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Waking Up from the American Dream by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio 

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Waking Up from the American Dream by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio 

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Waking up from the American Dream. What do people think of this when they hear it? Here Cornejo Villavincencino tells the story of how she realized how she felt when she realized the American Dream wasn't all it was played out to be. This story relates back to the thesis the American Dream is a facade perpetrated as American propaganda because her parents came to the country for a better life but were continuously let down by it. From racial injustices to the realization that her life was at the cost of her parents immigrant status. She states, "Growing up undocumented, I learned that the price of my innocence was the guilt of my parents". Due to this, she tried to make her parent's life better as much as possible since she was the only one that was able to translate for them in such a strange country. She called this her very own Model U.N. job. She realized how the ideas of America didn't match the reality of when you live in a place that declares itself full of opportunities and equalities for everyone.

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Growing up undocumented, I learned that the price of my innocence was the guilt of my parents.

If you are an undocumented person anywhere in America, some of the things you do to make a dignified life for yourself and your loved ones are illegal. Others require a special set of skills. The elders know some great tricks-crossing deserts in the dead of night, studying the Rio Grande for weeks to find the shallowest bend of river to cross, getting a job on their first day in the country, finding apartments that don't need a lease, learning English at public libraries, community colleges, or from "Frasier." I would not have been able to do a single thing that the elders have done. But the elders often have only one hope for survival, which we tend not to mention. I'm talking about children. And no, it's not an "anchor baby" thing. Our parents have kids for the same reasons as most people, but their sacrifice for us is impossible to articulate, and its weight is felt deep down, in the body. That is the pact between immigrants and their children in America: they give us a better life, and we spend the rest of that life figuring out how much of our flesh will pay off the debt.

I am a first-generation immigrant, undocumented for most of my life, then on DACA, now a permanent resident. But my real identity, the one that follows me around like a migraine, is that I am the daughter of immigrants. As such, I have some skills of my own.

You pick them up young. Something we always hear about, because Americans love this shit, is that immigrant children often translate for their parents. I began doing this as a little girl, because I lost my accent, dumb luck, and because I was adorable in the way that adults like, which is to say I had large, frightened eyes and a flamboyant vocabulary. As soon as doctors or teachers began talking, I felt my parents' nervous energy, and I'd either answer for them or interpret their response. It was like my little Model U.N. job. I was around seven. My career as a professional daughter of immigrants had begun.

In my teens, I began to specialize. I became a performance artist. I accompanied my parents to places where I knew they would be discriminated against, and where I could insure that their rights would be granted. If a bank teller wasn't accepting their I.D., I'd stroll in with an oversized Forever 21 blazer, red lipstick, a slicked-back bun, and fresh Stan Smiths. I brought a pleather folder and made sure my handshake broke bones. Sometimes I appealed to decency, sometimes to law, sometimes to God. Sometimes I leaned back in my chair, like a sexy gangster, and said, "So, you tell me how you want my mom to survive in this country without a bank account. You close at four, but I have all the time in the world." Then I'd wink. It was vaudeville, but it worked.

My parents came to America in their early twenties, naïve about what awaited them. Back in Ecuador, they had encountered images of a wealthy nation-the requisite flashes of Clint Eastwood and the New York City skyline-and heard stories about migrants who had done O.K. for themselves there. But my parents were not starry-eyed people. They were just kids, lost and reckless, running away from the dead ends around them.

My father is the only son of a callous mother and an absent father. My mother, the result of her mother's rape, grew up cared for by an aunt and uncle. When she married my father, it was for the reasons a lot of women marry: for love, and to escape. The day I was born, she once told me, was the happiest day of her life.

Soon after that, my parents, owners of a small auto-body business, found themselves in debt. When I was eighteen months old, they left me with family and settled in Brooklyn, hoping to work for a year and move back once they'd saved up some money. I haven't asked them much about this time-I've never felt the urge-but I know that one year became three. I also know that they began to be lured by the prospect of better opportunities for their daughter. Teachers had remarked that I was talented. My mother, especially, felt that Ecuador was not the place for me. She knew how the country would limit the woman she imagined I would become-Hillary Clinton, perhaps, or Princess Di.

My parents sent loving letters to Ecuador. They said that they were facing a range of hardships so that I could have a better life. They said that we would reunite soon, though the date was unspecified. They said that I had to behave, not walk into traffic-I seem to have developed a habit of doing this-and work hard, so they could send me little gifts and chocolates. I was a toddler, but I understood. My parents left to give me things, and I had to do other things in order to repay them. It was simple math.

