My favorite pecan pie recipe is from a Methodist cookbook sold at a church not far from the Virginia farm where my grandmother grew up. The pie’s perfectly gooey consistency comes from an obscene amount of Karo corn syrup; its slightly salty crust accentuates the toasty flavor of baked pecans. I make it every year for Thanksgiving, the quintessential American holiday I celebrate despite not living in the U.S. and not being American.

I was born in the ’90s in Mexico and grew up with the tantalizing promise of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. This landmark trade deal was heralded as a beacon of regional interconnectedness and economic progress. But for us kids, it symbolized more immediate delights: the chance to enjoy a Hershey’s chocolate bar or to buy the clothes Joey Potter wore in Dawson’s Creek, which we also now watched on TV. The promise of belonging to a shared, integrated region defined our childhoods, and with them, our identities.

I attended a private bilingual school, one of many that catered to Mexico’s expanding middle class and took pride in molding us into the most American versions of ourselves. Instead of a soccer team, we had basketball; we read coming-of-age novels like Holes and took SAT prep courses in case we wanted to apply to college in the U.S. But even among my classmates, I felt different. I thought of myself as not only bicultural but binational too.

My grandmother was an American nurse. In the ’40s, she met a visiting doctor from Sinaloa, Mexico inside the elevator of the Virginia hospital where she worked. As he held the doors open, he told himself that he would marry her one day. Eventually, he did. They had five children. The last of them, my dad, was born in the Mexican state of Sonora but was eligible for U.S. citizenship through his mom.

The author (left) with her father and older sister during a trip to Oaxaca, around 1997.

My dad was born long before the 1998 law that allowed Mexicans to have dual nationality, so he grew up in Mexico with a U.S. passport and, eventually, a Mexican work permit. In the late ’80s, his work permit expired, and he was deported out of Mexico. He crossed the border by foot, over the Laredo Bridge into Texas, carrying the official notice of his deportation from the country of his birth. He took a bus to Chicago, where he slept on a bench inside O’Hare airport until enough hours had gone by that he could legally return to Mexico, where my mom and 1-year-old sister awaited.

A few years later, I was born in Mexico City. I didn’t grow up with an American passport, but I did grow up with this story. It was proof of what I felt deeply: I was both Mexican and American.

Ever since I can remember, my dad has tried to pass on his U.S. nationality to my sister and me. He understands the financial and professional privileges of a blue passport. But because he’s never lived in the States (outside of the winters and summers he spent at the family farm in Virginia), he always hit a dead end. Still, I remained convinced that getting my U.S. nationality was just a matter of time. If my grandmother had been American and my father was American, why wouldn’t I be?

When I moved to New York for grad school on a temporary student visa, I was determined not to let bureaucracy get in the way of my heritage. So I filled out a “petition for alien relative,” a form that allowed my dad to request that I be given permanent U.S. residency through a green card. I could then, after several years, apply for citizenship. The reply from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services came in the mail a few weeks later: the petition had been accepted, meaning I was eligible for residency.

There was one caveat. I needed to follow-up with the Department of State, which processes the residency applications of U.S. citizen relatives and, eventually, issues the actual green card. Because my case wasn’t eligible for expedited processing, it would have to wait its turn in line. Last time I checked, the Department of State was beginning to process applications submitted in 1994.

The author (left) and her mother celebrating Thanksgiving in California, 2010.

Looking at the waitlist—and knowing I would not have documentation validating my binational identity for decades, at least—shattered something in me. The NAFTA promise that made us middle-class Mexicans think we would be citizens of a culturally intertwined North America felt like a lie. In Mexico, I was half-gringa. In the U.S., I was only Mexican and, as such, not always welcome.

I was reminded of this constantly while living in the States, though always in milder ways than foreigners who don’t pass as white (which I do). “Sorry, no Spanish here,” a woman on the other side of the phone replied when I called a public office asking—in my accented English—for an interview. On Bumble dates, men asked me for the expiration date of my visa; I went out for a few weeks with a guy who ultimately decided he could no longer see me because I didn’t have the paperwork to guarantee a long-term stay in the country. Second aunts posted Confederate flags with BUILD THE WALL captions on Facebook. I was unwanted. I did not belong. I was not who I thought I had been.

Four years after moving to New York, I consulted an immigration attorney who suggested a much easier path to a green card. It turned out I was eligible for an O-1, also known as the exceptional talent visa. I just had to file the paperwork and wait three months. After some years with the O-1, I could apply for a green card and eventually citizenship. I should have been excited, but something felt off.

I knew my privileged education had unlocked a path for immigration that many people are desperate for. I recognized that being able to choose where to build my life was an incredibly rare opportunity. But I also realized that living in the U.S. by any means possible wasn’t what I had truly been looking for. What I yearned for was a document that recognized my deep-rooted bond to my grandmother’s home. I had been searching, desperately, for something to validate my identity —papers I could point to that would say “You are of here, and also of there.” Yet documents alone couldn’t give me that. I headed back to Mexico.

Back in Mexico City, I rented an apartment far from where I grew up. I began buying my produce at the local mercado instead of Costco, which is where my family usually shopped. My poultry and meat came from a carnicería around the block. In some ways, I felt more Mexican than I ever had; in others, I felt like another digital nomad transplanted from the States to my own country.

Time passed. As my lingering doubts about going back to the U.S. dissipated, life took me by surprise. I met the man who would become my partner, the pandemic came and went, and we got married. I am now pregnant with our first child. When considering options for delivering our baby, my husband suggested we look into giving birth in the U.S. It would be our way to give our baby dual nationality, opening up employment and educational opportunities. We talked to friends who had done so and looked up doctors. But I decided against it.

These past few years, I’ve found a certain ease in my singular Mexican identity as I balance both the cultures I love. I enjoy warm tlacoyos for breakfast while listening to The Daily, bake peach pie on rainy Mexico City afternoons, and aloofly navigate the non-immigrant alien line at U.S. airports. While citizenship remains locked behind layers of bureaucracy and circumstance, biculturalism is something I continue to cultivate for myself. And this rich, complex blend of cultures is something I can pass on to my child, just as my dad did to me.

The post The Borders Between My Mexican and American Identities appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That is the phrase I grew up living in my native El Salvador.

