Immigrant Strong: April 2024 Issue
On reclaiming one's language, women adrift, and two Vietnams
In Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino,” Héctor Tobar unpacks what it means to be “Latino,” and combines his family’s story with criticisms of the U.S. immigration system, pop culture, and the media. This is one of those books that should be required reading, for it it highlights the impact of colonialism and racism on our culture, policymaking, politics, and more. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist brings stories from across the country to reveal history’s deep role in how we define and treat immigrants today, and the harms and injustices this creates.
Essays and Interviews
Natalia Sylvester writes about how Some Words Feel Truer in Spanish for The New York Times in a piece that will surely resonate with many readers of this newsletter, regardless of whether you are a Spanish speaker.
“Being bilingual empowered us to break barriers beyond the rules and definitions attached to words. Some things were simply untranslatable, because they spoke to this new space we were living in — within, between and around language. We were making a new home here, same as so many immigrants who end up shaping language as much as it shapes us.”
Staying on the same topic, here is Jamie Figueroa on The Fraught Process of (Re)Claiming the Spanish Language for LitHub.
“I tried to separate myself from the women on the plane, peel myself away as if a husk. I was afraid of the potency of their difference. It was something I wanted to be included in, claimed by, something I yearned for, in fact, but I gave in to the fear instead. A general but pervasive fear instilled in me by my mother’s surrender to assimilation, her belief that to reflect one’s origins, to emphasize oneself as a person of color, as a person from the Caribbean diaspora, was to draw direct public attention, putting oneself in the crosshairs of racism.”
One more on language—a topic I clearly love reading about. Here is Elmaz Abinader’s wonderful essay for Panorama, Staring Down the Language Barrier.
“The words I was taught as a toddler, and the sentences I put together were always in English — perfect immigrant-conscious-English — lacking contractions, keeping the hard “g” on every participle, I am going to school; involving very few exclamatory words; and spotted with the mandatory please and thank you. We spoke as if English were our second language, formal and careful, mindful of grammatical rules, precise with the hope of deceiving the people around us, that we fit in. We were proper, not sloppy, or sentimental. That was saved for Arabic.”
As we continue to witness a genocide and watch countries such as the United States fund it, I’m deeply grateful for every writer, artist, student and person speaking out, protesting, creating, and refusing to be silenced. For LitHub, here is Philip Metres’s Dispatches from the Land of Erasure During a Genocide.
“Did I take the time to walk a little outside during the genocide?
Did I phone an old friend, remember the old days and catch up on the new, during the genocide?
Did I share a kind smile with strangers on my way to and from work during the genocide?”
I enjoyed Samantha Mann’s interview for The Rumpus—Courage, Confidence, and Craft: A Conversation with Susan Lieu.
“I can also feel other as a Vietnamese person within my Vietnamese culture, so it’s not like you’re different from me. There are different ways that we can always feel different. And I want you to know, internally, my mind is switching all the time, and how hard it is.”
For Electric Literature, Sheila Sundar shares 7 Novels About Smart Immigrant Women Adrift.
“The smart women I had read about in books—at least, the women deemed smart in literary discourse—seemed to possess a sturdiness that was acquired only after generations of belonging. Vega was smart, but she was not sure-footed, and her story asks more questions than it answers: How does one escape the shadow of loss? How do we satisfy our dueling needs for love, sex, and freedom? What is the weight of caste, class, and race in America? How does an immigrant, and a cultural outsider, make (and remake) a home in a new country?”
Sasha Vasilyuk writes about Speaking Russian in America for The New York Times.
“I did not immediately tell my son a war had started. I believe in telling children the truth, but I couldn’t even explain to myself why one of my homelands was invading the other, why my cousins in Kyiv were hiding in bomb shelters, why my cousins in Moscow were fleeing the country. Maybe I’d tell him once I had a better grasp of what was happening or, better yet, when it was over. I was certain that it wouldn’t — couldn’t — last long.”
In LitHub, Christina Vo discusses her relationship with her father and their intergenerational story in Two Vietnams: Chronicling a Father and Daughter’s Shared Love For the Same Country.
“I realized that, like the divided nation he described, my father and I held two very different views of Vietnam. If I was ever going to write about Vietnam, I would need to weave my father’s narrative with my own, creating a mosaic of memories of a nation he escaped and the nation that had lured me back.”
I’ll end with Pranay Somayajula’s (follow them over at culture shock) great Electric Literature essay, My Nostalgia for Enid Blyton is Complicated.
“Blyton’s was a world of prim boarding schools and sleepy English villages, where lily-white children with monosyllabic names ate meat pies and tinned sardines rather than the heavy, spice-laden Indian meals that filled my family’s dinner table each night. Even as I imagined myself growing up alongside her protagonists, it never occurred to me that I, with my brown skin and Indian name, would in all likelihood have been shunned as an unwanted intruder, or at the very least regarded with haughty suspicion for my supposed foreignness.”
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 in the human rights and international affairs fields. I have written about my immigrant experience for the Connecticut Literary Anthology 2023, The New York Times, Catapult, Pigeon Pages, the Washington Post and the New York Daily News. I participated in Tin House workshops in 2024 and 2021, and attended the 2021 Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Conference as a parent-fellow. Find me on Instagram, @vesnajaksiclowe, or twitter, @vesnajaksic.