They sent for me when I was just shy of five years old. I arrived at J.F.K. airport. My father, who seemed like a total stranger, ran to me and picked me up and kissed me, and my mother looked on and wept. I recall thinking she was pretty, and being embarrassed by the attention. They had brought roses, Teddy bears, and Tweety Bird balloons.

Getting to know one another was easy enough. My father liked to read and lecture, and had a bad temper. My mother was soft-spoken around him but funny and mean-like a drag queen-with me. She liked Vogue. I was enrolled in a Catholic school and quickly learned English-through immersion, but also through "Reading Rainbow" and a Franklin talking dictionary that my father bought me. It gave me a colorful vocabulary and weirdly over-enunciated diction. If I typed the right terms, it even gave me erotica.

Meanwhile, I had confirmed that my parents were not tony expats. At home, meals could be rice and a fried egg. We sometimes hid from our landlord by crouching next to my bed and drawing the blinds. My father had started out driving a cab, but after 9/11, when the governor revoked the driver's licenses of undocumented immigrants, he began working as a deliveryman, carrying meals to Wall Street executives, the plastic bags slicing into his fingers. Some of those executives forced him to ride on freight elevators. Others tipped him in spare change.

My mother worked in a factory. For seven days a week, sometimes in twelve-hour shifts, she sewed in a heat that caught in your throat like lint, while her bosses, also immigrants, hurled racist slurs at her. Some days I sat on the factory floor, making dolls with swatches of fabric, cosplaying childhood. I didn't put a lot of effort into making the dolls-I sort of just screwed around, with an eye on my mom at her sewing station, stiffening whenever her supervisor came by to see how fast she was working. What could I do to protect her? Well, murder, I guess.

Our problem appeared to be poverty, which even then, before I'd seen "Rent," seemed glamorous, or at least normal. All the protagonists in the books I read were poor. Ramona Quimby on Klickitat Street, the kids in "Five Little Peppers and How They Grew." Every fictional child was hungry, an orphan, or tubercular. But there was something else setting us apart. At school, I looked at my nonwhite classmates and wondered how their parents could be nurses, or own houses, or leave the country on vacation. It was none of my business-everyone in New York had secrets-but I cautiously gathered intel, toothpick in mouth. I finally cracked the case when I tried to apply to an essay contest and asked my parents for my Social Security number. My father was probably reading a newspaper, and I doubt he even looked up to say, "We don't have papers, so we don't have a Social."

It was not traumatic. I turned on our computer, waited for the dial-up, and searched what it meant not to have a Social Security number. "Undocumented immigrant" had not yet entered the discourse. Back then, the politically correct term, the term I saw online, was "illegal immigrant," which grated-it was hurtful in a clinical way, like having your teeth drilled. Various angry comments sections offered another option: illegal alien. I knew it was form language, legalese meant to wound me, but it didn't. It was punk as hell. We were hated, and maybe not entirely of this world. I had just discovered Kurt Cobain.

Obviously, I learned that my parents and I could be deported at any time. Was that scary? Sure. But a deportation still seemed like spy-movie stuff. And, luckily, I had an ally. My brother was born when I was ten years old. He was our family's first citizen, and he was named after a captain of the New York Yankees. Before he was old enough to appreciate art, I took him to the Met. I introduced him to "S.N.L." and "Letterman" and "Fun Home" and "Persepolis"-all the things I felt an upper-middle-class parent would do-so that he could thrive at school, get a great job, and make money. We would need to armor our parents with our success.

We moved to Queens, and I entered high school. One day, my dad heard about a new bill in Congress on Spanish radio. It was called the DREAM Act, and it proposed a path to legalization for undocumented kids who had gone to school here or served in the military. My dad guaranteed that it'd pass by the time I graduated. I never react to good news-stoicism is part of the brand-but I was optimistic. The bill was bipartisan. John McCain supported it, and I knew he had been a P.O.W., and that made me feel connected to a real American hero. Each time I saw an "R" next to a sponsor's name my heart fluttered with joy. People who were supposed to hate me had now decided to love me.

But the bill was rejected and reintroduced, again and again, for years. It never passed. And, in a distinctly American twist, its gauzy rhetoric was all that survived. Now there was a new term on the block: "Dreamers." Politicians began to use it to refer to the "good" children of immigrants, the ones who did well in school and stayed off the mean streets-the innocents. There are about a million undocumented children in America. The non-innocents, one presumes, are the ones in cages, covered in foil blankets, or lost, disappeared by the government.

I never called myself a Dreamer. The word was saccharine and dumb, and it yoked basic human rights to getting an A on a report card. Dreamers couldn't flunk out of high school, or have D.U.I.s, or work at McDonald's. Those kids lived with the pressure of needing a literal miracle in order to save their families, but the miracle didn't happen, because the odds were against them, because the odds were against all of us. And so America decided that they didn't deserve an I.D.

