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“You have to think like a gringa now,” Arturo said. “You have to believe that you’re entitled to happiness.”
and I felt the way I often felt in this country—simultaneously conspicuous and invisible, like an oddity whom everyone noticed but chose to ignore.
“Come on, Alma! You think I don’t know you? You think I don’t breathe you and dream you every single day of my life? You think I haven’t been inside you? I know when you’re lying to me. There’s something else.”
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?
I mean, does anyone ever talk about why people are crossing? I can promise you it’s not with some grand ambition to come here and ruin everything for the gringo chingaos. People are desperate, man.
Like they really want to be tied to the underside of a car
or stuffed into a trunk like a rug or walking in nothing but some sorry-ass sandals through the burning sand for days, a bottle of hot water in their hands? Half of them ending up dead, or burned up so bad that when someone finds them, their skin is black and their lips are cracked open? Another half of them drowning in rivers. And half after that picked up by la migra and sent back to where they came from, or beaten, or arrested.
Inside each of us, I was pretty sure, was a place for the other. Nothing that had happened and nothing that would ever happen would make that less true.
What I didn’t understand—what I suddenly realized now—was that if I stopped moving backwards, trying to recapture the past, there might be a future waiting for me, waiting for us, a future that would reveal itself if only I turned around and looked, and that once I did, I could start to move toward it.
Maybe it’s the instinct of every immigrant, born of necessity or of longing: Someplace else will be better than
People do what they have to in this life. We try to get from one end of it to the other with dignity and with honor. We do the best we can.