I emigrated to Los Angeles in 2014, a long trip by land that took me two months. I needed to leave San Salvador: I had dreams of being a journalist, but I had no money. I could only afford two years at the Technological University of El Salvador. And economic life was too dominated by maras, or gangs. They are engaged in widespread extortion and selling drugs.

So with $100 in my pocket, I came here. I saw terrible things on the road, including human trafficking, and I crossed the border walking in the dark for five hours.

I thought I had passed the hardest tests to get here. But the tests keep getting more difficult. Today, more than ever, I need to rely on that phrase about not giving up.

This year, the environment has changed for immigrants. I see more immigration officers in my neighborhood, and more people have been removed.

Most importantly, I find it harder to secure and maintain a job. At first, I worked 10 hours a day, washing cars in Santa Monica. I got the worst sunburn from all that outdoor work, and my feet were wet all the time. It was a very low average salary for a place like California, but it was a steady paycheck. After six months of that, I found a job as a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant. The pay was not good over my nine months, but the paychecks arrived on time.

Unfortunately, I was fired. The reason: I had not provided the necessary legal documents since I am undocumented. I have not been able to get such a regular job since then. And that means I had to stop taking English as a Second Language classes that I need for my education and to start a career. Instead, I have taken very different jobs like cleaning, gardening, painting, and assisting with the remodeling of apartments.

Since Donald Trump became president, everything has been more difficult. The people I know are more anxious and scared. And employers do not want to hire undocumented people. The president’s racism has real and serious consequences for people like me.

I am 25 years old, and I think I can be a great contributor to this great country. But to do that, I need protection from immigration enforcement and more freedom to work. People like me have found jobs, but we can lose them at any time. I wish there was some way to get documents in an approved way, and submit them so that I could work without being under a cloud.

This should be possible. The state of California has a system in which you can provide paperwork and learn to be a safe driver, and then get a driver’s license even if you are undocumented. I have a license, and therefore I am legal to drive because of it. That license allows me to do the work I have.

Instead of keeping people in fear, why not give immigrants ways to do things right? In this way, today’s work can be based on yesterday’s work, and you can actually get somewhere.

I am Roberto Flores. And maybe I still have not reached my goal, but I am closer to it than I was yesterday. And I am not quitting.

The post I Survived the Gangs and the Border Crossing—but Trump Has Put New Obstacles in My Path appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Dear America,

I suppose I should wish you happy birthday. But I’m just not feeling it.

You and I, the United States and California, used to be pretty darn close—“indivisible” was your word and “inseparable” was mine. Sure, we had our differences—I’ve always been a little out there—but the differences were what made us a successful partnership.

America wouldn’t be America without California, and California was proudly part of America, which tolerated our excesses for our mutual glory. President Clinton, in a speech at UCLA during the early ‘90s, reminded us: “Don’t ever forget that California is still America’s America, the cutting edge for a nation still a symbol of hope and optimism throughout the world.”

But you and I have been drifting apart in a thousand small ways and some pretty big ones since then. Today, I look at you and feel like I’m an entirely different place, with different values, mindsets, even different realities.

I never used to think this, but now I find myself wondering about our future: Do you and I even have one together?

When I think of the problems in the relationship, it’s really not me. It’s you. While I’m the almond-producing state with a well-deserved reputation for flights of fancy, you’re the one that has gone nuts.

Now, everyone is entitled to a mid-life crisis, even 18th-century republics. But you are having an especially nasty one. Sometimes I feel like you’ve turned against everything you used to love: immigrants, trade, international alliances, voting rights, women’s rights, science, national parks, building infrastructure, and a certain stoic and respectful demeanor.

These days, you’re constantly freaking out. And the government you installed in Washington—a government my voters opposed by historic margins—is trying to take away people’s health care, make it harder to vote, roll back environmental and climate regulations, restart the failed drug war, defund Planned Parenthood, and pick fights with my best foreign friends and trading partners, perfectly friendly countries like Mexico, Canada, Germany, Sweden, and South Korea.

Couldn’t you have just bought an irresponsibly expensive sports car instead? I mean, you’ve got the global reserve currency to afford one.

Now, all of this crazy nonsense is pretty bad. But here’s what’s even worse, and maybe unforgivable: Your people, your media, and your elected officials keep trying to justify your crack-up as just a natural reaction to what you say is my awfulness. In your narrative, I’m too coastal, too elite, too rich, too educated, too Hollywood, too tech, too globalist, too uninterested in the pain of the rest of the country, and thus too out of touch with you. And so you’ve had to go stone-cold nuts to get my attention, to wake me up.

That thesis is—how do I put this?—exactly what the cows drop in Tulare County pastures after a good feed.

I shouldn’t have to say this, but my people and I know the pain of poverty (we’re tops in the nation in it), economic dislocation (just look back at the carnage of our 1990s recession and our late 2000s housing crisis), and drug abuse. There is no American malady I don’t suffer, with the exception of bad winter weather.

So the fact that you keep projecting your outrageous behavior onto me—while supporting a federal government that believes all these problems will be solved by cutting the taxes of my many millionaires and billionaires—tells me that you’ve taken leave of your senses.

I’m also starting to worry that your insanity and your lack of a coherent foreign policy in East Asia is going to end up getting me nuked by North Korea.

So, going forward, our relationship can’t be the same.

Now, I’m not going to march out the door and become my own country, like the crazy, Russia-compromised #Calexit movement proposed. You are still my country, and I’m not surrendering you. Plus, if I did become independent, I don’t think I could ever sleep at night with a nation as violent and volatile as you on my northern and eastern borders.

But I do need to put some distance between you and me. Let me put it this way: I need some boundaries, but I don’t mean a wall. I need to stand up for myself, and think about my own needs and protection first.

A few weeks ago, a small group of Californians filed a ballot initiative that will give me some space. The initiative, called “California’s Future: A Path to Independence,” does have a separatist bent—it takes “inseparable” out of the California constitution’s line about California being part of the United States. But it’s agnostic on the idea of California leaving the Union. The initiative takes the position that it doesn’t much matter whether California is in the United States or out of it, only that California is able to pursue its own interests, and not have them frustrated by you.

“America, whatever” is its attitude; “California first,” is its policy. The initiative sets up a structure with the express purpose of “buffering Californians” and their values (respect for diversity, science, and democracy) “against chaos, dysfunction, and uncertainty at the federal level.”

