Читать книгу Unsung America - Prerna Lal - Страница 6

Introduction

This is not a book about heroes.

This is a book about courageous people who sometimes made mistakes. People in difficult situations that they often did not choose. People who decided to act despite grave risk and uncertainty. People who were not in the right place at the right time. Through their stories, they tell a history of exclusion, bravery, resilience, and perseverance.

This is a book about immigrant trailblazers. Some passed on after making rich contributions. Many are still alive and continue to battle on for their freedom. The trailblazers in this book are unsung and have been ignored in favor of a narrative that either portrays immigrants as heroes or as villains.

When I was first approached to write a book about awesome immigrants, I thought I was the wrong person for the task, though not because I don’t think immigrants are awesome. We definitely are.

Most of us speak multiple languages. We leave our homes and embark on dangerous journeys and come to America seeking freedom and opportunity. We have lost our homes and yet work to create new ones. We have introduced the world to some of their favorite foods—tacos and curry and adobo and kimchi and injera. We create jobs as entrepreneurs, clean homes and office buildings, care for the ill as doctors and nurses, and feed the country through our work in agriculture. We have amazing, complicated names that are hard to pronounce and actually mean something. We make this country the rich, vibrant, diverse, and multicultural place that it is.

A whole encyclopedia could be written about immigrant entrepreneurs or valedictorians. But I did not want to only profile successful immigrants, the ones who made it in the United States. I am tired of that narrative. I am exhausted from how many times I have been asked to play respectability politics, asked to propose a model minority narrative. I have learned the hard way that perfect grades, perfect resumes, and perfect behavior did not prevent us from being the target of legal, political, or immigration enforcement efforts to forcibly remove us from our homes.

After the end of the transatlantic slave trade, American and British industry leaders scoured the world for a cheap source of labor. The British found it in East Indians and brought 60,965 people, including my great-great-grandparents, to the islands of Fiji to work on sugar cane plantations as indentured servants. After indentured servitude ended forty years later, many Indians decided to stay. Although indenture had been brutal, they had lost all semblance of caste, acquired a new language, and built new lives in Fiji. It became home. When the British colonial experiment ended in 1970, the Indian and indigenous population struggled to live in harmony in a post-colonial era.

Fortunately, my grandparents and parents were not born into any kind of servitude, and they were able to build successful lives for themselves in an economy that promised upward mobility. Therefore, it came as a complete shock to my system when my father asked me to pack my bags for the United States in 1999. He had an urgency to move that I could not understand.

I was almost fifteen years old when we came to live in the San Francisco Bay Area. I spent the next decade of my life trying to make sense of where I was and why he had brought me here. Who leaves golden sandy beaches, rich blue lagoons, and emerald-shimmering seas to live in an earthquake zone where it is cold most of the summer? And without a plan to ensure that I could go to college and not spend the rest my life struggling?

Granted, I could have died in Fiji. I was a little queer kid, and I was never good at hiding it. My classmates were mostly Christian zealots. My high school principal would have loved nothing more than to expel me for being gay. And my best gal pal at the time was as powerless as I was to do anything about it, even though we did our best to protect one another. In my father’s head, the Bay Area was the only safe place, and many years later, I realized that my parents had made the best choice they could with the information they had at the time.

I took pieces of my home with me—photos of me with my best friends, a Fijian baseball cap, a keychain with a map of the islands, a small desk flag, my favorite tattered green bath towel, and my childhood pillow and blanket.

More vivid than those things, I also carried memories with me. In the weeks before we left, I promised myself that I would imprint in my memory everything about my home, so that it would never be lost to me, and that in my moments of trial, I could use these memories to ground myself, and to seek strength from them. Sometimes I can recall conversations from childhood more easily than the ones I had yesterday.

Immigrants are often told to get in line, and I did. However, a complex tapestry of immigration laws rendered me without status shortly after we arrived in the United States. My US citizen grandmother had filed paperwork to sponsor my mother (and by extension also me as her child) but that paperwork also established that we had intent to immigrate permanently to the United States. Therefore, when I applied for a student visa to continue my studies, the United States government denied it because my grandmother’s petition served as evidence that I had intent to reside here permanently. I was eighteen when I lost status.

