American Like Me

by America Ferrera

  And then at the age of seventeen, everything changed. My papers had come through for me to immigrate to San Francisco to be with my mom. It should have been good news—and it was. But it was complicated. I had missed my mother so much, but leaving Tigerlily and my pageant girls was devastating. We didn’t have Facebook or texting then. I remember landing in San Francisco and writing Tigerlily a letter because even a phone call was very expensive. I felt so cut off from the family who had been my only home for the last two years. They were my safety net and my mirror, showing me it was okay to be me for the first time in my life. It felt like cutting myself in half to leave all that behind.

  It did not help that San Francisco felt so foreign to me. Even though I spoke English, my version of the language was formal and polite—and slang or everyday idioms were completely lost on me. Even the fresh, balmy air was strange to me—it was wonderful of course—but I was used to the gritty, dirty smell of the city. Where I grew up houses were literally stacked up next to each other, separated only by thin plywood walls. This new white-picket life was very alienating to me. San Francisco felt isolated compared to Manila, where kids played out in the streets at all times. And even though a lot of people were Catholic in San Francisco, they didn’t celebrate Fiesta. I missed the rowdy outdoor parties and wandering from house to house to talk to neighbors.

  And no Fiesta celebrations meant no trans beauty pageants. I was heartbroken and homesick.

  “This is America; it’s not the same as the Philippines,” my mother would say.

  She fully accepted me as I was, and allowed me to be me—but she had to get real with me about the fact that I wasn’t going to make money from pageants in the United States. And I had to find work because I needed to earn money. It was so hard to let go of “trans beauty queen” as my job title. My mother knew the feeling—she went from being a teacher in the Philippines to being a factory worker in America. She kept suggesting that I apply at a grocery store or maybe try for some sort of customer representative job. But I was hardheaded and seventeen and had just left the most affirming, exciting career I could have ever hoped for. It was more than a career—it was a lifestyle—and a glamorous one, which is not something most seventeen-year-olds get to enjoy. So I was having trouble signing up to work in a food court at a mall. I felt so disconnected and needed to find my people.

  And I wasn’t just a beauty queen without a pageant. I was an immigrant now, trying to find a home in a completely new country. Something told me that the secret to my survival was to find other immigrants from Manila. I started asking my pageant friends back home to see if anyone had a friend in San Francisco. A friend of a friend in Manila told me about Lucy. She’d been living in San Francisco for a few years and invited me to visit her apartment and meet other Filipinos.

  That night was the beginning of my new life in America. Lucy introduced me to a great group of girls. We went to a late-night Thai restaurant and danced until the wee hours of the morning. The next day, we had Filipino brunch in Daly City—otherwise known as Little Manila. What a welcoming place for any Filipina immigrant! After our brunch, one of the girls mentioned that there might be a job opening at the cosmetics counter where a bunch of the girls worked in a big department store. Even though my only experience with makeup was when it was being applied to my face by someone else, I insisted I would be good for the job. She laughed at my resolve and set up an interview for me.

  I went to that job interview like a true beauty queen, ready to conquer the world. I looked like my best self. I got my hair done, in a nice, understated way. Not a pageant style, but a nice blowout with layered waves that didn’t move no matter how hard the wind blew on my way there. Somehow I got the job. The first day at work made me feel at home. It may not have been a pageant, but I was surrounded by makeup and lovely women and a lot of the girls I’d gone dancing with a few weeks before. In no time at all, this group of girls had become my new family. Instead of sharing a love for pageants, we had our love of cosmetics, dancing, and garlic fried rice.

  The Asia and Pacific Islander Wellness Center became a regular hangout for me and the girls, every Wednesday. It was a place that served the immigrant and LGBTQ communities, and Wednesday was trans-girls’ night. We would meet up to share our stories, have a potluck, connect, and learn about ways to improve our health and our relationships with ourselves. API Wellness became my refuge, where I could get critical information about things like taking hormones and finding doctors who would provide compassionate care. This new source of information and community-building gave me a better sense of my own worth and belonging in America. As I developed deeper friendships, I was able to share more about my passions and dreams until I finally felt determined to find a trans pageant in San Francisco.

  If you’re lucky there’s maybe one per year there, but a girl at API Wellness had mentioned she’d heard about one coming up. Lucy helped me sign up for the pageant and helped me find the supplies I needed. I got right back into my old rhythm, putting together a look and costumes. If it couldn’t be my career anymore, I was still going to work this pageant like it was my job. I couldn’t wait.

