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.

Zócalo has awarded the $10,000 prize yearly since 2011 to the nonfiction book that best enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion. The 13 previous Zócalo Public Square Book Prize recipients include Heather McGhee, Michael Ignatieff, Danielle Allen, Jonathan Haidt, and most recently, Michelle Wilde Anderson.

Tobar is the author of six books, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and a professor at UC Irvine; he was born and raised in Los Angeles and is the son of Guatemalan immigrants. Our Migrant Souls blends personal, local, and global histories to explore what it means to be “Latino” today. (The quotation marks are Tobar’s, and they address the word’s capaciousness and its limits.)

Our Migrant Souls is “an essential read for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of race, identity, and the immigrant experience in America,” wrote one of our Book Prize judges. “Tobar’s exquisite use of the written word is a rare delight in and of itself,” noted another. Yet another concluded that the book “felt like a collage, or as the title says, a meditation. That felt just right as a way to show a sprawling, socially constructed identity.”

The annual Zócalo Book Prize event, featuring a lecture by Tobar, who will also be interviewed by USC historian and 2020 MacArthur Fellow Natalia Molina, will take place on June 13, 2024, at 7 p.m. PDT, both live in person in Los Angeles and streaming on YouTube. In addition, the program will honor the winner of this year’s Zócalo Poetry Prize. Zócalo’s 2024 Book and Poetry Prizes are generously sponsored by Tim Disney.

We asked Tobar about the connections between Latino identity and social cohesion, how Los Angeles shapes his work, and what books he recommends readers dive into after finishing Our Migrant Souls.

The post Héctor Tobar Wins the 2024 Zócalo Book Prize 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.

President Trump claims that California allowed millions of non-citizens to cast ballots in the 2016 elections. This allegation, while totally bogus, has put California and its political leaders on the defensive. They are forced to respond as Trump and his allies use the lie to justify a new federal commission devoted to making it harder for all Americans to vote.

Californians should go on offense—by embracing Trump’s ugly lie and transforming it into a beautiful civic truth. Let’s make our state more inclusive and more democratic—by guaranteeing non-citizens the right to vote in our local and state elections. Non-citizens should also be able to run for local and state offices.

Sounds radical, right? It’s not. In this country, there is no constitutional prohibition against non-citizens voting; states decide who gets to vote. And for the majority of American history, voting by non-citizens was commonplace. Given the stakes of this awful moment for foreign-born people in our state and country, we should seize the opportunity to give the franchise back to non-citizens. Make California Great Again.

Nearly 11 million of California’s nearly 40 million inhabitants are foreign-born. Of those, a little less than half—about five million—are now naturalized U.S. citizens. That leaves nearly six million or so who are non-citizens. Of those, about five million would be old enough to vote if not for their lack of citizenship—making them the largest cohort of disenfranchised adults in our state.

Most Californians will tell you they live in a democracy, but a crucial characteristic of a truly modern democracy is that all its inhabitants have the right to vote. And California fails to meet that standard: Roughly one in six California adults can’t vote because they’re not citizens.

This is a violation of the principles upon which our country is supposedly based. Taxation without representation? These non-citizens pay taxes, but they are not represented. Consent of the governed? Noncitizens must follow our laws—but they do not have the vote to consent. The home of the brave? Noncitizens serve in the military in significant numbers, but they cannot vote for the government that sends them off to war. Family values? Non-citizen adults are the custodians of their children, the vast majority of whom are citizens, who must depend on their parents to act as their legal representatives.

Non-citizens might be called second-class citizens, if they were citizens.

When we look at systems like this in other countries, we call them apartheid. But this state of affairs doesn’t occasion much outrage here, even though we know that the lesser status of non-citizens—especially the estimated 2.4 million Californians who are undocumented—makes them more vulnerable to discrimination, abuse, and removal from their families and the country they’ve helped build. Their lesser status also makes it harder for them to speak up when they’re wronged.

