Immigrant Strong: May 2023 Issue
Immigrant Strong: May 2023 Issue
WE ARE 4 YEARS OLD! On a migrant's journey, a long lost father, writing as protest, and more.
Javier Zamora’s Solito: A Memoir is a riveting story about the author’s journey from El Salvador to the United States as an unaccompanied 9-year-old. My first tears came in the first chapter, and the last ones dropped nearly 400 pages later, in the Acknowledgments section.
I happen to be a parent of an 8-year-old, but I cannot imagine anyone reading this book without being both deeply moved and disturbed by the kind of suffering such a young child must endure to be reunited with his parents due to inhumane immigration laws. Zamora and his parents were essentially forced to leave El Salvador because of the U.S.-funded civil war there—one of many facts of history that often get ignored when discussing immigration. It’s a frequent topic in our political discourse, but how often do we examine and acknowledge the reasons behind so many migrants’ journeys? And what kind of a country has an immigration system that leaves parents with no choice than to send their child on a potentially deadly journey with strangers?
This month marks four years since I started this newsletter and I find it fitting to feature Solito in this anniversary issue. One of the reasons I started Immigrant Strong is because I despised the way some people talked about immigrants, including those who are undocumented--as if they are animals, not humans; as if anyone wants to risk their life crossing a border characterized by violence and hate; as if any human being can be “illegal” and their humanity is contingent on a piece of paper.
I wanted to give space to stories told by immigrants about their lives, without the racist political lens they’re often filtered through. To challenge reductive and false narratives about “good” and “bad” immigrants, as if we’re not people, with our good and bad sides. To dispel the myth of the American Dream, and share writing that is not rooted in tropes or outdated ideals that are nowhere near reality for most immigrants, especially people of color.
Solito is written with a poet’s mastery of language, a raw and harrowing account of an unimaginable journey, and well-crafted narration from the point of view of a child still learning how to tie his shoelaces and use the toilet. The author shares his remarkable story on his own terms—something I hope immigrants will keep doing, whether their lives involve trauma or not.
Before I move on to the next section, I wanted to thank everyone who has subscribed to Immigrant Strong and shared it with others over the last four years. We’re nearly 1,000 people strong—not bad for a free newsletter started on my living room couch with a $0 budget. Thank you to those of you who have kindly pledged financial support—I’m keeping it free for now, but please know that your support and encouragement have kept this newsletter alive for four years. I hope it’s achieved at least a little bit of what it has done for me—introduced me to spectacular writing in the empowering world of immigrant literature, and made me feel like part of a community.
With love,
Vesna
Essays and Interviews
For Guernica, Aida A. Hozic penned this beautiful letter, Many Years of Nowhere Behind Us, about Sasha Hemon’s new novel.
“The war had erased thousands of lives and made millions of people into refugees, including your parents, my mother, many of those we love. My husband, an American, was cheered by the stories of your parents’ life in North America, by the humor and the kindness with which you narrated their struggle to transform the space they found themselves in. He recognized my mother in your parents’ excessive thriftiness, their unease when ordering food in restaurants, their preoccupation with personal and global catastrophes. I, by contrast, related to the void that structured their existence.”
I think a lot about the power of literature in social justice and movement building, and the wider role it can play in our society. In this interview for the Writer’s Digest, Jennifer De Leon discusses writing as a form of protest.
“My sincere hope is that readers feel what Maya, the main character, is feeling as she moves through this harrowing yet hope-filled journey of being forced to leave the only home she knows, for the unknown. It is empathy that, I believe, will prompt readers to ask deeper questions about immigration at the southern border, about the human beings crossing it every day, and their reasons for doing so.”
I enjoyed Ava Chin’s LitHub piece, In Search of My Long Lost Father: The Crown Prince of Chinatown, excerpted from her memoir, Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming.
“Looking at the picture of so many generations of Chins at their New Jersey Shore summer home (Chinese on the Jersey Shore?), I felt happiness, pain, anger, relief, and gratitude. Growing up, our family orbit had felt so small—just me, my mother, and my maternal grandparents, and the endless ruminations about my estranged family.”
