Introduction



The Case for Rejecting Assimilation

I coveted whiteness once, but I knew in the back of my mind that conning myself into assimilation would only ever make me a poor imitation of what I would never be.

—Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race

A runner ties her shoelaces and is ready for the race. She’s prepared to run the 400-metre dash. As the starting pistol goes off, she’s informed that her race is now the 400-metre hurdle. She’s stunned but determined. She clears the first hurdle, barely—she has not trained for this race. It slows her down, but she resumes her stride. She struggles to clear the second hurdle. By the time she gets to the next hurdle, she’s starting to get the hang of this race she never knew she’d be running. There is a hint of a smile on her face because she’s finally catching up. Suddenly, the ground is slick with water beneath her feet. She looks around, but it is only in her lane. How is that possible? She has no time to ponder such mysteries, for the next hurdle is here. She clears it. Gravel is thrown in her lane, and she loses her footing. But she is strong and agile, and with one foot in front of the other she clears the remaining six hurdles. As she’s about to run through the finish-line ribbon, she’s told that her race isn’t over. She must complete another lap around the track, and when she’s done, she can claim her spot on the podium. She’s exhausted, but she must finish, so off she goes to run her final lap. She finishes in record time. Along the way people cheer and tell her what an amazing job she is doing. As she puts her arms up in celebration, she’s once again informed that her race continues. Frustrated and out of breath, she goes around the track once more. She wants desperately to be off the track and on the podium. By the tenth time she’s gone around the track, she begins to wonder if someone like her is meant to finish the race. None of the runners who now have medals around their neck look like her. She presses on. After years of running around and around, buying new kicks, getting new coaches, inching closer, she falls chasing a finish line that she was never going to reach. She picks herself up, looks at her bloody knees and hands, and wonders what the hell she is doing.

Finally one day she stops running, walks off the track, and goes in search of something better. Something more truthful. Something closer to freedom.

* * *

When I was a junior in high school, a boy I had a crush on told me I sounded like a white girl. I had spent so much time practicing how I enunciated words so no one could tell English was my second language that I took it as a compliment, though he had not meant it as one.

I was still undocumented in high school, so sounding like a white girl gave me a false sense of security. Having an accent said I was from someplace else; sounding like a white girl fooled me into thinking I could belong in the United States. If I sounded like I was from here, who would question whether I should actually be here?

I am a Brown, formerly undocumented immigrant from Mexico. Assimilation has been forced upon me since the moment I set foot in San Antonio, Texas, in 1994. For a long time, I didn’t understand that assimilating to “American” culture really meant imitating white America—that “sounding like a white girl” was a racist idea meant to tame me, change me, and make me small. I ran the race, completing each stage, but I never quite fit in. No one told me I was entering into a system that never wanted me to begin with.

My parents ate American exceptionalism like it was holy communion on Sunday. They were the first people to fall for the lie. They told me everything was possible in America as long as I worked hard and stayed out of trouble. This idea proved too simplistic, too naive. When I became undocumented at the age of fourteen, after my tourist visa expired, doors began to close. I thought with my smarts, with my English, with my money, I could blend in and slip through the cracks unnoticed. Once I was in, I’d integrate, I’d latch on, I’d become a part of the United States. I’d belong.

I learned the language, at the expense of my Spanish, only to find that in English I didn’t exist. I read the American history textbooks in school that erased any trace of the deep Mexican roots in this country. Still, I forged ahead. I received a college education, graduated with honors, and landed a prestigious job, only to find that it wasn’t enough. I needed a piece of paper with a nine-digit Social Security number, something that eluded me.

When you are someone like me, you can’t get to the top without bending the rules because the rules are meant to keep you at the bottom. So with fake papers I managed my way to one of the most coveted jobs on Wall Street. At Goldman Sachs I made enough money to be considered upper middle class. I paid taxes, gave back to my community. But despite my superficial success, plenty of people wanted me to go back to where I came from.

I thought, When I get my papers, my parents’ formula will work, and everything will be possible, everything will be okay, everything will be beautiful. I got my green card in 2009. The process nearly cut me in half: the anxiety of each application, every fingerprint, the fact that my entire life depended on an immigration official’s mood. My body expressed all the things I didn’t have the words to scream. I had unexplainable headaches, searing back pain, and a stomach too weak to belong to a Mexican. I was the oldest twenty-six-year-old in the world.