The nasty truth is that, for all California’s professed love of immigrants, we have become accustomed to this state of affairs: It is simply the way things are. It’s supposed to take only five years to secure U.S. citizenship but, unless you’re rich or well-connected, it now takes more than twice that. And the federal government’s failure to reform immigration over the past generation—to make legal the millions who have made their homes here—have trapped people who have been Californians for 20 or even 30 years in a legally vulnerable position.

As political theorist Michael Walzer has observed, “The rule of citizens over noncitizens, of members over strangers, is probably the most common form of tyranny in humanity.”

What can California do about this? To its credit, the state has taken many steps on behalf of non-citizens. Californians who aren’t U.S. citizens now enjoy in-state tuition to our public universities, driver’s licenses, the ability to practice the law and other licensed professions, and—if they are children—state-funded health care.

But none of this is really enough. All Californians won’t be equal until all have the right to vote.

This lesson of history has been too easily forgotten. To deny the vote “is to make us an exception, to brand us with the stigma of inferiority,” said Frederick Douglas. A century later, Martin Luther King, Jr. prioritized voting rights because they gave African Americans the ability to fight back against discrimination: “So long as I do not firmly and irrevocably possess the right to vote, I do not possess myself … Give us the ballot and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights.”

Americans like to remember Douglas and King and tell themselves that our country’s story is one of extending the franchise over time—to African Americans, to women, to 18-year-olds. But non-citizens have a different story: They had the right to vote, and lost it.

For most of our history, from the founding of the United States in the 18th century until well into the 20th century, non-citizens had the right to vote and exercised it in dozens of our states and territories—in local, state, and even federal elections. The main objections to this came before and during the Civil War from Southerners, who feared the political power of immigrants and their tendency to oppose slavery. A ban on voting by noncitizens was a major feature of the Confederate Constitution.

But after the Civil War, non-citizen suffrage was restored in the South and was encouraged in the growing West, as a lure for settlers and as part of the assimilation process. What better way to integrate fully with our culture, to educate yourself and your children in our civic traditions, than voting?

It was only before and during the First World War—and its accompanying xenophobia—that a backlash formed against noncitizen voting in state elections. By 1926, every state had banned the practice.

Such voting has been permitted in limited local form. Today, New York, Chicago, and (as of 2016) San Francisco, allow non-citizens to vote in school board elections. Some cities in Maryland permit non-citizens to vote as well. And in recent decades, as global migration has increased, two dozen countries have established voting rights for non-citizens. Sweden, for example, permits foreigners who’ve been residents for three years to vote in state and local elections, while New Zealand permits non-citizen voting in its national parliamentary elections.

The U.S. Supreme Court precedent is clear: States can let non-citizens vote if they so choose. While the federal government explicitly outlawed non-citizen voting in federal elections during the 1990s, the door is still open for local and state elections.

California should walk through that door.

Non-citizen voting would not merely re-enforce our commitment to protecting our most vulnerable people; establishing truly universal suffrage would be a call for cohesion in a very polarized time.

Non-citizen voting would be good for California, too. Our electorate is far older and whiter than the state as a whole; non-citizen voting would make the population of voters more representative. Expanding the franchise in this way would also reflect the reality that citizenship, like California identity itself, is as much a state of mind as a legal designation. If you’re an Angeleno who roots for the Dodgers, pays our too-high taxes, battles our traffic, volunteers in your community, picnics in our parks, and sends your kids to public schools, how are you any less of a California citizen than me?

By the same token, the arguments against enfranchising non-citizens make little sense. The idea that non-citizens constitute some distinct, isolated group that doesn’t fit here is at odds with reality. California’s non-citizens are a diverse array of people by origin, class, and education, and most, as longstanding residents, have more in common with different groups of actual citizens than they do with each other.

And the go-to argument of the anti-immigrant crowd—that excluding non-citizens from voting makes our society cohesive—is disproved by today’s nasty political division over immigration itself. Jamie Raskin, a legal scholar who now represents Maryland in Congress, has pointed out the “tautology” of keeping non-citizens from voting: “When opponents of inclusion make an argument about insufficient commonality, they are only reinforcing and deepening what they claim to bemoan: the social and existential distance between those on the inside and those outside seeking admission.”

