The American’t Dream
By: Ariana Aboulafia
This weekend, I was sitting at a table on the campus of the University of Miami with my dog when a sixteen-year-old prospective student and her mother walked up to me.
What begun as a brief moment of her saying hello to my giant, black poodle turned into an hour-long dialogue with this young woman about my college experience. At the end of our conversation, she told me that it was hard for her to imagine what her life would be like when she finally began attending college. Imagine, she said, me, at a school like this.
Indeed, imagine.
When I was sixteen, college was but a dream for me, too. By the next year, I had begun school at the University of Southern California, which has one of the highest populations of international students of any school in the nation. My first year there, I had roommates hailing from everywhere from Texas to Taiwan; and, the longer that I attended USC, the more people I met from different places, with different perspectives. While I was at school, it never really occurred to me that after college, my friends from other countries — whether they were from Kenya, India, or Canada — would not be able to stay in the US unless they successfully completed an incredibly difficult and competitive visa process. It wasn’t until graduation, actually, that I realized that the end of college could also mean the end of their time in the United States for many of my now-closest friends.
One of these friends is Jorge Molina. I met Jorge during my sophomore year of college, when we were both chosen to be Orientation Advisors to help new students transition to life at USC. For an entire summer, Jorge and I worked together, ate all of our meals together, went to parties together, and lived next door to each other; needless to say, we got to know each other pretty well. We were both newly-out members of the LGBT community, and both writers who loved film and live-tweeting awards shows. We had so much in common that I rarely even remembered that Jorge was not born in the United States of America.
About a year ago, when the possibility of a President Trump still felt far away, I think Jorge and I had our first conversation about his immigration status. With Trump calling Mexicans “rapists” and with more hate crimes happening each day, I began to fear for my friend’s safety and texted him to see how he was doing. He assured me that, despite the fact that we had both graduated a few months earlier, he was still living in Los Angeles and pursuing becoming a screenwriter while working on his visa application. LA, he told me, was still a relatively safe place for him. He was fine.
On the night that Trump got elected, Jorge was the first person that I thought of. As a gay, disabled woman, it was hard not to feel like Trump’s election amounted to a personal attack, and hard not to wonder just how my life would change in the next few months or years. Jorge, I thought, must be feeling the same way — after all, he too was doubly under attack. And, even worse, he couldn’t even vote in the election, so his fate was solely in other people’s hands, people he had — people we all had — trusted to keep us safe, trusted to care about us incorrectly, naively and blindly.
Donald Trump clearly hates immigrants, perhaps particularly Mexican immigrants — or, at least, this is the rhetoric that he spreads in order to garner support from those who actually do hate Mexicans and immigrants. Similarly, Mike Pence hates gay people and trans people, or at least pretends to.
Why, then, does a gay immigrant from Mexico want more than anything else to be in this country?
When Jorge told me, recently, that he had moved back to Mexico to be with his family, I was saddened but not surprised. I had assumed that, given our current political climate, he had gone to Mexico for the foreseeable future, for his own safety and emotional wellbeing. Actually, he was — and still is — in Mexico working on his visa application, with the goal of re-entering the United States one day very soon.
Jorge is a screenwriter, with a unique perspective on the intersections between film and popular culture. He has kind eyes, and he is intelligent enough to have graduated from a top-20 research institution with one of the best film schools in the world on a full scholarship. In Los Angeles, it sometimes seems like everyone is, at least half-heartedly, trying to enter “the industry” by working on a script between Netflix binges at coffee shops or taking minor acting jobs on Craigslist. The only ones who will make it in film, however — as with any other competitive industry — are the ones who truly give all of themselves to the pursuit. Jorge did, when he was in LA, and continues to do so as much as possible now from his home in Mexico City.
Films and the film industry are, in so many ways, reflective of the very best parts of America. There is no place that makes films quite like ours; American movies tell underdog stories, and more importantly they tell our stories — yours, and mine, and your neighbor’s and your friend’s. Truly, there is no better industry for a gay immigrant from Mexico to get into than this one; and so, part of me understands why Jorge wants to come back to America. But, part of me is still confused.
As a native-born American citizen, it is easy for me to criticize this country — especially right now. As a gay person, I am afraid each and every day that I wake up unsure of what my rights will be tomorrow. As a disabled person, I am afraid of what will happen to the healthcare benefits that I so desperately need. As a woman, I worry about my access to birth control, and as a Jewish person I fret over the acts of anti-Semitism that have increased in frequency alongside the resurgence of neo-Nazi power and pride marches.
I consider myself to be a patriotic person. I am the proud granddaughter of a WWII veteran, and even while I criticize this country I recognize how privileged I am to even be able to do that without the fear of imprisonment or worse. But, I do not know that, now, I would choose to live in this country if I had a viable life somewhere else. I think that many other people probably feel the same way, even if they don’t want to admit it.
How can it be then, I wonder, that Jorge feels so differently? And, how can it be that this person, who wants to be in the United States more than anything else, who still sees all of the best parts about this country and its inhabitants, is the very same person who is being denied entry?
Recently, I was talking about politics with a few colleagues from law school when one brought up the fact that, for children under the age of eight, the only president they have ever known is Barack Obama.
“Imagine what they must be thinking now, with Trump,” one noted, “Imagine how confused they are, and how afraid. Imagine what they must think about America, about the type of place we are and the type of place that we have become.”
Indeed, imagine.
People like Jorge Molina don’t have to imagine — they know. They know every single day what a wonderful and terrifying, complexly divided and simply unified place America can be. They see each day on the news a president who wants to build a wall to keep them out, and a vice president who will neither confirm nor deny that he wants to “hang” them, everyone like them too.
And yet, they want to live here because they do not only see what we are, they see what we can become. When white supremacists purporting to protect American ideals march through Gainesville and Charlottesville with their feet stuck firmly in our most shameful historical moments, people like Jorge see only how far we have come. Immigrants, and people like Jorge, are our past, present, and future — and, in a lot of ways, they are more American than any born-citizen, because they have had to fight to be where they are today every step of the way.
“Sometimes,” Jorge said to me recently, “I wish the mere ‘wanting’ would be enough to allow me to stay [in the US]. That’s something you can’t transmit in a paper [visa] application. Just how much I want it; just how much is at stake for me. My career, the community I’ve built, my dreams. It all hangs on an ‘approved’ seal. But, I’m still fighting for it.”
Jorge is just one person, fighting for his dreams.
America is full of hundreds of thousands, of millions of just one person, fighting for their dreams. Really, what could be more American than a gay kid from Mexico City, coming to school on a scholarship, and living in Hollywood?
Or, more accurately, what is more American than any young man who believes so purely in the greatness of this country that he wants to live here?
Imagine having that much faith in a place, even when it seems that that place has no faith in you. Imagine leaving your family for the chance, just that chance, to become what you’ve always wanted to be. Imagine loving the place that lets you do that, no matter who the president is.
Imagine. Indeed, imagine.