In the meantime, it sets up a structure so that California behaves more like its own nation, and looks out for its own interests. Your and my relationship should be, it argues, less about any lingering feelings of love and loyalty, and more about business.

While you slide toward republican authoritarianism, the initiative proposes that California—a place where the people who get the most votes actually win the elections—will stick up for democracy. We will fight for the universal right of all adult citizens to vote, even if you continue policies that make it harder for people to vote. We will challenge attacks on our immigrants, our world-class cities, and our highly effective anti-smog policies.

“As Californians, we have much to gain and little to lose by pursuing autonomy,” the measure says, adding: “The path to both autonomy and full independence is largely the same; for California to take stock of the leverage it has over the United States, and to use this leverage to negotiate for ever greater autonomy.” For example, my people should seek changes to tax and budgeting policy so that I’m not paying more in taxes than I’m getting back in services. And I’m not interested in subsidizing your irresponsible debt or your constant wars, which my people don’t support. And while I’m at it, I’ll be demanding the representation I deserve—starting with more than two senators.

The initiative’s proposed commission—which is modeled on one of California’s most enduring governing entities, the reform body known as the Little Hoover Commission—would pursue both federal and state policy changes and demand progress from elected leaders on ever-greater California autonomy.

It’s not a perfect idea. For one thing, the initiative would name the commission after Juan Bautista Alvarado, an obscure 1840s governor who supported greater California autonomy under Mexican rule. But he also had a colorful personal life, including a drinking problem so bad that he didn’t make it to his own Santa Clara wedding (his half-brother had to stand in for him). It would be better to name the commission for General William Tecumseh Sherman, who is both a major California figure (as an Army officer during the Gold Rush and a leading banker of 1850s San Francisco) and an American military hero who famously marched through some red states with voter registration issues.

Yes, I’m going my own way. But my people are just as American as yours, and so on July 4, I’ll still host many millions of barbecues, and enough patriotic parades and fireworks displays for 39.5 million of your citizens. Back east of the Sierra, I hope your celebrations are bigger and louder than ever, and that your people will stand extra close to the fireworks.

Maybe all the explosions will wake you the hell up.

Independently yours,

California

The post California, Let’s Celebrate July 4 by Declaring Independence appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’d been away from Santa Monica for quite some time and had yet to fully unpack and organize my apartment. The floor of my closet was a wreck. Piles of miscellaneous footwear and chaos lay everywhere as I dug through debris in the hope of finding a matching pair of slippers.

There, stuck in the corner under the shoe rack and covered in dust, lay a forgotten pair of brightly colored, orange, woolen slipper-socks my Sicilian grandmother, Teresa, knitted well over a quarter-century ago. I salvaged the little booties, quickly put them on, and was struck by the gems on my feet. The knitting was close to perfect, the craftsmanship remarkable, and the bold orange and light-green yarn woven throughout showed such a playful humor that it made me smile.

Everyone in the family—her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren—was given my grandmother Teresa’s crocheted wares. Sometimes they were given as birthday or Christmas gifts, but most of the time when she finished a project she would offer the crafted article to whomever wanted it. In my youth, I considered her creations passé and unfashionable. But as the booties instantly warmed my feet, I examined these meticulously made items more closely, marveling at their workmanship and my grandmother’s gumption.

Bedspread afghan, made by the author’s grandmother. Photo courtesy of Kathleen Garrett.

My eye caught another woolen object sticking out from the mound of wreckage at the bottom of the closet. Shoving shoes, boots, and whatever else in that pile aside, I pulled out a knitted wire hanger. Years before the velvet, non-slip hangers became popular, my resourceful grandma took metal hangers and crocheted over them. This woolen covering not only prevents clothes from falling off, but also makes the unsightly wire attractive with bright, multi-colored yarn intricately stitched around it.

Making the best out of unlovely things was a particular skill of Teresa Munafo, born in the small town of Fondachelli-Fantina, Sicily, in 1901. Her father bought cheese from local farmers, picked filbert nuts and sold them in the coastal city of Messina, some 80 miles away, while her mother raised their four small children. In 1908, the massive Messina earthquake struck southern Italy, killing her father and leaving the family destitute. Teresa’s education never went beyond the third grade, as she and her siblings had to quit school and work picking crops for pennies. At night and whenever there was free time, she and her sister would weave and crochet garments and coverlets for the family.

The art of crocheting developed throughout the world at different periods of time. In Italy, it dates back to the 16th century, and according to Danish researcher, Lis Paludan, “crocheting was known as ‘nun’s work’ or ‘nun’s lace,’ where it was worked by nuns for church textiles.”

Teresa’s older brother, at 14, left to find work in America and sent what little money he earned back to the family. Her sister married at 14 or 15 (the exact age is unclear), had two children, then died of a heart attack at 19.

Teresa found herself pregnant out of wedlock by her first cousin, Carmelo Salamone, when she was 19; a scandal in her strict Roman Catholic family and community. But Carmelo was unaware he was to become a father, and shipped off with his brothers and male cousins in 1920 for America. Learning of Teresa’s condition, he was forced to return to Italy to marry her. Her older brother scornfully asked before her wedding, “Aren’t you ashamed to wear a veil?” referring to its symbolism of purity, which he felt she no longer deserved. Carmelo then went back to America, and two years later sent for Teresa and their new son to join him. They settled in a large Italian community in Schenectady, New York, which is where Teresa further honed her skills with knitting needles, learned English, and became a businesswoman.

Doily, circa 1920, made by the author’s grandmother. Photo courtesy of Kathleen Garrett.

Hanging in the back of my closet was a deep burgundy, button down, knitted sweater my grandmother made when I was a teenager—not much younger than she’d been when she became pregnant with her first child. At that age, I didn’t think this handcrafted garment was trendy enough to wear, though I couldn’t part with it either. In examining the cardigan more closely on that damp night, I realized its three-quarter sleeves and scoop neck were not out of date at all, but rather fashionable, so I put it on. The softness and warmth of the wool caressed me as though it were the loving embrace of my long-departed grandmother.

