Thirteen years illegal: Dreaming the immigration dream in these trying times
by Jody Jenkins
For thirteen years I lived as an illegal immigrant, skirting the known edge of civil society. I wasn’t fleeing war or repression. I was in search of the poetics of the Lost Generation and the Beats and didn’t believe in boundaries in art or life. As an American abroad, I was invisible and unsought but still subject to those spontaneous fractures in trajectory that could change life forever. And so I had what I offhandedly called “a wetback mentality” — avoiding authority, working in the shadows and ever aware that the most innocuous of encounters could end me up in a paddy wagon while my wife and kids ate dinner, wondering why Daddy was so late getting home.
I am white. I am American. Because I wasn’t African or Arab, I was of no interest to authorities. And I wanted nothing from the country I lived in except to be left to my life. It seemed a fair ask at the time and I was creative in pursuing it as a freelance journalist and itinerant anything that often involved working on boats, editing literary magazines, doing translations and other such things just to get by. It wasn’t very different from what’s called the ‘gig economy’ today, where living on the edge brings out your survival instincts and your native ingenuity. Most of the anglo friends I made there — legal or not — were a distinct personality type — ambitious, adventurous and entreprenurial to the extreme, often filling niche markets with boutique ideas of the kind that give economies new wrinkles conceived by people intuitively drawn to testing the tight rope of life day after day. And they knew how to live. Most all of them deeply appreciated what they had and what they had experienced and how, like having children, this new land had helped them grow as human beings. It is difficult and trying, learning to live and survive in another culture, another language, in another country far from your known supply lines. It builds a certain kind of character that we laud in America as an archetype and yet eschew when it comes to border policy.
It is difficult and trying, learning to live and survive in another culture, another language, in another country far from your known supply lines. It builds a certain kind of character that we laud in America as an archetype and yet eschew when it comes to border policy.
More than anything in my experience in America, living on the edge abroad was a lesson in citizenship. You never see things so well as when deprived of them. In the same way you begin to see the deep and unique meanings of the words of your own language through the prism of another, I learned the meaning of citizenship by translating my experience through another country’s notion of it. And I learned deep community among a group of people bound together by the common experience of life. My only legal piece of paper in my first thirteen years in France was a barge pilot’s license because I didn’t have to prove citizenship to obtain it. But I did have to do an intensive first aid course with the pompiers (firemen) that made me obligated by law to stop and help others in distress. In the month after obtaining my Brevet de Premier Secours (First Aid Certification), I was involved in three incidents: One was pulling a drowning man from the Seine; the second was helping a woman who had gone into shock in a restaurant; and the third was leading authorities to a man who had attempted suicide. The first question the police asked me after I saved the man from drowning was about my papers. By the third incident, when the pompiers arrived after my call, I pointed to where the man was so they could find him and help him and then I ran as fast as I could in the opposite direction. My legal requirements of citizenship were suddenly clashing with my moral obligations as a human being. And so a deep awareness of the two became a point of tension that remains to this day.
A French friend once said something I immediately associated with the United States: She’s pretty from afar but she’s far from pretty. After a long sojourn abroad, I returned to America to be near my kids as they went away to school. I was proud to come back, wanting to be a part of a country that so soon after the disastrous first decade of the new century could elect the most unlikely of presidents given our circumstance and racial evolution. We were heading in the right direction environmentally though not fast enough. Food consciousness was widespread and growing. Occupy mainstreamed the phrase “We are the 99%.” Health care was finally a reality. Though the banks and corporate America were charging headlong towards the next financial disaster and there were still striking issues of inequality and race festering at our core, it seemed in many ways we were ripening as a nation. There was a big picture quality to it.
The closer I got, the prettier America became until we went over the electoral Niagra Falls in a barrel. And the sudden hyperfocus on immigration and deportation brought out a certain body memory: I lived illegally for so long that even today, when I see police in the street, I yawn. I had read of a spy in World War II who cultivated the habit when the Gestapo was nearby in the belief that no one yawns who has something to hide. And no one who lives that immigrant experience can look at another struggling under the same stresses and not viscerally sympathize with the fears and hopes and uncertainties of their lives. Come to escape the nightmare of a war we helped foment or to pursue a dream we sold, and then hounded on dubious grounds for having the audacity to dream it.
The narrowness of that issue given the scope of our horizons and challenges seems counter intuitive to all we are as Americans, and to ignore all that we could benefit from those feverish minds that search the deepest corners of their fears for ways to make life workable. It’s not that immigrants force us out of jobs as much as they force us out of our barcaloungers to reconsider our comfortable assumptions about who we are and what we look like, even down to the language we speak or the religion we practice. When Piyush “Bobby” Jindal, the Indian-American Republican Congressman and former governor of Louisiana, stands in front of the microphones and addresses his constituents in a drawl, it challenges us to push the bounds of our known world. And without that — that constant reconsideration of who we are that is at the very core of America as a nation — we begin to implode on the very promise we claim to be protecting by barring immigrants from our shores. As the comedian Doug Stanhope once remarked about seeing Mexicans in rags being led away after illegally crossing the border, that if they’re stealing our jobs, “We need to retool.”
America is the land of dreams, a world where you can literally remake yourself. Our marketing vis à vis Hollywood has been effective in selling us as the greatest place on earth, and yet we’re surprised when people want to buy into that. I once spent two weeks with a Mexican family in Cuernevaca and the grandfather, an erudite and elegant man with manners that matched the best of my Southern roots, couldn’t say enough about the beauty of American cinema and it’s ability to persuade. And one of the things I valued and missed as an expatriate was the can do-ism that is at the heart of the American consciousness and is reflected in so much of that film culture. What comes across most in the notion of the “American Dream” is the idea of the possibility of becoming the best that you can be.
While European sensibilities teach us a lot in terms of embracing our lives and living in the now, there is a thick layer of fatalistic “it’s not possible” ism that we didn’t want our kids to grow up with. In France, there is no universal myth that anyone can become president. And every time I feel the fix is in in politics and find myself poo pooing the naive notion that it’s possible for anyone to be president here in the States, someone like the mixed raced son of a single mom and a Muslim father happens on the scene. And so our kids came home to study and learn that their dreams are only limited by their ability to dream them, that they can change the world and there’s no one other than themselves to tell them otherwise. It’s a powerful statement, one that resonates with anyone with a heart or a dream or a child. We give that gift to the world. It’s miserly to think that there’s only so much to go round.
A friend who was a Vietnam Vet carried a Zippo lighter with the inscription “For those who fight for it, life has a flavor the protected will never know.” As someone who has seen the battlefield and desperately struggled in the legal margins, it captures in a different context the very real and profound appreciation of those who dream the dreams America embodies and go to extraordinary lengths to achieve them. These times seem almost Biblical in their migratory import. And for those swept up in its current, I can’t help but imagine what their mindset and fortitude could bring to a world that welcomes them.
Jody Jenkins is a writer and filmmaker living in Northampton. He is the Director of Field Production for Amherst Media.