Two years later, in 2011, I left my corporate job at Goldman Sachs. To my mom, my decision felt reckless, like throwing away the fishing pole that had kept us fed and jumping into the open water. She viewed the security of my paycheck as more than money. Instead, it was a reward for everything we had endured as a family, most of all the pain of being separated from our loved ones in Mexico and eventually from each other.

I had made it. I had the career, the money, y papeles. Ya lo tenía todo. Hadn’t I reached the finish line of a long race I had been running since the moment I immigrated to the United States? Why walk away after everything I had been through, when I had survived it all and finally had what we immigrated for: a better life, a 401(k), and papers? But how many scars had I collected along the way, many still unhealed, still stinging? My decision was necessary, urgent even. I was a fish needing to get back in the water.

I told my mom how walking away from the security of a paycheck was actually the biggest flex of all. I joked, “Mira ahora me pagan para criticar al país.” Who would have imagined: we thought we had to be perfect, and now I make a living pushing this country to do better by us.

In August of 2014, twenty years after I arrived, I became an American citizen. By then the process had exhausted me—the legal dance, for sure, but what had truly gutted me was the undertaking of assimilation. I was asked to do the impossible: to shed my heritage and become white. I wouldn’t get to remain who I was, like the snake who sheds its skin to grow and heal after an injury but remains a snake. I had to become someone else, thinking one day the race would be over and I’d finally be able to wear America proudly around my neck. Americanizing was supposed to help me fit in, but even after I learned English, became a citizen, got my coins, I still wasn’t welcomed. In fact the opposite was true. To still be Mexican, I had to speak Spanish, a language that escaped my tongue the more time I spent here. Many Mexicans told me I wasn’t Mexican enough, though I was born in Mexico and spent the first eleven years of my life there. I was caught in the middle, rejected by my own people while the American identity still dangled out of my reach. I had to put myself back together and almost didn’t survive the transformation. I became a Frankenstein collecting the pieces I’d lost along the way—my language, my culture, my family.

I needed to write this book to heal. In researching the stories of our past, I found the truth I had been missing. This book is about dismantling the lie of assimilation to reclaim the most essential and beautiful parts of ourselves, our history, and our culture. In the first half, I will dismantle the lies that drive immigrants, and people of color, to change who we are in order to make us palatable, or at least tolerable, to white America. I didn’t find freedom in assimilation because there is no freedom in racist ideas. Assimilation requires that the story we tell about the United States and about white people is an uplifting, inspiring, sugarcoated version of the facts, in which the whip, guns, and racist motives must remain hidden. But it was the truth about this country, the knowledge of its ugly dirty secrets, that set me free. In part one, I talk about the lies. The lie of whiteness that distorts the history of our country to cast white people as the saviors and everyone else as invaders. The lie of English that says if we learn the language and speak it like a white person, we’ll be treated with dignity. In reality, English has been used to segregate us in schools, to keep us from voting, to deport us. Then there is the lie of success, which makes us believe that as long as we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps like the good European immigrants of the past, we’ll surely earn our place. When some of us do reach positions of power, the assumption many white people make is that we must be the affirmative action student or hire. We end up believing and spreading these three lies, but belonging doesn’t exist in racist America, it exists in our America. In the places we build for ourselves.

As much as we talk about America the melting pot, the nation of immigrants (another lie), the beacon of light in the world, the balance of power remains overwhelmingly white. The top ten richest Americans, all white. The U.S. government is 87 percent white in Congress, and 99 percent of governorships are held by white people. The publishing industry, 76 percent white.1 TV executives who decide what media we consume, 88 percent white.2 In education, 75 percent of full-time college professors and 80 percent of teachers are white.3 Yet, so many of us set out to climb the corporate ladder thinking we can be one of those top ten richest Americans without fully understanding the racist policies that will make it nearly impossible. Or, without considering how becoming a billionaire hurts people, our people most of all.

The lies of assimilation culminate in telling immigrants that if we do it “the right way,” we’ll be welcomed with open arms. But there is only one correct way to exist in America, to have unquestioned belonging, and that is to be white. I will dive into how citizenship laws that go back as far as 1790, when the first U.S. Congress was formed, were created to exclude people based on their color and race. Chinese immigrants were banned from entering the United States after they started to move up the economic ladder. Mexican immigrants were recruited to come work the fields, only to become disposable scapegoats. When economic hardship hit, their families were deported en masse, whether undocumented or U.S.-born. Legality has never protected us.

