary School, because his girlfriend hasn’t answered his last 14 calls.
6:30 a.m. The sun isn’t even out yet, but moms and dads are already waking up their little munchkins for school, reminding them to dress warmly and not to forget their Secret Santa gift. It’s the day before winter break today, and Ms. Lopez’s class is doing a gift exchange. She’s waiting in room 315 with little Santa pencils, reindeer erasers and Olaf stickers for everyone.
6:45 a.m. On the opposite side of the country in California, a Latina undocumented immigrant is caught stealing a pouch of Grubber’s baby food, and the store manager calls the police. That exact same moment, my mind imagines a hard lockdown announcement coming over the speakerphone in P.S. 117, 3000 miles away.
6:46 a.m., tick tock. Tick tock.
6:47 a.m., tick tock. Tick tock.
6:48 a.m. “Put your fucking hands in the air. Police speaking.” The immigrant starts sputtering, taking a small step back.
6:48 a.m. “Put your hands in the air. Police speaking.” The gunman drops his weapon, but his toothy grin does not drop from his face.
6:55 a.m. Blue and red sirens are blaring down the streets, taking both people away. They are both in handcuffs, except only one of them will be forced to leave the country. Except only one person is called a criminal and the other a mental health patient. I think I’m hallucinating. I know that I’m hallucinating, and it pisses me off — terrifies me — knowing that my hallucinations are real.
It’s 6:56 a.m. and I should be crying but I am not. These past few hours, I’ve become friends with this prison cell that I’m sitting in. I think I’m going to miss him. His walls lent me their ear when I couldn’t trust anyone else, and his floor caught my tears when no one else did.
6:57 a.m. Three minutes until deportation.
6:58 a.m. Two minutes until deportation.
6:59 a.m. One minute until deportation. 59 seconds. 58 seconds … 27, 26, 25 … 3, 2 … 1.
7:00 a.m.
“The officers are ready for you. Please step out and come this way.”
As I sit in the car, about to be driven to the nearest airport, I can’t help but look out the window. I see my future — the future of other immigrants — and it is made of solid diamond. It sparkles with the laughter of our children as they yell “Mami” and “Dadda” after school. I see our future, hardened but made beautiful by centuries of living in American shadows, of cutting off pieces of our own flesh to make others come alive.
It is a future that not everyone else sees. That not everyone else bothers to see, as long as they themselves have a house and family to go home to. But some of us don’t have houses or complete families to go home to. Some of us don’t have a country to go back to. Some of us live our lives in scattered pieces that we’re desperately trying to hold together, forever slipping through the cracks.
To the ones up there, you may be the face of this country, but you are not its heart. You are not America. You exploit America far, far more than my people ever will, but you continue to cast the blame on us, dumping salt on all our open wounds until it hurts too much to walk. You need to give us our green cards and our citizenship. You need to give us the tools we need to travel, to fly and to support our families. Give my people our jobs and give us the education we need to come out of the dark. It is easy for you to make yes or no decisions about our lives, sitting in an air-conditioned room knowing that there are no consequences for you. It is easy for you to sit up there and call us pigs and dogs, buying and selling and harvesting our feelings like organs at a meat market. But today, you can throw me against the wall and grab me by the throat, force me to stay silent while you violate me. You can deport me and make me live my nightmares all over again — if it means that you will let my people go.
To my fellow immigrants of color, we are in this together. Not as competitors fighting it out to see which one of us can be “second to white” — but as friends who will hold each other’s hands through it all. It doesn’t matter if her skin is a different shade than yours. It doesn’t matter if he can speak English slightly better than I can, or if you and I speak two completely different languages. At the end of the day, we all want what is best for our families and for our children, and that is why we came here to America. We came here to survive. And while we are at it, let us remember that our children are not here to carry out our dreams. They have their own lives ahead of them, and they will have a much easier time growing up knowing that their parents will always be here for them, love them.
To the children in school, remember that this country is made of people who walk on red carpets and the people who vacuum those carpets. Remember that the railroads and subways you take are built on immigrant labor and lives. Remember that your education represents only a subset of what needs to be learned, that your history and mine alike are an echo of the struggles of the millions of other immigrants, emigrants and refugees who make this idea of history possible in the first place.
Cherish these lives and don’t leave them behind.
Thank them when you have the chance.
Fight for us when you are older.
Fight for yourselves.
♦♦♦
The time is now 8:30 a.m.
Dear America,
I will never forget the first day I set foot in you — smelled your cotton candy breath for the very first time. It took a million dreams to get to you and it took everything I had and more. It took every last drop of my courage and the love of everyone I knew.
Eight years later, I am leaving you with nothing but the clothes on my back and an empty space in my heart where “home” should be. Today feels like a big deja vu moment. It feels like I am dancing alone to a song that’s supposed to be ours. I’m going to miss you more than you will ever know.
But something tells me that I will find it in me to forgive you again. To forgive you for hurting me and for listening to the lies of the people you choose to represent yourself. Something tells me that we will see each other again, even if it takes another million dreams to get to you.
I’ll see you again when the American label is ready to be earned and not born into, and I’ll see you again when I learn to live without the constant fear that you would leave me behind, forget about me. I want to hold Tommy, Jordan and Liam without worrying that they might go to your government the very moment I look away. I want to see your beautiful eyes without blue and red lights getting in the way, and I want to have my Titanic moment without the white palm of the white hand of your white men pulling me backwards. I want to bathe in your reds, blues and whites without losing my immigrant Black, Brown and Yellow. I want to be fearless, America.
So with that, promise me that you will always wait for me — even if in your eyes, I’ll never be good enough for you. Promise me that you won’t give away my animal heart the next time I trust you with it, even if this one’s a little soggier, veinier and more Frankensteinian than the other hearts being sold at the meat market today.
Promise me that you will take good care of it the next time I tell you that I love you.
Because I really, really do.
Sincerely,
A.H.