The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

by Francisco Cantú

My mother soon confided in the man, and he became the first person she ever told about her lifelong shame of being Mexican. The man smiled at her. That’s how it works, he told her. The first generation struggles to leave, to come into a new country, to gain acceptance in a new culture. Often they arrive and find themselves ostracized, they settle in pockets, they do everything they can just to get a toehold. Whether or not they learn English themselves, they know that their children must speak it. Sometimes they go so far as to discourage their children from speaking their own language—they want them to get into good schools, to identify with their new culture, to be accepted by it in all the ways they were not. The man looked knowingly at my mother as he explained. This second generation, he continued, might find themselves at great distance from the culture of their parents. Perhaps somewhere along the way they are told to put the old culture behind them, and so they find it within themselves to reject it. As the second generation forms their own identity, he went on, it is more often built within the new culture rather than the old. By the time they have their own children, it usually turns out that this third generation is almost totally accepted. They have it easy—the culture of their grandparents’ adopted country defines them wholly. However, he added, when they arrive at adulthood, they often begin to look around for something that makes them unique. And it’s then t...