Although Teresa had only minimal education, she possessed the work ethic and ingenuity of an executive. When the Great Depression rocked the world, the migrant community of Mont Pleasant, a sub-section of Schenectady, was hard hit. Basic household items, such as blankets and curtains, could not be purchased in stores, so the women of the neighborhood sewed, knitted, and crocheted in groups, making these necessities for one another.

A loom was set up in Teresa and Carmelo’s driveway and the women worked together to create comforters and window dressings. A horse and wagon came around, selling thread, yarn, and other needed materials for their projects. This gave Teresa the idea to purchase the materials from wholesalers in New York City, and sell them for a small profit to the neighborhood paisans.

As the demand for material grew, so did my grandmother’s need for a supply room. She took over one of her sons’ bedrooms, moving him into his two brothers’ tight sleeping quarters, and filled the new storage space with shelves of material from floor to ceiling. Business went so well that she and her husband decided to buy the apartment building across the street, and convert it into a department store, and thus the family business was born.

The beautiful afghan stretching across my queen-size bed is her largest and one of my most treasured heirlooms. It is white with little granny squares of multi-colored flowers knitted throughout. This particular type of blanket was a special work. My uncle offered me his one day since he had so many other knitted throws and blankets she had made. I was thrilled to possess such an artistic treasure.

Looking at the stitching more closely, my grandmother’s nimble fingers appear like a vision, rhythmically and supplely knitting in rapid precision. I recall her barely looking at her hands as her fingers swiftly moved the yarn in and around the needles, creating intricate patterns and designs. She never used a knitting outline or instructions of any kind. Nor did she ever count aloud or write down the stitch number. She just seemed to know how many knits and purls, traveling, twisted, and slip stitches she had done. She knitted blankets, sweaters, bedspreads, booties, baby caps, mittens. She crocheted tablecloths, bedlinens, doilies, and handkerchiefs. Even pocketbooks. There wasn’t anything my grandma’s knitting needles couldn’t create.

Table runner, made by the author’s grandmother. Photo courtesy of Kathleen Garrett.

Being a disciplined and industrious woman, and believing idle hands are the devil’s workshop, Grandma Teresa attempted to instill her work ethic in her granddaughters, insisting we learn how to knit. But my adolescent temperament couldn’t appreciate the skillfulness and imagination of her work, nor how useful this craft could be. Years later, while performing in a one-woman show, I had to knit a sweater in a scene, and thought of all those times she tried in vain to teach me. Fortunately for me and the show, my character knitted badly.

Another of her handmade, woolen blankets rests on the back of my sofa. It is a motif—loud, free, and fanciful, with wide lime green and hot pink stripes running throughout. In looking at these whimsical objects, I suddenly realized perhaps this was the only way my grandmother, a serious and formidable woman, could express the imaginative, childlike joviality that was kept bottled within her.

Grandma Teresa was not always as warm as her creations. She did not spoil her grandchildren with outward affection, nor let the grandkids get away with behavior their parents would not allow. Perhaps she never knew what it was like to be a fancy-free child laughing and playing without a care in the world. Maybe the only way she knew to express her love to us kids was to insist on discipline, instill work habits, and give us the tools that brought her a successful life.

Today, when I am wrapped in her afghans or my feet warmed by her knitted booties, I am reminded of my grandmother, Teresa Munafo Salamone—and inspired by her mettle to come to a new land taking on a different language, culture, and life, and having the courage to never stop creating.

The post With Crocheting Needles, My Immigrant Grandmother Wove a New Life in America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

And then there was Wenona, the Sioux girl.

Wenona, Cummins proclaimed, was not only the “champion rifle shot of the world,” but also the daughter of a chief named Crazy Horse and a white woman, born in a “tepee on the south bank of the Big Cheyenne, near Fort Bennett, Dakota,” and only 18 years old. Cummins offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who could best Wenona with a rifle at the Exhibition. Her extraordinary shooting prowess, he crowed, had been bestowed upon her by supernatural spirits of the Indian world.

In fact, “Wenona” was not a Sioux teen. She was 29-year-old Lillian Frances Smith, the daughter of a white Quaker couple from New England. A former performer in William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West show, she had earned the scorn of the legendary Annie Oakley and had been cast aside to make her own way in the world.

Lillian Smith, probably age 15. Probably a Buffalo Bill’s Wild West publicity photo. Image courtesy of University of Oklahoma Libraries, Western History Collection, Rose Collection, No. 787.

At the cusp of 30, the so-called “California Girl” may have thought that adopting a Native American persona was her last chance to differentiate herself from Oakley. At least, this is what my original thesis was, when I first examined the sparse records that Smith left in her own writing before her death in 1930. I had been casting about for a California figure to write about, and tripped over mention of Smith in a footnote in an article about someone else. I had to piece together a sparse collection of Smith’s letters, newspaper accounts, playbills, accounts of those who worked with her, and genealogical sources to find her “real” story. And her real story, I found, had little to do with Oakley. It was not even so much that a “rehabilitated” Indian could sell a lot of tickets at that time—though that was certainly part of it. As I collected more and more sources, I concluded that the primary purpose of Smith’s transformation into Wenona was so that Smith could completely erase her past and start all over again, in typically American fashion.

Smith was a darling of Buffalo Bill’s 1886-1887 Wild West Show. One was at a loss, exclaimed one observer of the show in New York, whether “Miss Lillian Smith, Miss Annie Oakley, Johnnie Butler, the ‘Kid’ [cowboy Jim Willoughby], or Buffalo Bill himself” deserved the highest praise for marksmanship. As soon as Smith joined the show in April of 1886, Oakley shaved 12 years off her own birth date, insecure about the talented young teen stealing the spotlight. And Smith did not waste any time getting on Oakley’s nerves, bragging that the latter was “done for,” once the public had seen “her own self shoot.”

Yet, I learned through my research, Lillian was far less concerned with a feud with Annie Oakley than with getting away from her controlling father, Levi, who traveled with his daughter on the American leg of the Wild West tour. Levi followed Smith everywhere, and prevented her from making friends when he could. Under normal circumstances, this might illustrate good parenting—she was, after all, just a teen. But Levi exploited his daughter, and later, her younger sister. I found many examples of this, but perhaps the most poignant is mentioned in a letter Smith wrote to a friend, lamenting her sister’s situation: “The best thing she [Nellie] could do would be to marry or go with some man who was smart enough to manage her—else she will never win with this old man around her neck.” This is exactly what Lillian did when she married the cowboy “Kid” Willoughby, who was a dozen years her senior, in 1886. By marrying Willoughby, Smith put a trusted friend in charge of her finances and virtue while overseas, and pushed her father out of the picture. By all accounts, they were smitten with each other, and Willoughby staunchly supported his wife when Oakley and husband Frank Butler took her to task in the newspapers.

