Immigration in the 2016 election is playing out the way immigration seems to always play
out during these battles. It’s being used as a fear wedge issue. It’s profoundly been
mobilizing racist xenophobic and nativist tropes. The Latino communities particularly
come under tremendous assault. We’re being demonized by many of the leading republican
candidates. We’re being sort of attacked and just the sort of odious and hateful rhetoric
being directed at the community which I belong to has been incredible. It’s just been extraordinary.
I’m a Dominican immigrant. Dominican immigrant who grew up in New Jersey. A Dominican immigrant
who started in Spanish, then lost Spanish – spoke only Black English and what we would
call white people English. Then relearned Spanish. Someone who has lived with great
intimacy in the complexity of bilingualism, of, you know, language acquisition and language
loss. Who lives in a community that has often been deeply marginalized and deeply disfigured
by kind of slanderous stereotypes versus Dominicans. And someone who grew up absolutely transformed
by the practice of reading. Someone whose life was made beautiful by reading. Someone
who was granted the world. I was given the world by books. I was given the past. I was
given the future. I was given other countries. I was allowed to inhabit a multitude of people.
In many ways reading made me free and all of the things I’ve talked about being Dominican,
growing up in New Jersey, being a poor immigrant kid, living in a society that didn’t value
my community, didn’t value people of my skin color, didn’t value the kind of poor
immigrants that we represented.
And then this practice of reading. These things all come together to inspire me to want to
do what reading did for me for other people but bringing my community and bringing my
experiences with me. I wanted to create books and literatures that didn’t erase me, that
didn’t kind of do symbolic violence on my community. That didn’t reduce us to stereotypical
just gibberish. And my love of reading and my love of my community and my belief not
only are we the people I grew up with. Not only are we deserving of great art but we
are the center of great art. All of these convictions I think helped to drive me towards
becoming the artist I am. We’re in the middle of the Black Lives Matter movement and it’s
sort of ironic that on the one hand we’re engaging with Black Lives Matter but on the
other hand this entire issue of the hatred of immigrants and the demonization of immigrants
has gone almost unnoted, unchecked. You know you could say anything you want about Latino
immigrants and get not only a ton of press but get a ton of support from way too many
Americans. And I think that none of this is going to help us with the future. In fact
all of this is going to damage what we need to do, the courage and the unity that we’re
going to need to create a fair reasonable humane immigration policy to confront the
reality of immigration in this country. As a country we have preferred to just wallow
in the mud of xenophobia and fear rather than sort or clamber on to the hard dry earth of
our reality. Our reality is we’re an immigrant nation. Our reality is that these kind of
nonsense legalistic frameworks aren’t going to help us and that we’ve got to deal with
the facts on the ground and we’ve got to stop, stop trucking in this kind of racist
nonsense. It helps no one.