Assimilation is not a road to belonging, but rather the carrot America dangles in front of immigrants, Latinos, and other people of color, an unreachable goal to keep us fighting for the single place at the podium rather than spending our energy creating spaces where we don’t have to compromise who we are to fit in.

With the marked rise of white nationalism in the United States, there is an urgent need to reject the idea that America is a country with a singular identity that only one group of people gets to call home. The demographics of America are changing; some estimates suggest white people will no longer be the majority as early as 2045.4

Though it might be tempting to think that with Donald Trump no longer in office, the worst of American racism and hatred is over, we would be wrong to believe that the illness that is racism is behind us. Donald Trump was simply a symptom. During the attempted coup on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, the Confederate flag was flown inside the building for the first time in history, but the white supremacy it represents has roamed the halls of Congress all along. And it is still there.

We’d also be foolish to believe that only white people are capable of perpetuating white supremacy. We are all caught up in a system designed to help advance white supremacy by replicating the behavior of our oppressor, sometimes out of ignorance, for protection, or because we have a false belief that we, too, can become white, and therefore have the power, money, and privileges white people do.

So how do we untangle ourselves from the web of lies? In the second half of this book, I share how we can fight our way back to true freedom and belonging through reclaiming our history, our identity, and our culture. When I was a young girl learning about the history of the United States, I often asked myself, Where were we? I’ve learned that Mexicans, our Indigenous ancestors, have always had a footprint in this land. We have many examples to follow of people who resisted assimilation, who fought for equality. We must shine a light on those who came before us, those who showed us decades ago that we are enough. Through them, I have learned this is where I belong, not because white people accept me, but because the same roots that ground me to Mexico ground me here, too.

I am a Mexican immigrant, and my experiences as a Brown Latina have informed how I view my place in the world. It’s a complicated story. Where do I, as a non-white, non-Black person, fit in binary conversations about race that dictate life in America? And in turn, how does my non-white, non-Black identity contribute to the power of white supremacy?

Reclaiming my identity has been a painful birthing process. Something beautiful has been born, but not without blood and tears. The Latino identity is complex. As I write about in more detail later, even the very words we use to describe our community cause controversy. How we are counted in official forms like the census have created unintended consequences, or maybe it’s by design that we are treated as America’s bastard child, as perpetual foreigners no matter how many generations ago we became American. At times I argue that Latinos should not aspire to whiteness because it’s never offered protection or belonging. That argument becomes complicated because there are Latinos who are white. Unpacking all of this felt like taking a thorn out of my ribs—an experience full of pain and relief at the same time.

Some people say that I am ungrateful because this country has given me so much, and that I should simply ride into the sunset with the bounty it has bestowed upon me. The truth is, I do have a lot, but I finally know how much it has cost me. In order to love America fully, I had to stop being enamored with it. To me, there are two Americas. One doesn’t want me now and never will, no matter how many human-interest stories we tell or facts we chart. I am not interested in writing for that America. I used to think we had to preach beyond the choir if we wanted to create a better world. Narrative change strategies have been focused on transforming the way people see us, on convincing white people to view us as human through our stories of pain, success, and trauma. But now I know the choir needs energizing, needs love, needs to feel seen, heard, and understood. I am glad other people are doing the work to change hearts and minds. But my work focuses on changing how we see ourselves. On empowering us, both in our feelings and in our actions. This book is for the choir—a choir of whoever can relate or find meaning in these pages. I welcome you into this space.

I love us. I believe in us. We don’t need the kindness of the white gaze to celebrate ourselves. We don’t need our stories to be translated so white people can see us as human. They are not our saviors. We are.

It is time to thrive in our own skin. It is time we learn our history and stand in our truth. The future and health of our nation depends on our willingness to embrace, support, love, and celebrate all the people that create the United States. That will happen only when we stop trying to be accepted, when we stop viewing whiteness as the center of the universe, as what we should assimilate to, and when we create our own spaces and make our own antiracist rules.

I am Mexican, and I am proud of it. I am also American, and that’s not a separate identity from my Mexican one. I don’t live between cultures. I am both cultures. I carry all of it in this gorgeous brown body. No matter how hard this country has tried to get rid of us, we are still here, flourishing. My hope is in us. In me. In you.


Copyright © 2022 by Julissa Natzely Arce Raya.