Immigrant Strong: February 2025 Issue
On female friendship, a bike, and Dominican immigrants in New York
Hi everyone,
This month has been bananas—six flights, a UN report, daughter’s birthday, February school break, and a million other things, all while living under a fascist, authoritarian, racist, and utterly incompetent government. One of the most frustrating things has been seeing people ignore or minimize the situation, never bringing up the terrifying state of affairs in any interaction and going about their lives as if everything were normal. Or people telling me “you’ll be fine!” as if I shouldn’t care about people who will die—or already have—as a result of dismantling USAID; women not having access to health care; trans individuals being denied fundamental human rights; immigrants getting sent to countries where their lives will be targeted; an anti-science lunatic running our health agency (get ready for more deaths from measles and other illnesses we’ve essentially eradicated thanks to vaccines he doesn’t believe in); life-saving services getting eliminated so billionaires who already don’t pay taxes can get richer; scientific research and health trials getting blocked; the climate crisis accelerating because our government is gutting environmental protections while subsidizing fossil fuel companies; and white supremacists and conspiracy theorists running agencies that make critical decisions about our lives, our environment, our planet, and our children’s futures.
I could go on forever, but instead, I wanted to say I’m grateful for every one of you still writing, reading, creating, resisting, speaking out, and refusing to normalize any of this. Because none of this is normal—it is wrong, evil, terrifying, and exhausting. But it’s not new; it’s the recipe followed by authoritarians, dictators, and far-right extremists. I can’t help but think how ironic it is my parents left Yugoslavia because of the rise in fascism and ethno-nationalism and I now live in the United States…
I hope we are all finding ways to support the people and organizations that recognize the gravity of this moment and are doing everything in their power to stop these and many other horrors. And if you are white and privileged like I am, I hope you can be an ally and help uplift the communities this government is trying to dehumanize and erase. If you’re not already subscribed to it, check out Writing Co-Lab’s 100 Days of Creative Resistance.
A few announcements before I dive into this month’s reads:
I’m going to AWP’s conference for the first time! I’ll be in L.A. at the end of March and hope I get to meet some of you in person.
I won an award :) Thank you to the Croatian Women’s Network/Mreža Hrvatskih Žena.
NYC folks: heads up that I’ll be reading at Must Love Memoir on April 8.
My words are on a tote bag, how neat is that? Check out Your Faithful Reader’s merch shop.
I’m no longer active on X for obvious reasons, but let’s connect on Instagram and BlueSky.
Book
I ordered The Dead Are Gods after meeting Eirinie Carson at Hedgebrook last month so I had high expectations. Eirinie is incredibly smart, funny, and thoughtful, and everything she read from her work-in-progress was brilliant and so layered; I vividly remember our whole group gasping at the same time during one of her reads. I inhaled this memoir in two days and it met my high expectations—it is a beautiful, powerful, nuanced reflection on grief and female friendship. This love letter to the author’s best friend is also about her embracing her Blackness, the power of a formative relationship, and above all, unconditional love. I felt like I was in the dance clubs and on text chains with these two fascinating women and hardly a page went by without me thinking about my best friend, who lives across the Atlantic. Please follow this gorgeous writer, who was born to a Scottish mother and Jamaican father and raised in South East London before moving to California. And be on the lookout for her next book, Bloodfire, Baby.
Essays and Interviews
I just returned from a friend’s beautiful wedding in El Salvador, so I loved coming across this piece that discusses the country’s history. Here is Cesar E. Cisneros’s An Imprecise Translation in The Rumpus.
“Full erasure of your community, your family, world. You were forced to adapt—adopt the language of the perpetrator that caused all this destruction around you, that ended the life you knew. No language to connect us, your stories are gone. A systemic unlinking from the past and from each other.”
Áine Greaney writes about becoming a Permanent Resident for the Doubleback Review.
“But that last one was ten years ago now, and so much can happen in ten years. There have been flights and funerals. There have been tears and parties, arrivals and departures.
You’re at the immigration desk. This is the correct room and correct desk because you have double-checked the signs. You pull yourself up tall because this is another thing you have learned in America: Fake it ’til you make it.”
Jean Guerrero reflects on How I Crossed the Border Back to Myself for The New York Times.
“As a child of the border, I related. I knew many labels applied to me — girl, American, Hispanic, millennial, gringa — but I liked to think of myself as untranslatable or too complex to be reduced to any of them.”
Ella DeCastro Baron writes about growing up as a Filipina-American in Hymen Bike for KHÔRA.
“Each weekend, our moms and dads literally bet on the American Dream. They gambled their healthcare, mail carrier, hospitality, multi-level marketing paychecks. Whichever the host house, we bountied food across the kitchen for everyone to feed ourselves whenever, often till two, three, sometimes four in the morning. In their Jordache jeans, pink and burgundy velour Sergio Valente sweaters, moms swinging their flea-market knockoff Louis Vuitton purses, our nanays and tatays played Blackjack, mahjong, and pares pares. This tropa of families of Filipino immigrants lived, laughed, loved together until I moved to college.”
In this excerpt for LitHub, Rich Benjamin recalls Memories of a Military Coup: Making Sense of a Vanishing Haitian Heritage.
“As my mother ages, I worry I am squandering a vanishing chance to really know her—our history.
My family’s existence in Haiti, those disremembered years, dwell like a caesura in our minds, lost stanzas in an epic poem. If ever I am to understand my mother, I must speak to that void.”
I’ll wrap it up with Jared Jackson’s Electric Literature interview with Alejandro Heredia. Here is“Loca” is a Year in the Lives of Dominican Immigrants in 1999 New York.
“These characters are migrating for different reasons and because of that they develop different relationships to the country. To me, that felt like a more responsible way of writing about immigration than suggesting that all immigrants are pining to return home. That’s not the truth of my lived experience, or the immigrants from across the world whom I’ve met.”
Thanks for reading,
Vesna
About this newsletter: Writing about immigrant and refugee life—the struggles, triumphs, and quirks—by immigrants and refugees, children of immigrants and refugees, and others living between countries and cultures. 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 for Back Where I Came From: On Culture, Identity, and Home, Connecticut Literary Anthology 2024, Connecticut Literary Anthology 2023, The New York Times, Pigeon Pages, the Washington Post, the New York Daily News, and Catapult, among others. I was a Writer in Residence at Hedgebrook (‘25), participated in Tin House (‘24 and ‘21) and Kenyon Review (‘24) workshops, and won the Poet & Author (‘24) and Parent Writer (‘20) fellowships from Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Find me on Instagram and Bluesky.
Thanks for sharing all of these resources and writing works, Vesna! Grateful for you <3
Great letter, Vesna! I cannot agree more about how maddening it is to see certain ppl going about their lives as if nothing is happening. Thanks for the reminder of how important it is to keep writing. XO