As the youngest child and the only one without papers, sending me back to Fiji was not an option for my parents. But it did mean having to live without status in the United States for an indeterminate period.

For a long time, I lived in fear for my life. I was afraid to go to the hospital when I broke my hand, afraid to report violence at home, afraid to ask for help even when I was the victim of a crime, afraid to tell teachers and friends in college that I needed financial support, afraid to apply for jobs or seek scholarships—all out of fear that someone would find out I was undocumented and report me to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). I feared that I would never be able to graduate from college and live to my full potential.

To pay my way through college and graduate school, I worked as a janitor, cleaning homes and office buildings. When I turned twenty-four, my parents finally received lawful permanent residency (popularly known as “Green Cards”). However, since I was no longer a child, the Obama administration sought to remove me from my home and separate me from my family. By this point, all my family had legal status except for me. My only papers were the couple of degrees under my belt, and I was hungrily trying to get more. I was almost done with law school—as if anyone who wanted me deported ever cared about my academic credentials or achievements.

More importantly, I became a target for removal from the United States because I had become part of a mini-movement of undocumented rabble-rousers who were finished with hiding in the shadows, and instead were organizing to prevent the deportation of thousands of other undocumented people. We blogged, wrote letters, marched, met with politicians, testified before congressional members, occupied buildings and streets, chained ourselves to things, and even infiltrated immigrant detention facilities. Many of these stories are profiled in this book. Many more are likely lost because of a history that marginalizes subaltern voices.

I still clung to half-remembered, half-forgotten memories of Fiji. I never went to a beach, because I feared that it would remind me of all that I had lost. I stopped doing things that I had loved. I stopped living. I did not make any friends. I did not want to form any ties. I did not want to ever love and lose again.

So I devoted myself to accumulating something I would never lose: knowledge. An old Indian parable taught me that knowledge was something that thieves could not steal. In college, Michel Foucault, who ironically was also banned from the United States, taught me that knowledge was power. So when the Notice to Appear for removal proceedings came, I was prepared.

I did not fight deportation because I wanted to. There was nothing I wanted more than to go home. I fought because I would only go home on my own terms. I was going to go back to Fiji with a Green Card in my hand, to sip fresh coconut water from the husk, and enjoy the land’s surreal beauty like an American tourist.

It took a historic Supreme Court decision for me to finally gain lawful status. On June 26, 2013, the US Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), and my same-sex US citizen partner could finally sponsor me as her spouse. I became a lawful permanent resident on August 1, 2014.

The next week, I found myself in Canada, and two weeks later, I was back in Fiji, catching up on fifteen years of my life.

I was thirty-four when I finally became a United States citizen and voted in my first election. By this time, I had learned to survive without papers as an undocumented, unapologetic, unafraid, queer, and unashamed person. I had also learned that home was not a place, but one that I instead built based on friendships, community, and with my supportive and loving partner.

Now I could go from surviving to thriving. I started living again, opened up my own law practice, and became the parent of a rescue pup, Rosie. She likes to eat, sleep, run, and hopes to one day catch a duck. More than anything, she makes me want to keep things simple, too. I obsess about making sure that she has all her papers, even as I help other immigrants live the same complete life that I am now living.

I share my story only to illustrate how we as immigrants come in all shapes and sizes from all over the world. We have many stories to tell—of escaping persecution in our homelands, of arriving as employees and overstaying our visas, of surviving unscrupulous employers, and terrible immigration attorneys mishandling our cases. And no matter what our status, color, creed, or tongue, we are no less deserving of civil and human rights.

We are drawn to America’s promise and protection, and betrayed by its peril. We are part of families who were exiled, siblings who were separated, and grandparents who never knew us. We are sad, angry, scared, but also funny, joyful, and grateful for a second chance at building a new home and life. The stories prove that we, like you, are worth fighting for and fighting over.

In the coming chapters, you will be introduced to many pioneers who fought hard to ensure the freedoms that we take for granted as immigrants. You will learn about the laws that were created just to deport us and about how we have responded. You will learn about our struggle, our mistakes, and our humanity. And hopefully, by the end, you will identify with us as we continue to fight to live where we belong.