Lillian Smith as Princess Wenona, taken at the 1901 World’s Fair in Buffalo, New York. Centered in the photo is Geronimo. An inscription on the photo says, “General Milles–Indian Congress,” probably meant to commemorate General Nelson Miles’s winning of Geronimo’s surrender in 1886. Image courtesy of Library of Congress.

The marriage failed in 1889 when Willoughby left with Buffalo Bill on a second European tour and Smith did not—possibly because Oakley made Smith’s absence a condition of her own return to the show. Newspapers hinted at Smith’s dalliance with a “half-breed” as the reason for the breakup, but it is more likely the young sharpshooter simply lost interest in marriage with Willoughby so far away. Levi Smith immediately took control of his daughter’s career again, and the family traveled up and down the West Coast, living off Lillian’s exhibition earnings.

In 1897, Smith impulsively married a saloonkeeper in Santa Cruz, and just as quickly left him when she met Charles “Frank” Hafley, sheriff of Tulare County, at a gallery in Visalia the following year. Hafley was not conventionally handsome, but he was witty, athletic, and very intelligent. Additionally, he was an extraordinary sharpshooter in his own right, and a very competent equestrian. The two may not have ever legally married, but they began a decade-long romantic and business partnership that packed in more adventure than most people saw in their lifetimes. They traveled to Hawaii as a sharpshooting act, to the East Coast to perform at the 1901 World’s Fair, and to the Jamestown Exhibition in Virginia in 1904. The pair even created their own program called “California Frank’s Wild West,” and started an Indian curio business on the side (Smith created her own brand of tomahawks). It was Hafley who helped Smith morph into “Princess Wenona,” helping her write a “new” biography that included him, “Fighting Frank” Hafley, as the cowboy who brought this fair Indian maiden into a culture of civilizing whites.

Wenona’s costume often included a fully fringed, suede tunic with intricate beadwork and a fantastic feathered headdress, which she wore even while shooting moving objects while astride a galloping horse. Her “Indianness” helped differentiate her among other Wild West stars, but her costuming was also practical. Smith had struggled with her weight since puberty, and her tunic let her hide her voluptuous figure. Additionally, it gave her freedom of movement to do the physically demanding feats she was known for, like shooting glass balls thrown all around an arena while galloping full speed on her horse while flipped on her back.

Perhaps most importantly, Wenona’s adopted Sioux identity forever severed any connection between her and her parents. In 1900, we know from one of her letters, she was still trying to convince her younger sister to leave Levi’s sphere of influence on the West Coast and move east to be closer to her. The Smith girls’ mother died in 1901, and their father in 1908. Wenona did not see either of them again after she met Frank in 1898.

Lillian Smith as Princess Wenona. Publicity photo from Pawnee Bill’s Wild West, circa 1905. In this image, Wenona is Minnehaha, the fictional Native American woman in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1855 poem “The Song of Hiawatha.” Image courtesy of Library of Congress.

Audiences were more than willing to receive Wenona as a member of a “noble race,” albeit one doomed by the progress of civilization. As Philip Deloria, Laura Browder, and other historians describe it, Native Americans were icons of American identity, and citizens wanted to feel a natural affinity with the continent. Indians could teach them such “aboriginal closeness.” Lillian Smith was not the first or last performer to try to bridge this gap. In her book, Real Native Genius: How an Ex-Slave and a White Mormon Became Famous Indians, Angela Pulley Hudson describes how in the mid-1800s, Warner McCary and his wife Lucy, who was not only white but divorced, traveled the United States as singers and comedians before turning to lecturing on medical healing. They used “Indianness” as a way to disguise their backgrounds, justify their marriage, and make a living—much as Wenona did. Smith’s popularity spurred a number of wannabes on the Wild West circuit: “Princess Kiowa,” “Princess Winonah,” “Princess Mohawk,” and others. One notable “Princess Kiowa” was Nellie Smith, Lillian’s younger sister, who was also an accomplished sharpshooter, but was never quite as good or as famous as her older sister. Nellie fades from the historical record after 1916, when she was performing for Yankee Robinson’s circus.

Wenona retired from show business in 1925 or thereabouts. She had a brief relationship with cowboy Wayne Beasley just before World War I, but her last substantial romantic entanglement was with Emil Lenders, one of the great painters of the American West. Lenders had also “gone native.” His first marriage had ended when his wife could no longer tolerate his traipsing off with various tribes instead of helping to take care of his family in Philadelphia. He had first met Wenona at the Buffalo Exhibition, and got reacquainted with her around 1920 when Joe Miller of the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch in Ponca City, Oklahoma, brought Lenders in to paint buffalo and other animals. Wenona had performed with the 101’s traveling wild west since 1915, and Joe Miller generously allowed many of his performers to live on the working ranch. It was only natural, when Lenders and Wenona fell in love, that they shared a house there.

The couple parted ways amicably in 1928, when Lenders met and married another woman. Wenona lived on in a tiny cabin on the outskirts of the 101, and passed the time caring for her many chickens and dogs. At age 59, she developed a heart condition, and quickly deteriorated over the Christmas season of 1929.

She still always wore her Sioux garb, and asked to be buried in it upon her death. When she passed away in February of 1930, her friends obliged.

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I am an immigrant from Vietnam. I left the land of my birth in 1978—just shy of my first birthday—and arrived in the U.S. a few weeks after I turned two. All of us on that boat, and hundreds of thousands of others, fled for the same reason: to escape the oppression of the communist regime. It took us more than one full year to arrive in the United States, most of that time spent on an over-packed freightship smuggling 2,300 other refugees on a cargo hull full of festering flour and one functioning restroom.