The Dream, it turned out, needed to demonize others in order to help the chosen few. Our parents, too, would be sacrificed. The price of our innocence was the guilt of our loved ones. Jeff Sessions, while he was Attorney General, suggested that we had been trafficked against our will. People actually pitied me because my parents brought me to America. Without even consulting me.

The irony, of course, is that the Dream was our inheritance. We were Dreamers because our parents had dreams.

It's painful to think about this. My mother, an aspiring interior designer, has gone twenty-eight years without a sick day. My dad, who loves problem-solving, has spent his life wanting a restaurant. He's a talented cook and a brilliant manager, and he often did the work of his actual managers for them. But, without papers, he could advance only so far in a job. He needed to be paid in cash; he could never receive benefits.

He often used a soccer metaphor to describe our journey in America. Our family was a team, but I scored the goals. Everything my family did was, in some sense, a pass to me. Then the American Dream could be mine, and then we could start passing to my brother. That's how my dad explained his limp every night, his feet blistered from speed-running deliveries. It's why we sometimes didn't have money for electricity or shampoo. Those were fouls. Sometimes my parents did tricky things to survive that you'll never know about. Those were nutmegs. In 2015, when the U.S. women's team won the World Cup, my dad went to the parade and sent me a selfie. "Girl power!" the text read.

My father is a passionate, diatribe-loving feminist, though his feminism often seems to exclude my mother. When I was in elementary school, he would take me to the local branch of the Queens Public Library and check out the memoir of Rosalía Arteaga Serrano, the only female President in Ecuador's history. Serrano was ousted from office, seemingly because she was a woman. My father would read aloud from the book for hours, pausing to tell me that I'd need to toughen up. He would read from dictators' speeches-not for the politics, but for the power of persuasive oratory. We went to the library nearly every weekend for thirteen years.

My mother left her factory job to give me, the anointed one, full-time academic support. She pulled all-nighters to help me make extravagant posters. She grilled me with vocabulary flash cards, struggling to pronounce the words but laughing and slapping me with pillows if I got something wrong. I aced the language portions of my PSATs and SATs, partly because of luck, and partly because of my parents' locally controversial refusal to let me do household chores, ever, because they wanted me to be reading, always reading, instead.

If this all seems strategic, it should. The American Dream doesn't just happen to cheery Pollyannas. It happens to iconoclasts with a plan and a certain amount of cunning. The first time I encountered the idea of the Dream, it was in English class, discussing "The Great Gatsby." My classmates all thought that Gatsby seemed sort of sad, a pathetic figure. I adored him. He created his own persona, made a fortune in an informal economy, and lived a quiet, paranoid, reclusive life. Most of all, he longed. He stood at the edge of Long Island Sound, longing for Daisy, and I took the train uptown to Columbia University and looked out at the campus, hoping it could one day be mine. At the time, it was functionally impossible for undocumented students to enroll at Columbia. The same held for many schools. Keep dreaming, my parents said.

I did. I was valedictorian of my class, miraculously got into Harvard, and was tapped to join a secret society that once included T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens. I was the only Latina inducted, I think, and I was very chill when an English-Spanish dictionary appeared in our club bathroom after I started going to teas. When I graduated, in 2011, our country was deporting people at record rates. I knew that I needed to add even more of a golden flicker to my illegality, so that if I was deported, or if my parents were deported, we would not go in the middle of the night, in silence, anonymously, as Americans next door watched another episode of "The Bachelor." So I began writing, with the explicit aim of entering the canon. I wrote a book about undocumented immigrants, approaching them not as shadowy victims or gilded heroes but as people, flawed and complex. It was reviewed well, nominated for things. A President commended it.

But it's hard to feel anything. My parents remain poor and undocumented. I cannot protect them with prizes or grades. My father sobbed when I handed him my diploma, but it was not the piece of paper that would make it all better, no matter how heavy the stock.

By the time I was in grad school, my parents' thirty-year marriage was over. They had spent most of those years in America, with their heads down and their bodies broken; it was hard not to see the split as inevitable. My mom called me to say she'd had enough. My brother supported her decision. I talked to each parent, and helped them mutually agree on a date. On a Tuesday night, my father moved out, leaving his old parenting books behind, while my mom and brother were at church. I asked my father to text my brother that he loved him. I think he texted him exactly that. Then I collapsed onto the floor beneath an open drawer of knives, texted my partner to come help me, and convulsed in sobs.