Practically, establishing non-citizen voting would be hard. It might require a new governor; Jerry Brown, in vetoing a 2013 bill to make noncitizens eligible for jury service, declared that voting should be reserved for U.S. citizens only. Those who want to replace the Electoral College with a national popular vote for president fear that a different standard for voting in California could undermine their cause. And in an era of mass deportation, few undocumented Californians would register to vote, since it would mean putting your name and address on a public list.

But that shouldn’t stop us from enfranchising five million Californians. The safest way to do that is to permit voting only in local elections. Allowing non-citizens to vote in state elections is dicier. It would likely escalate our war with the federal government, since in the United States our votes for federal representatives are conducted via state elections, and non-citizen voting for federal offices is currently illegal.

But escalation is inevitable. Trump and his supporters have shown that they will attack and lie about California and its voting practices, whether we let non-citizens vote or not. So why should federal opposition get in the way of doing the right thing?

California should take the clear position: Universal suffrage means universal suffrage. When Trump attacks our immigrants, we should hit back by saying he’s really attacking the right to vote, which belongs to all citizens.

If America is going to persist in calling itself a democracy, there ought to be at least one state in this country that is an actual democracy.

The post To Make California a True Democracy, Give Non-Citizens the Right to Vote appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

President Trump has stormed in with talk of Muslim travel bans, plans to build a wall along the Southern border, and ambitions to deport millions. And Los Angeles County has been ground zero for immigrant flows and immigration issues for decades. In the early 1980s, roughly a fourth of all immigrants coming into the United States came in through the county, prompting the anxiety and fears that in 1994 led to Proposition 187, a ballot measure that sought to strip the undocumented of any access to education or other public services.

While the pace of immigration has dramatically slowed—in fact, the share of the population that is foreign-born has been on the decline for the last several years in L.A. County—the earlier demographic tidal wave permanently changed the shores it hit. Today, roughly one-third of all county residents are foreign-born, nearly half of the workforce is immigrant, and just over 60 percent of the county’s children have at least one immigrant parent.

Any changes with immigration policy and immigration rhetoric at the national level are bound to have a local impact here. This is particularly true of the new president’s focus on “illegal immigrants” and his promise—one of the few to be put into effect—to unleash Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on a wide swath of people without legal status in the country.

In the last few years of the Obama administration, emphasis was placed—not always successfully and not always fairly—on deporting those with criminal records. What Trump has done is to essentially throw away any priorities: Anyone in the country without proper papers is fair game.

The threat of this new deportation regime is worrisome for many communities in the United States. But Los Angeles is an especially juicy target for ICE: Of the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, nearly one million are in L.A. County. And while some may still think of the undocumented as recently arrived single men whose removal is regrettable but impacts them alone, that is clearly not the case in Los Angeles.

Here, people with legal standing and those without are thoroughly intertwined both personally and economically. More than 60 percent of the county’s undocumented have been in the United States for longer than 10 years, and roughly one-fifth of the county’s children have at least one undocumented parent. Families of mixed legal status are now the norm. There are about 800,000 U.S. citizens and another 250,000 lawful permanent residents who live with an undocumented family member.

That’s a lot of our neighbors—and we’re not counting all the undocumented relatives who may live nearby but in other households. We’re also not counting intimate non-family relationships: all Angelenos who rely on the undocumented to mow their lawns, take care of their kids, or clean their houses. In present-day Los Angeles, every deportation is likely to disrupt a family, damage a business, and weaken a community—and so what happens to and for immigrants really matters for everyone.

Trump has left us living in a disquieting scenario, one that Cynthia Buiza, executive director of the California Immigrant Policy Center, describes as being “between hope and fear.”