Like many ethnic Chinese in Vietnam, my family members were merchants. My maternal grandma, who had fled to Vietnam from British-held Hong Kong as a teen to escape the Japanese invasion in the 1930s, had a fabric stall at Saigon’s Ben Thanh Market. My dad had a factory that manufactured shampoo and detergent. After the Vietnam War officially ended in April of 1975 with the fall of Southern Vietnam to the Northern Vietnamese communists, the new regime stripped our family of its livelihood, confiscating our family businesses and much of our savings. They also introduced a series of new currencies—each time capping the sum families were permitted to exchange. Anyone found with more was punished, the money confiscated.

Years later, my grandma would tell of counting her life savings, exchanging the maximum allowed, and burning the remainder. She described watching her tears fall into the flames as the money burned; just burning and crying, because what else was there to do?

Early in 1977, the year before we fled Vietnam, my mom was six months pregnant with me and my father was in jail for “unpatriotic acts” after commissioning the building of a small junk boat he’d hoped to use for our escape. My mom visited my dad in his cell so he could help name me. He must have had money on his mind, as my name translated means Gold and Jade.

Fellow refugees transfer a Vietnamese child onto a Coast Guard boat in Manila, Philippines on Jan. 8, 1979.

My grandfather had just passed away, but my maternal grandma still had five kids at home to raise. She was 4’9” on a tall day and a breadwinning matriarch before her time. She negotiated an escape route for us on that Panamanian freightship, but it would come at a steep cost.

There were 19 of us in total in my nuclear and extended family. Passage on the ship was purchased through luong, 1.2-ounce, 24-karat gold bars. All told, 154 luong—more than $135,000 in today’s dollars—were required to smuggle my family out of Vietnam. Those bars were the culmination of a lifetime of work, coated with love and stamped with faith, molded into 24 karats of black market gold. Which is how we found ourselves part of the mass exodus that would come to be known as the “Vietnamese Boat People.”

After being denied entry at the ports of Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Brunei for temporary asylum, we floated aimlessly at sea, waiting. My mom watched over my two-year-old brother and me while we all sat atop a two-foot by two-foot table. Another family lived in a permanent crouch underneath. All around us, families staked their claim to plots of floor, sleeping upright, backs propping up backs. If someone needed to do their business or go in search of food, family members would stand vigil over the hard-won territory. Somehow, even as we were reduced to human freight, the framework of family held, in the form of “Go shit, I got your back.”

Eventually our freighter docked in the Philippines, but we were not allowed to disembark—all of the existing camps were full. After a full 10 months at sea we were finally transferred to a makeshift refugee camp on a Philippine island. My mom set me on the ground to roam and was pleased to discover that I could run.

At the camp, my parents and extended family underwent an arduous vetting process including background checks and physical screenings with blood tests. Then came the search for a sponsoring country. A refugee who could claim a relative in another country was given priority there. Barring that, where you wound up was a crapshoot by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees.

My parents, my brother, and I lingered in this system for several months until a church group in Minnesota agreed to sponsor us. In one fell swoop, we were whisked from the humidity of the tropics to the sub-zero temperatures of a midwestern December. The commitment and logistics of sponsoring and providing for a refugee family are significant, so the church group shared the responsibilities for clothing, sheltering, and integrating us into American life. One group of volunteers met us at the airport with donated second-hand winter jackets. Other volunteers helped us find and furnish a small two-bedroom home in the suburbs, while still others worked on getting sponsorship for the rest of our family, until all 19 of us were re-united.

Our family also relied on public social programs as we adjusted and assimilated into American society. My parents enrolled my brother and me in a Head Start preschool while they studied English, passed the GED, and took job-training classes. For a year or so, we lived on welfare and food stamps, supplemented by baffling 10-pound blocks of bright orange government cheese.

Within two years, my mom spoke English well enough to take a job in a bank, the start of a 30-year career that became our modest family livelihood. When it came time for my brother and me to think about college, we benefitted from the expectation of our family that we would go. We had as role models close relatives who had recently graduated. But we also relied on programs like need-based grants, low-interest loans, and work-study programs.

We hear so much talk about individual resilience, self-reliance, and the proverbial bootstraps being the ingredients of the American Dream, and I’d like to think my family exhibited those traits in our extraordinary journey. But there is a lot more that goes into the American Dream’s promise of providing people an opportunity to improve their lives and to contribute to this great nation. Nothing exists in a vacuum, after all, and certainly not opportunity. We all rely on the springboard provided by our extended families, our communities (like those Minnesota church volunteers who made our American story possible) and, yes, government-backed immigration policies and programs like those that let us enter, fed us, and then helped us obtain an education.

Now, more than three decades and a generation after we fled Vietnam, my youngest child has just turned two—the age I was when I arrived in the U.S. Her first words? “Milk,” “mama,” and “dada.”

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We’re at a Dodger game and I’ve decided to just mumble that part of the national anthem. I see it as a victory that I don’t have to look at the Jumbotron for most of the lyrics, though my ignorance might shock or offend many Americans. How does an 18-year-old, born and raised right here in California, not know the entire “Star-Spangled Banner”?

That was two years ago. While I have since learned that it is perilous fight, I still don’t know the Pledge of Allegiance or the words to “God Bless America.” My knowledge of American history does not extend past the American Revolution.

But I’m not poorly educated. I go to an Ivy League school. And there are things I know that you do not. I can list all the regions of France (the past 22, not the newly condensed 13) and can sing countless German Christmas carols and nursery rhymes. I know all the words to “La Marseillaise,” the national anthem of France, as well as the significance of their national symbols, including La Marianne and the Gallic rooster. I can recite German folk tales, prayers, and poems. I also know the names of all of the French presidents and which Republic they were a part of (there were quite a few false starts), beginning with Louis-Napoleon, Napoleon’s nephew and an eventual emperor himself. I speak French and German fluently.

I’m not a French citizen (although I do know the process one must undergo to become one) and have no French heritage, and I was educated in Los Angeles. But in French. My elementary, middle, and high school, Lyceé International de Los Angeles (LILA), taught almost all of its classes in French. At the start of fifth grade, I distinctly remember counting how many hours of French I had a week: 12. That’s not including Art, P.E., or Math, which were also all taught in the language. By comparison, I only had six hours of English.

Jones (far right) on a school field trip with LILA to the Griffith Park Observatory.