After that, my mom became depressed. I did hours of research and found her a highly qualified, trauma-informed psychiatrist, a Spanish speaker who charged on a sliding scale I could afford. My mom got on Lexapro, which helped. She also started a job that makes her very happy. In order to find her that job, I took a Klonopin and browsed Craigslist for hours each day, e-mailing dozens of people, being vague about legal status in a clever but truthful way. I impersonated her in phone interviews, hanging off my couch, the blood rushing to my head, struggling not to do an offensive accent.

You know how, when you get a migraine, you regret how stupid you were for taking those sweet, painless days for granted? Although my days are hard, I understand that I'm living in an era of painlessness, and that a time will come when I look back and wonder why I was such a stupid, whining fool. My mom's job involves hard manual labor, sometimes in the snow or the rain. I got her a real winter coat, her first, from Eddie Bauer. I got her a pair of Hunter boots. These were things she needed, things I had seen on women her age on the subway, their hands bearing bags from Whole Foods. My mom's hands are arthritic. She sends me pictures of them covered in bandages.

My brother and I now have a pact: neither of us can die, because then the other would be stuck with our parents. My brother is twenty-two, still in college, and living with my mom. He, too, has some skills. He is gentle, kind, and excellent at deëscalating conflict. He mediated my parents' arguments for years. He has also never tried to change them, which I have, through a regimen of therapy, books, and cheesy Instagram quotes. So we've decided that, in the long term, since his goal is to get a job, get married, have kids, and stay in Queens, he'll invite Mom to move in with him, to help take care of the grandkids. He'll handle the emotional labor, since it doesn't traumatize him. And I'll handle the financial support, since it doesn't traumatize me.

I love my parents. I know I love them. But what I feel for them daily is a mixture of terror, panic, obligation, sorrow, anger, pity, and a shame so hot that I need to lie face down, in my underwear, on very cold sheets. Many Americans have vulnerable parents, and strive to succeed in order to save them. I hold those people in the highest regard. But the undocumented face a unique burden, due to scorn and a lack of support from the government. Because our parents made a choice-the choice to migrate-few people pity them, or wonder whether restitution should be made for decades of exploitation. That choice, the original sin, is why our parents were thrown out of paradise. They were tempted by curiosity and hunger, by fleshly desires.

And so we return to the debt. However my parents suffer in their final years will be related to their migration-to their toil in this country, to their lack of health care and housing support, to psychic fatigue. They were able, because of that sacrifice, to give me their version of the Dream: an education, a New York accent, a life that can better itself. But that life does not fully belong to me. My version of the American Dream is seeing them age with dignity, being able to help them retire, and keeping them from being pushed onto train tracks in a random hate crime. For us, gratitude and guilt feel almost identical. Love is difficult to separate from self-erasure. All we can give one another is ourselves.

Scholars often write about the harm that's done when children become caretakers, but they're reluctant to do so when it comes to immigrants. For us, they say, this situation is cultural. Because we grow up in tight-knit families. Because we respect our elders. In fact, it's just the means of living that's available to us. It's a survival mechanism, a mutual-aid society at the family level. There is culture, and then there is adaptation to precarity and surveillance. If we are lost in the promised land, perhaps it's because the ground has never quite seemed solid beneath our feet.

When I was a kid, my mother found a crystal heart in my father's taxi. The light that came through it was pretty, shimmering, like a gasoline spill on the road. She put it in her jewelry box, and sometimes we'd take out the box, spill the contents onto my pink twin bed, and admire what we both thought was a heart-shaped diamond. I grew up, I went to college. I often heard of kids who had inherited their grandmother's heirlooms, and I sincerely believed that there were jewels in my family, too. Then, a few years ago, my partner and I visited my mom, and she spilled out her box. She gave me a few items I cherish: a nameplate bracelet in white, yellow, and rose gold, and the thick gold hoop earrings that she wore when she first moved to Brooklyn. Everything else was costume jewelry. I couldn't find the heart.

I realized that, when my mother found the crystal, she was around the same age I am now. She had probably never held a diamond, and she probably wanted to believe that she had found one in America, a dream come true. She wanted me to believe it, and then, as we both grew up, alone, together, she stopped believing, stopped wanting to believe, and stopped me from wanting to believe. And she probably threw that shit out. I didn't ask. Some things are none of our business. ♦

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Personal History by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio: Growing up undocumented, I learned that the price of my innocence was the guilt of my parents.

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I Have a Dream Speech by Martin Luther King Jr

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I Have a Dream Speech by Martin Luther King Jr

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The I Have a Dream Speech by Dr Martin Luther King Jr shows the hardships of living in "free" America as a man of color. For centuries people of color are thought of as less than American simply because of the pigment of their skin, race or ethnic identity. The idea of America being a land of equality during the time of this speech represents how the American Dream is a facade perpetrated as American propaganda, meant to attract people in to later be let down. Propaganda that was never meant to go towards anything for many, even if it did start looking successful initially it was meant to fail and leave people in ruin.

