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Chapter 3
Political Identity Starts at Home:
Border-crossing Families and the Making of Political Subjects
I think my family’s struggles had a very subconscious effect on me. I didn’t grow up thinking of social justice. I just let myself in with a latchkey from the time I was five. We did garment work on the floor of the apartment and I thought it was fun. I prepared myself for poor treatment for being a foreigner. But I also absorbed my parents’ pain and anger and stubbornness that this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. (Quynh Nguyen)
Quynh Nguyen speaks to the hardships faced by so many refugees and immigrants but gives them a particular interpretation—“this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.” In this and the following chapter, I will be suggesting that these activists are constructing counter-hegemonic interpretations of mainstream portrayals of “the” refugee or immigrant experience. Through their narratives, here of childhood, and in the next chapter of coming into their own as adult political actors, they are speaking about events, feelings and perceptions that are very widely shared among today’s immigrants. But they reorganize them in important ways.
The U.S. has a long tradition of interpreting cultures and communities of immigrants and native-born peoples of color negatively. At one extreme are nativist and racist ideological portrayals. But many assimilationist and liberal arguments for better treatment or more resources for those the society discriminates against also embed some variety of deficiency theory. For example, anthropologist KarenMary Davalos pithily characterized mainstream anthropology’s stereotypical treatment of Mexican Americans as “an oppressed luckless group with no language, no culture, and no motivations” (Davalos 1998, 34). In such views, people somehow need fixing so they can enter the mainstream. Mainstream approaches to upward mobility, education, and immigrants’ adaptations to life in the U.S. often organize these experiences as wounds or cultural traits in need of cultural remediation or cure.
In her study of college-aged Chicanas, Aida Hurtado (2003, xiv) captures well how the scholarly version of the latter strands of hegemonic ideology organize everyday experiences of immigrants and other people of color, and affect the ways they see themselves--even those who know better. Delighted but surprised about the richness and honesty, strengths and willingness to be vulnerable with which these young Chicanas responded to her study, she also worried that
I too, in spite of my best efforts to fight against it, had succumbed to the view that ‘we couldn’t be that good,’ [like the young Chicana respondents in her study] that we must have some ‘hidden injuries of class’ (Sennet and Cobb 1993), suffer from ‘stigma vulnerability’ (Steele 1997), and experience ‘acculturation stress’ (Allen, Amanson and Holmes 1998) as we moved from predominantly working-class Chicano environments and families into predominantly white institutions. The social science literature, often repackaged in the popular media, had partly convinced me that. . .we are forever in psychological ‘limbo’ (Ogbu 1987), unable to fully integrate our ‘multiple worlds’ (Cooper and Denner 1998).
Aida Hurtado focuses on the point she experiences herself being defined as an inadequate “other” by the mainstream and her emotional internalization of it. It is an important moment because it captures the impact of the dominant culture, and becoming conscious of that impact. Being able to create a counter-hegemonic and empowering narrative from the same experiences that hegemonic culture weaves into a story of deficiency depends on this double recognition. When scholarly and activist narratives revisit widely shared experiences to name the disempowering and replace it with an empowering narrative, they become powerful forms of politicization.
Scholarly confrontations, between mainstream ways of interpreting subordinated cultures from the outside, and potentially counter-hegemonic ways of defining them from within, are much like the political contests in which testimonios and political narratives are engaged. Both challenge who can act as an interpreting subject and the nature of what counts as a legitimate interpretation. Indeed, the fields of ethnic, women’s and queer studies came into being around precisely that political mission, and have used artistic and scholarly personal to create new social actors who interpret the world from those points of view. As with political testimonios, Davalos argues, referring to Chicana/o scholars, that those projects are also engaged in telling counter-hegemonic stories whose “profound bias [is] to empower the people under investigation” (Davalos 1998: 37; see also Acuña 2000, 448).
This chapter is about narrators’ recognizing mainstream spins on emotionally powerful experiences for what they are, and beginning to retell experiences of stigmatization and oppression that are widely shared in immigrant communities in counter-hegemonic ways. They take on three hegemonic stories about immigrants.
First, and most broadly, they challenge the ways that hegemonic stories stress the divisions between children of immigrants and their parents around assimilating into the mainstream—parents can’t or won’t, but children can and will. The subtext of that story is that assimilation is the natural goal of immigration and that immigrants are welcome in the American mainstream. It speaks to the hardships parents undergo in search of better lives for themselves, and especially for their children, and to the separation this quest creates between parents and children. It claims that children become at home in the new society and alienated from their parents and culture.
Narrators offer a counter-narrative to this story that unites them with their parents and with their communities and cultures. They identify with their parents’ quest for a better life and with their feelings of not being “at home.” Most narrators’ parents came to the U.S. as political refugees or in search of safety, security and better economic opportunities. They made the choice first to cross national and then social borders in search of education and employment, knowing that this would be socially difficult and often painful for themselves and their children. In doing so, they experienced distorted and stigmatizing reflections of themselves in the words and deeds of white America’s institutional gatekeepers. They enlisted their children in crossing social borders, going to schools with affluent whites, or to college. Narrators tell powerful stories about childhood experiences they share with many other children (Part I): crossing the border into the U.S.; crossing language and social borders in school; and making friends as children across social borders. In all these accounts they emphasize the shock of seeing themselves as “other.” The dominant emotional theme in these childhood stories is is of non-acceptance by mainstream America. At best, there is conditional acceptance, but the conditions of assimilation demand rejecting important parts of themselves, families and cultures, which they refuse. They grapple with the difficulties of living simultaneously in more than one world and on different sides of power/privilege borders, while at the same time fully inhabiting none and feeling out of place in all.