My relationship to German is the opposite. I’ve never taken a German class, but my mother and her relatives are German, and much of my large extended family still lives in Germany (our last family reunion took place in Kiel, on the shores of the Baltic Sea, and boasted 98 attendees). It is for this reason that German is my first language and I spoke it exclusively to my mother until I was 12. She refused to respond if I spoke to her in English, to ensure that I learned the language well and wouldn’t forget it when I grew up.

This determination is also why she sent me to French school. Not only did she believe that the French educational system was the best in the world, but also that an immersion school would guarantee I became fluent in yet another language.

It wasn’t until my brother and I were in the car with her, en route to our kindergarten interview, that my mother informed us that the school taught its classes in French. Despite not having any say in the matter, we were, apparently, unfazed. Another language, why not?

Indeed, I am grateful for my trilingual upbringing; it has enabled me to look at things from different angles and it has enriched my understanding of the world. But it also gave me a cultural affliction: I am an American whose entire perspective was shaped by a German heritage and a French education. Because of this layered detachment from the U.S., I’ve become a foreigner who is not remotely foreign.

I never joined the Girl Scouts or had a lemonade stand (although the latter may have more to do with my heavily trafficked Los Angeles street than my curious upbringing). I played soccer as a child, but I didn’t know the rules of American football until this year. The bedtime prayer I’d learned as a child was in German and told the story of 14 angels who protected me by standing at various places around my bed. I did listen to the Harry Potter books on tape in the car when I was little, and I did see one of the more recent Batman movies, but in both cases they were translated into German.

At my International Lycée (a term which refers to a secondary school that follows the French curriculum), where exotic nationalities were rampant, I was known as “the German kid. ” On one level that made sense—I speak German like a native and am well-versed in traditional songs and fairytales. But as a practical matter it was a stretch. I don’t know all that much about the German government or everyday life there, and—family reunions aside—my connections to the actual nation are minimal.

Jones (left) wearing a LILA t-shirt with a friend.

My knowledge of, and affection for, France, on the other hand, is borderline excessive. At the moment all I can think about is how this current U.S. election mirrors the French 2002 presidential election, and the ways in which Donald Trump resembles Jean Marie LePen. And when I recently read an article on “laïcité”, the oft-criticized French practice of imposed secularism, my thoughts immediately went to how endearing I find the policy. Rather than viewing it as an attack on religious freedom, I see it as a holdover from the French Revolution. In 1799 the French were doing everything in their power to separate themselves from the monarchy; they went so far as to invent their own calendar! Laïcité is their way of fighting against a tradition of religion used as force. It is the French trying to maintain equality, all these years later.

Sometimes I blurt out words like “flou” and “pechvogel”, which roughly translate to “imprecise and vague” and “someone who attracts bad luck”, respectively. I use them not because I’m trying to be pretentious, but because they express sentiments for which I have not found precise English translations.

This isn’t to say that I don’t love the English language; it’s actually my chosen college major. I also don’t dislike America, and I love California and Los Angeles. L.A. is a mixture of bewitching glamour and harsh reality, and I am lucky to have grown up here. But, on its own, it’s not home.

Truthfully, I’m a little lost. As I grew up my languages and my worlds became jumbled, and as a result I no longer fit into any of them. I’m not German enough to be German, I’m not French enough to be French, and I’m not American enough to be American. I have lived in the same L.A. home since I was two, but I didn’t speak English until I was at least three. My childhood was so filled with German that I dreamt in the language, but I know little about the realities of the nation. I have an American accent when I speak French, and of these three countries I have spent the least amount of time in France, but I know the most about its origins, politics and society.

Sometimes I wish I had a more clear-cut connection to a single place and culture. There is safety in having a true home. A place that, however boring or fast-paced, you know like the back of your hand, an expression, which, interestingly, has no direct translation into German or French. The closest you can get is “wie deine Westentasche,” or “comme le fond de ta poche,” which both roughly translate into knowing something like the inside of your pocket.

I’ve come to terms with the fact that I don’t have this exact relationship with a place, and that I may never. I need more than a place to feel whole. Los Angeles is only truly home when I’m with friends from my French school community laughing about Louis XV. When my mother makes bratkartoffeln and tells me about the German mystery that she’s reading. Or when I go to a small French restaurant in L.A. with my family on Bastille Day and we speak German the whole time. This I know, like the inside of my pocket.

The post When Being Home Means Speaking German on Bastille Day in a Los Angeles Bistro appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

So I didn’t grow up learning about Daniel Boone and his exploration of the frontier around the time of the American Revolution. If I’d heard of him at all, I probably thought, like many people, he was fictional. But go back to my British Columbia elementary school and there he is, in a 1985 copy of National Geographic on the shelf of improve-yourself reads. That year I was 10, permed and brace-faced and not terribly happy, often sniffing around for something more alluring than modern life. The crusted hull of the newly found Titanic on the cover caught me. But when I parted the magazine with my thumb, it fell open to a pen-and-ink drawing of a man carrying a body, open-eyed and loose-jointed, a spill of blood pouring from its mouth. The caption said it was Boone, who turned out to be an actual person, holding his dead son. Every day at free time I read that article, gawking at the pictures of Kentucky and the westward trails Boone helped open in the 1700s, and at that illustration. I didn’t know why.

Certainly America had a kind of mystique, even in 1985. Crossing the border into Washington state was a palpable change. The landscape was no different, but the licence plates and the slightly elongated vowels were. The unapologetic motel names (The Apple, The Deep Water) and the chatty gas station signs (Come on in! Canadian dollars at par). Baby Ruth chocolate bars and Chuck E. Cheese restaurants, known only from TV commercials on the U.S. stations we got. The gigantic Paul Bunyan statue looming out of the redwoods in Klamath, California, which was cloaked with a kind of glamour in spite of its splintery edges. As we made a pit stop during a childhood road trip to Disneyland, a woman there told me Bunyan was a real person; then my parents said he wasn’t. The U.S. seemed built out of legendary things. It seemed built for travel and for looking.

I didn’t think about Daniel Boone during these childhood trips, or once I moved into the next grade. I can’t remember thinking of him again at all until I was pregnant for the first time, lying on the dusty carpet of my study, which was soon to morph into the baby’s room. My first book, a story collection, was about to come out, and I was trying to figure out what to write next. Maybe it was the horrible dread of losing a child that made it surface, but that National Geographic picture snapped back into my brain. I asked the library to dig up the magazine, and once I saw it again properly, I realized I’d remembered it as a photograph, which of course it wasn’t and couldn’t have been. I knew then what I wanted to write about was Daniel Boone—Dan to me now—and 18th and early 19th century Kentucky, and what happens when legend is mapped onto actual people and places.