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I Have a Dream speech by Martin Luther King .Jr HD (subtitled)

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Of Mice and Men represents the loss of the American Dream due to a series of actions that ended in disaster. Steinbeck reveals how the most unexpected person can cause someone else to lose the hard work and dedication put in to get to their American Dream. George had the idea that he and Lennie would make enough money and put it towards their own little piece of land where they wouldn't need to work for anyone. This idea and dream were short-lived because George lost his best friend his life companion, the person he shared his dream with. America here was represented as the dream they both shared, but that is all it was a dream, a fantasy that they created in order to survive the long hours that they will never spend together again because of Lennie's actions.

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Richard Cory By Edwin Arlington Robinson

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Richard Cory By Edwin Arlington Robinson

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Richard Cory by poet Edwin Arlington Robinson describes the successes of a man in America through the eyes of the poor living in the streets wishing for the same life as Richard Cory. The poem states, "In fine, we thought that he was everything to make us wish that we were in his place".  Richard Cory was the walking definition of the American Dream for those impoverished on the streets of America. He resembled everything they couldn't have that Richard Cory did have. He resembled the fake promises of America to the many that were deprived of it and were left out on the streets by America, the country that dangled ideas in front of them. This poem relates to the thesis The American Dream is a facade perpetrated as American propaganda because although Richard Cory had everything the American Dream was described as, yet he wasn't happy within himself. The poem states, "and Richard Cory, one calm summer night, went home and put a bullet through his head".  Meaning that not even the biggest of riches that America waves in front of a person and the luxuries, a person can feel alone and isolated and unhappy about their life. The road to getting there may be full of happiness and thrill but what about the after? When you've got there and have everything you ever dreamed of having?

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My interviewee was my mom, who has laid out the pathways to opportunities for my 3 brothers and myself. She struggled as a single mom when I was younger but she continues to persevere through her own obstacles. To her, the American dream meant and continues to mean opportunities, better life, a better future, and success in life. When she was younger her "when I get older" dream was to become a criminal lawyer. Now her American Dream is to create a better future for my kids, meaning my brothers and me. She believes she influenced herself because if you don't challenge yourself to have a good life, you'll never push ahead and do something with your life, work for what you want because you are in a country full of opportunities. She is currently still working toward her dreams as they have changed as she's gotten older and had a family. Also, she believes the American Dream is realistic to achieve with education and discipline and staying focused on what you want and where you are going. America to her is still the land of opportunity because the United States is full of opportunities and a life that her mother country didn’t have or it had them but it is a lot harder to achieve those goals there due to other issues. A piece of evidence she remebered her parents would impress on her is pelea por lo que tu quieras (Fight for what you want), I did take it because if I didn't work and fight for what I wanted because that advice to this day has served to push me to keep working and not give up on myself. A final piece of advice she gave me was que le eches ganas y que siempre te mantiengas en el lado de que todo se puede si tienes diciplina y eres constante en tus cosas siempre vas a ser triunfadora en lo que sea que hagas.

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The American Dream to me ideally would be to graduate High School first. Then continue on to college, either it be community college or straight to a 4 year and graduate with a degree, which will allow me to pursue a career I know ill enjoy dedicating my time and efforts too.

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Another part is to establish a successful life. Buy or build from the ground up a home, probably not in California, that if I potentially have kids they can play in. I just want it to feel homey to people that come and visit.

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Adam’s explains that regardless of your background or personal zealous the American Dream should be joyful and full of fulfillment for everyone with equal opportunities. The American Dream is where man and woman alike shall be treated equally, gender aside. The American Dream is that of the land that provides wealth to those that need it and opportunities to everyone. A place for everyone to fit in and find themselves surrounded by what they couldn't have in their maternal countries. A place of second chances.

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Major cliche to say that I simply want to make my mom proud, but its true I do and I have no shame in saying it. When I was younger and she was a single mama of 3 she would work hard and long hours in order to provide my siblings and I the stability and little comfort and much of what we had. She worked endlessly sometimes I wouldn’t see her for days on end and now just being able to have her more present in my life sets a clear goal and understanding of I want to do this for her. For her long and brave efforts to make sure I’ve always had what I needed and never feel like I was missing something. For the periods of time I would go without seeing her to simply wanting to prove that her efforts weren’t for nothing. Her hard work taught me the values of sacrificing and dedicating time and effort in order to achieve something.