Also in LitHub, James Crawford penned this great piece, “Every Border is a Story.” On Dividing Lines Both Real and Imagined, excerpted from his book The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World.
“Before they are mapped, or drawn, or marked, they begin as an idea. No political border ever just exists in the world. It can only ever be made. Or, rather, it can only ever be told. One way or another, every border is a story.”
In this interview with Margaret Juhae Lee for The Rumpus, Jane Wong discusses the craft decisions behind her memoir’s structure, one book that greatly influenced her, and who she wrote Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City for.
“This book is so deeply tied to class—low income, working class, immigrant babies, living paycheck to paycheck, being in debt, the struggles of trying to get by and making do with what you have. That’s why the Bruce Springsteen lyric in the title kicks it off. He’s truly the troubadour of the Jersey working class. More broadly, it’s a book that speaks to experiences of immigrant families with language barriers, trying to find healthcare and what it means to feel uncomfortable with upward mobility.”
Deb J.J. Lee discusses growing up Korean American in New Jersey, the mental health issues they confronted, and a fraught relationship with their mother in this NPR interview with Malaka Gharib.
"I wanted to fit in so bad [in Summit] that I tried to force myself to forget the Korean part of myself. It was a survival mechanism."
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio makes great points about America’s wrongful treatment of immigrants, and how we should be focusing on things that are actual threats against democratic principles. For The New York Times, here is Immigrants Keep Loving America, Even When America Doesn’t Love Them Back.
“White conservative men, the mainstay of the voting bloc that feels itself to be invisible and left behind, whose genius goes unnoticed and valor goes untested, now have an opportunity to be the protagonists they feel is their birthright. But they must know in their hearts that it is not brown, Black and nonbinary children who threaten America’s standing in the world; rather, it is men like them, all stirred up by military cosplay.”
Frankie Huang has a well thought out and informative piece on Netflix’s Beef series in Electric Literature, Being an Honorary White Person Doesn’t Make Us More Powerful.
“Many viewers of color would be quick to recognize—with resignation—the need to play to stereotypes in order to usher through a positive transaction, or maintain a pleasant atmosphere in mixed company. So often, we have to put survival above dignity; we swim upstream even if the waters are unclean, tainting us the longer we linger.”
Irene Muchemi-Ndiritu discusses Navigating American Racism as an African Immigrant in LitHub.
“I went from being incredibly sure of my identity and comfortable in my skin to being bewildered. I longed to understand where my Blackness fit into this complicated society. To the white folks, I was just Black. To Black Americans, I was African, and they made it clear that I was frustratingly naïve. “You just don’t get it,” I was told, and it stung. The Africans told me, “Don’t dwell on it.” ”
One of the many things I love about literature is that it can allow us to access things we can’t otherwise get. In Judy Blume Taught Me What My Parents Wouldn’t in Electric Literature, Kavita Das reflects about some important lessons she learned from her books.
“As the child of Indian immigrant doctors, we didn’t talk about any of these issues, and it was tacitly understood that they were taboo and off limits. What’s even stranger is that my parents would talk to each other and their doctor friends about bodily medical issues — often in our midst — but didn’t talk to us, their children, openly about our own bodies.”
Thanks for reading,
Vesna
About this newsletter: Writing about immigrant and refugee life—the struggles, triumphs, and quirks—by immigrants and refugees, and children of immigrants and refugees. For more info, here is a Q&A I did with Longreads about the newsletter. Photo in the logo: Miguel Bruna/Unsplash.
About me: I grew up in the former Yugoslavia, then immigrated to Canada, and now live in the United States, where I work as a writer and communications consultant for nonprofits focusing on human rights and social justice. I have written about my immigrant experience for The New York Times, Catapult, Pigeon Pages, the Washington Post and the New York Daily News. In 2021, I attended Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing conference as a parent-fellow, and participated in the Tin House Summer Workshop. Find me on twitter, @vesnajaksic; Instagram, @vesnajaksiclowe; or my website, www.vesnajaksic.com.