Narrators also challenge the mainstream gender story that immigrants come from “traditional” cultures that subordinate women. Here, the implied contrast is that “modern” American culture does not. Instead, narrators reflect deeply on their family members as at once grounding them in new versions of their ethnic communities and doing so by modeling ways of being adult women and men in them (Part II). When they analyze these connections, activists describe family members as exemplars of ideals they wish to follow---both in their willingness to take the hard road for what they believe, and for a self-respecting sense of self. The events they highlight are less about their parents’ political views than about the ways parents or other family members modeled ethical values and ways of being women and men in the world.
Finally, narrators take on mainstream constructions of “the immigrant dream” as striving, Horatio Alger-like, for material and individual success in the land of opportunity. Instead, they show their families and communities as helping to shape a sense of self and belonging in a social world where reciprocity and responsibility to others was paramount. Here, success becomes defined in collective and communitarian ways. Instead of deficiency we see caring, resourcefulness and courage as part of being a woman and a man in this community. Instead of people bound by “tradition,” they show women and men living cultural traditions creatively and resourcefully.
They are counter-narratives, explanations of the experiences that set them on the path to becoming the political activists they become in the next chapter. Together, both chapters show them constructing themselves and their families as socially competent actors and members of a cultural community with their own, non- or counter-hegemonic perspectives on society and culture. These counter-narratives then are part of an ideological struggle about how we understand ourselves and the possibilities for a just society.
I. Childhood and the Making of Political Selves
When I met Suyapa Portillo, she had already had been a hospital worker organizer with SEIU Local 399’s Catholic Healthcare West campaign, done a short stint as an organizer for the Screen Actors Guild, and was then working on welfare reform at CHIRLA, the Coalition for Immigrant Rights. She grew up and went to Pitzer college in the Los Angeles area, where she first became involved in political activism around racism. She was born in Honduras. For Suyapa, her mother’s fear for the safety of her politically active son was the catalyst to radically change her own life and Suyapa’s.
I was born in Copán, Honduras, Central America, and when I was about seven years old, I was a regular kid growing up in a little town. My dad was a teacher in the school; and he would get the newspaper every day, and all the newspapers from the region. One day looking through the newspaper he noticed my brother's picture in the paper saying that the students were taking the university, and that the military was surrounding the place. So of course, that evening we got on the bus and headed to the university in the capital; we lived pretty far from the capital. And I think that's when it clicked to me that my brother was involved in these issues. He is my brother and was the one who played with me all the time when I was little; he is 12 years older than me. That it was the first time I became aware of what students were doing.
Ever since then our lives took a different turn in the sense that our parentsdivorced -- there were a lot of family problems. My mom decided to leave the country after that, maybe a couple, three years later, leave my dad for personal reasons, and leave the country because she wanted to take my brother out of the environment because she was very afraid for his life.
Then, when the opportunity came, this guy was transporting people to the US for $2,000 U.S, she borrowed the money and we began our journey. We left the little town and went to the city where my mom worked as a secretary. She never left me. My brothers were already in college, so I was the youngest one. She figured out how to get to the US and together we came by land.
We got caught by immigration, so we were detained for a month. And this is in 1983 when the worst of the Central American bloodbath was happening. When they were interrogating my mom they thought she was a Nicaraguan Sandinista or something, so we were taken to interrogation separately, off from the group. There was a group of people detained and interrogated all night. I didn’t know what was going on. I just remember the guy trying to figure out where my mom was from because she was trying to pass as a Mexican so if we got turned back, we wouldn’t have togo back to Honduras, but Mexico.
They didn't believe her, and they put usin a holding cell. Then they transferred us to Chula Vista and then we were transferred to a place we used to call Hotel Cortez-- Cortez Hotel like the conquistador. What it was is a detention area in San Diego for families, elders, mothers and children.
Suyapa Portillo analyzed the process of crossing the border as a transformation in identity. When she left town with her mother, she was a “regular kid growing up in a little town.” By the time she reached San Diego, she had been detained, seen her mother interrogated and gotten the message that they were less than welcome others in the U.S.
The U.S. supported war in El Salvador also divided Milton Pascual’s family. Like Suyapa, Milton also grew up in Los Angeles. He began hanging out at HERE Local 11, the hotel and restaurant workers union while he was still in high school. The Pascual family is a force in the local as two of his uncles are organizers. Milton did not join them immediately, but instead went to California State University in Los Angeles.
Milton’s parents came to the U.S. when he was a baby. Milton was raised by his uncles and grandparents in El Salvador until his mother came to bring him to the U.S.
I never got to see my parents until I was eight years old. I would see them by pictures, but I would never talk to, see them, be face to face with them, until my mom went to ElSalvador and picked me up, which was really hard for me to accept, that she was my mom. The people that I looked up to were my grandma and my grandpa and all my uncles and my aunts who took care of me for eight years.
So I went on this journey of coming to this country, illegally like most of us do, as Hispanics do. My mom first took me to the main city of Mexico which was Mexico City. I was really afraid, first of all, because I didn't know-- I couldn't trust her as much as I would trust my grandpa, even though she was my mom, my full blooded mom. It was really hard, you know, it wasn't my position. I was a little kid. I was only eight years old.