The hope lies in the way the state’s immigrant and social movements have, in Buiza’s words, “tried to create a firewall around Trump.” Pressure has been placed on the state legislature to pass a California Values Act (SB 54) that would spread “sanctuary city” policies of non-cooperation with ICE across the state. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, a combination of county, city, and philanthropic dollars have been pooled to create a $10 million L.A. Justice Fund that will provide resources for the legal defense of undocumented individuals facing the threat of deportation.

Despite such efforts, there is understandably plenty of trepidation on the part of immigrants. Local law enforcement agencies note that reports of sexual assault and domestic violence from Latino communities have fallen dramatically—not because there is less crime, but because there is less reporting. Meanwhile, county health officials are noticing a trend in which activity in local clinics is on the decline—but activity in emergency rooms, often for illnesses that should have been treated earlier, is on the upswing.

The actual scale of the deportation threat in L.A. County has been somewhat muted by several factors, including the unwillingness of local police forces, particularly the LAPD, to cooperate with ICE, as well as several effective “know your rights” campaigns by immigrant-serving organizations. But the fear is palpable and justified: There have some well-publicized cases, including the detention of an immigrant activist and student at Cal State Los Angeles, and many of us are living with the constant worry that a relative, neighbor, or co-worker will be snatched away.

There are also well-placed concerns about what might happen with DACA, the Obama-era executive action that granted temporary status and work permits to the so-called Dreamers—undocumented youth who came to the United States at an early age and basically grew up as Americans. Roughly nine percent of all those eligible for the program nationwide were county residents, and it is likely that Angelenos constituted an even larger share of those who applied, given the maturity and depth of the immigrant-serving infrastructure here in Southern California.

So far, the Trump administration has not stopped the popular program. But as Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center, puts it, “DACA seems to be hanging by a thread.” If the president finds his policies stalled by Congress and his political standing threated by a special prosecutor, it may be tempting to shore up the support of his base with polarizing actions that do not require legislative approval.

Gutting DACA would check both those boxes: It can be done by presidential fiat, and it targets a population of “illegals” despised by a base of voters who seem unaware that no DACA recipient is actually going after their jobs in, say, coal mining. Moreover, to gut DACA would be to go after some of the most vibrant immigrant youth organizers in the anti-Trump resistance: dreamers who were instrumental in securing DACA, and have benefited from the program.

So how will L.A. respond if Trump further targets immigrants?

In the immediate future, it will be all about defense. Fortunately, major political figures like L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti have spoken strongly against the presidents’ immigration policies while Los Angeles County has moved forward with a new Office of Immigrant Affairs that will work with immigrant families to protect their rights and further their futures. The landscape is not without landmines: In tiny Cudahy, for example, pro-Trump activists from out of town are seeking to strip the fiscal base of the city (via a proposed ballot measure to end a utility tax upon which local government relies) as punishment for its status as a “sanctuary city.” But the general direction is positive.

One important effort that could help more: L.A. institutions should assist those legal immigrants who can become naturalized citizens to do so. Citizens are likely in a better position to defend their relatives—and to punish those opportunistic politicians who seek to divide. In L.A. County, nearly 800,000 adults could make that passage to citizenship—and to voting—and many organizations are stepping up to this task. An innovative program in the city libraries provides information to would-be Americans.

In the longer haul, Los Angeles will need to understand what the Trump threat has revealed: So many of us are immigrants—and so many others are one generation, one relative, one neighbor, or one co-worker away from the immigrants that Trump now threatens.

Because of this, immigrant integration is everyone’s business. And that will require that Los Angeles go beyond shoring up legal protections and promoting citizenship—key as these are—and also work to provide English classes for immigrant adults, strengthen education for their children, and secure a real toehold for immigrants in the local economy.

In the current choice between hope and fear, we Angelenos cannot adopt a false optimism—people really are under threat. Nor can we be paralyzed by panic. Instead, we must choose a third path: We must show the rest of the country what the future can be if we put aside racialized anxiety, celebrate the contributions of many people and cultures, and build the economic, social, and policy platforms for communities to thrive.

The post Want to Protect Immigrants? Help Integrate Them into Our City. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.