The Book of Unknown Americans

by Cristina Henríquez

I took a couple nasty turns, but I ended up all right.

“You have to think like a gringa now,” Arturo said. “You have to believe that you’re entitled to happiness.”

came from México, but there’s a lot of people here who, when they hear that, they think I crawled out of hell. They hear “México,” and they think: bad, devil, I don’t know. They got some crazy ideas. Any of them ever been to México? And if they say, yeah, I went to Acapulco back in the day or I been to Cancún, papi, then that shit don’t count. You went to a resort? Congratulations. But you didn’t go to México. And that’s the problem, you know? These people are listening to the media, and the media, let me tell you, has some fucked-up ideas about us. About all the brown-skinned people, but especially about the Mexicans. You listen to the media, you’ll learn that we’re all gangbangers, we’re all drug dealers, we’re tossing bodies in vats of acid,

We’re the unknown Americans, the ones no one even wants to know, because they’ve been told they’re supposed to be scared of us and because maybe if they did take the time to get to know us, they might realize that we’re not that bad, maybe even that we’re a lot like them. And who would they hate then?

This whole chapter really expresses how we feel in the eyes of the Unites States.