On The Immigrant Narrative
Everyone confects the story of him or herself that best suits their needs. The story we tell of ourselves may be driven by the need to look good, to be forgiven, to amuse, to envelop oneself in distracting fog or glittering bits, to bare ones jewels like a ruptured pomegranate.
My father has told me his immigrant story. It is full of his particulars, but is also aligned closely with the master narrative of immigration to America. This is a fundamentally triumphal narrative, especially for immigrants from poorer counties. It is the story of go-getters choosing change and risk over the familiar. It is the story of turning your back on poverty, war, famine, lack of opportunity and persecution and walking towards that better place.
This immigrant narrative, so full of hope for new beginnings, is true. Generations of immigrants to the United States have left behind all of the ills mentioned above. Many have come to live a standard of life that was unimaginable in their motherlands. My grandmother, at 83, can scarcely imagine how her 17-year old all-American great-grandson lives or thinks. He is a great kid, respectful and deferential, but he can scarcely understand the life she once lived. He could plunge into the oceanic depths of google and still not emerge with a clear picture of the way great grandma learned to live, love, worship, and structure her life.
So this narrative of immigrant hope and ascent is true but incomplete. If I want to tell the full story of immigration, I must also talk about being removed from the homelands, from the familiarity of extended family (including yes, the toxic kin). I have to talk about my father as a snail, carrying on his back a great, coiled shell patched together from jagged fragments of the motherland. I have to speak of yearning for and hating tender, merciless Mexico. I have to speak of losing that fundamental adult confidence that you know how things work, that your tongue can wrap itself around the language of power. That you can, without faltering and looking down at your shitty shoes, unleash a fluent river of language on your behalf. That you live out your decades like an interloping guest afraid of being dis-invited and ejected from the big house.
That in the end, the story of the immigrant, is the story of the human, and that is always part tragedy.
ouramericanstory 