My novel, All True Not a Lie In It, is about Dan’s life and family. It tries to get at how it felt to believe in a paradise just beyond the mountains, to be full of an urge to pick up and move on, regardless of the wreckage chained to that desire. The journey is of course the American narrative, from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Lolita to Road Trip. Travel and its aftermath seem to me the root of America’s story about itself—colonial exploration and immigration, slave ships and escapes, Native American seasonal movement and the eventual reservation system.

An 1874 lithograph titled “Daniel Boone Protects His Family.”

Dan grew up an immigrant’s son in a Pennsylvania Quaker community, close to several Delaware and Catawba native communities, and when the family was booted out of the group, they left the area to look for more freedom and land. Dan never really stopped, exploring through North Carolina and the Blue Ridge mountains, and later taking his wife and children into the Kentucky wilderness of his fantasies. Those fantasies and the travel that fulfilled them led to his son’s death, his daughter’s kidnap, and his own capture and adoption by Chief Blackfish of the Shawnee. He was heavily remorseful for the damage to his family, but rarely stopped moving them on in search of something better.

The actual events of his life are dramatic enough to seem invented, as many writers have realized, and embellished, over the years. For instance, many people think he was at the Battle of the Alamo in Texas, which occurred after his death, confusing him for Davy Crockett (unhelped by the fact that actor Fess Parker played both Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone in different 1960s TV shows). This seems an American tendency, too: the capacity to reinvent the self (we see you, Madonna), but also to reinvent someone else in a desired image (JFK as King Arthur). People in the 20th and 21st century want to see Dan in a coonskin cap, though he never wore one and in fact hated them. And white Americans in Dan’s time wanted a recognizable national hero, a man fighting for the newborn country against its royal oppressor, a crack shot, fair but firm in dealings with so-called “Indians.”

This desire to create a legend attempts to paint over any dullness or ugliness in a life, but different shades of ugliness sometimes get painted on. Twenty-five years after Dan’s death, just as westward expansion into native territory exploded, he was re-buried, with a new monument featuring “Indian-fighter” carvings placed on his grave. I think this twisting of his life would have discomfited Dan, who seems to have felt deep closeness to his adoptive Shawnee parents and sisters, avoided fighting as much as possible, and was likely most comfortable with the native way of life in the wilderness. But again, this is a matter of seeming.

I know I call him Dan—and I know Dan is my invention, this figure already imagined again and again and re-created one more time. As a child traveling south, I thought being American meant having a built-in expansiveness, a sense that there is always somewhere else to go. I see that now in Daniel Boone. But after writing this book, I also think it means an ability to see double, to perceive, even dimly, that a person actually lived while overlaying that life with wishes, ideas, the stories one wants. For Americans, the exact details of Boone’s life have always seemed to matter less than his suitability for legendary status. The stories that surround him helped people in his time and for centuries afterwards smooth over the cost of relentless expansion. A gift and a blindness. My version of Dan has both.

The post Daniel Boone’s Legend Defines the American Mystique appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

With that, I ask this question: What makes Collins’ poetry so captivating to so many?

Robert Frost, 1874-1963.

The answer may lie in the example of Frost, who also had a large public role. In 1961, Frost became the first poet ever invited to read at a presidential inauguration, for John F. Kennedy. His public fame rested on his image as a benign New England sage. Cultural critic Lionel Trilling objected to that view, saying of Frost in 1959, “He is not the Frost who reassures us by affirmations of old virtues, simplicities, pieties, and ways of feeling: anything but … I regard Frost as a terrifying poet.” Trilling found in Frost’s poetry existential questions seething with darkness.

Collins was appointed poet laureate shortly before September 11, 2001. Today, as we live in a post-9/11 society, we reflect upon the events of that day—and the years that have followed—realizing that our world is far too familiar with danger and dread.

Hence Collins’ appeal. While Frost’s poetry consists of fear and terror where one would expect happiness and joy, Collins has an uncanny ability to find a small glimmer of light, love, and hope in the most basic tokens of our dark times: Silverware, a bird, lawn chairs, and teenage girls who cannot help but say, “Oh, my God” to everyone about everything.

Collins populates his poems with lonely figures straight out of an Edward Hopper painting, imbuing them with simple good will and humor. His poem, “The Chairs That No One Sits In,” would be an example of anomie and bleakness, particularly because he tells us that, “You never see anyone/ sitting in these forlorn chairs,” if not for stanzas such as these:

It may be none of my business,
but let us suppose one day
that everyone who placed those vacant chairs

on a veranda or a dock sat down in them
if only for the sake of remembering
what it was they thought deserved

to be viewed from two chairs,

That imaginative turn takes what should be an oppressively sad poem and transforms it into a cause for wonder as he imagines people in the two chairs, a man and a woman, and tells us that, “there is only the sound of their looking.” This, Collins argues, is the very definition of poetry. In his poem called “Poetry,” he con-cludes the following of himself and his fellow poets:

We are busy doing nothing—
and all we need for that is an afternoon,
a rowboat under a blue sky,

and maybe a man fishing from a stone bridge,
or, better still, nobody on that bridge at all.

Collins unabashedly celebrates poetry for its ability to make readers pause, celebrate, and engage in anything and everything, from the most awful to the most seemingly trivial—until, at a poems’ root, it yields surprise, and that glimmer of light we need so much.

In his poem “Baby Listening,” Collins imagines that a hotel service for “baby listen-ing” is offering babies who will listen to guests. In fact, the service is for families who would like staff to listen in on a sleeping baby while the parents go out to the hotel restaurant. As he writes: “Baby listening—not a baby who happens to be listening/ as I thought when I first checked in.” He adds: “Lucky for some of us/ poetry is a place where both are true at once/ where meaning only one thing at a time spells malfunction.”

In the universe of poetry that Collins creates, the poet fails only when he or she becomes too simple. Like Frost, Collins is deceptive. But unlike Frost, Collins, in a dark time, lets his readers know the secret of how and where to find light.

The post How Billy Collins Breathes Light Into the Post-9/11 Darkness appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.