  The pageant was at the Palace of Fine Arts, a beautiful old building in the Marina District. It had a huge stage. I had borrowed a red halter gown from Lucy and was most nervous about the interview portion, since my English was still a little too formal and I had trouble communicating my real personality. But as soon as I arrived and began getting ready in the dressing room, I felt so inspired. Unlike the Philippines, where most of the girls are Filipina, here there were contestants from so many cultures and nations. Samoan, Taiwanese, Polynesian, Thai, Latina, and a lot of Filipinas too, of course. As I looked around at all these American faces, I loved seeing all the many ways there are to be trans. There’s not just one way. And beauty is more diverse than we imagine too. I thought of Tigerlily and all my Filipina girls back home. In the Philippines, trans people were highly visible—even celebrated in pageants—but they weren’t politically recognized. In America, it seemed just the opposite—at least at the time. Trans people were more politically recognized in America, but not nearly as visible and celebrated. How lucky I am, I thought, to experience both of these cultures.

  I couldn’t wait to sashay out on that stage and give it everything I had. If I was only going to get to do this once a year as a hobby, I was going to make it count. As I predicted, I struggled a little in the interview portion with my English. I didn’t say anything grammatically incorrect, I just had trouble conveying my intelligence and personality. I wanted them to see who I really was. One of the judges asked if I was enjoying my new home in the United States. I smiled and nervously replied, “Yes, I love being here with my family.”

  As I uttered these words, I looked out across the audience to see dozens of Filipinos smiling and rooting for me. They had come out in droves to enjoy their favorite pastime—just like at Fiesta.

  I ended up winning second runner-up. Not bad for my first American pageant, but mostly I was just happy to be home.

  PHOTO BY MARY WALN

  Frank Waln is an award-winning Lakota hip-hop artist, producer, and audio engineer from the Rosebud Rez in South Dakota. A winner of three Native American Music Awards and recipient of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation 2018 National Artist Fellowship for Artistic Innovation, Frank Waln travels the world sharing his story through music and presentations focusing on finding our truth and reconnecting to our roots.

  Frank Waln

  MY GRANDMOTHER IS AN alchemist trapped in a death camp. Mother of eleven, grandmother of too many to count, and relative to many, my grandmother’s spirit forged gold out of scraps in spaces and places that were built to kill and destroy her people. Foreign invaders took everything she would have used through countless acts of physical, spiritual, and emotional violence. Still she found a way to turn everything she made into gold, including me.

  I, like my grandmother, was born and raised on the Rosebud Indian Reserva
tion in south central South Dakota. What I didn’t know until I was in my midtwenties was that our reservation was historically a concentration camp where the US government marched my people to die. I later learned this happened to more than 560 different nations of people in a historic and ongoing effort to systematically eliminate indigenous people. Why would the government want to do this? Why would they want to destroy the people with whom they signed hundreds of treaties? Because they broke the treaties and built their country on stolen land. To erase us is to erase the evidence of their violence. Once Native Americans cease to exist, the United States can rewrite the history of this illegal settler colony.

  I learned that the US government not only trapped my great-great-grandparents on concentration camps called reservations, they also limited and regulated our travel, food, education, housing, health care, and day-to-day lives within those concentration camps. We had to get permission from white settler men called “Indian agents” if we wanted to get food, fix our own houses, or travel between communities on our reservation to see relatives. If we didn’t get permission from the Indian agent overseeing our district, we were violating US law and would be arrested. This was also a time when it was illegal under US law for us to practice our cultures, ceremonies, or ways of life. We weren’t free to even practice our religions until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978. Growing up, I didn’t realize each and every person on our reservation descended from those who survived genocide. We carried the strength and trauma of the Indians they couldn’t kill. We became alchemists out of acts of survival. We were left in death camps with nothing but scraps. My grandmother became an alchemist like the ones before her. She taught me to be an alchemist like the ones before me.

  My grandmother spent many years as the head cook at the elementary school in my home community of He Dog. This is a small community of about thirty to forty families. She tells me one year, long before I was born, the state sent pears to the schools on our reservation to serve at school meals. It was the first time many of the children on our rez had ever even seen a pear. Many of the students wouldn’t even try the new foreign food being served at lunch. They didn’t know what to think of it. Fruit doesn’t grow in death camps.

  When my grandmother realized many of the children at the school she cooked for weren’t eating the pears because they didn’t know what they were, she asked the principal if she could go into the classrooms to teach the kids about pears and then let them try the new fruit. The principal gave her the green light and her idea became a successful food education campaign.

  My grandmother would also bake fresh bread every day for the whole school because, according to her, “They deserved fresh bread every day too.” My grandmother’s bread is famous on our rez and I almost find it hard to believe that a whole school got my grandmother’s fresh baked bread every day, because now she only makes it on special occasions. Soon the state came in to investigate, and in a surprising turn of events, mandated that every school in the district bake fresh bread for their students every day. My grandmother was magic like that. She took the scraps they gave us and transformed them into gold. She impacted lives in real ways that still resonate back home when folks older than my mother come up to my grandmother and tell her she’s their favorite cook of all time. The food she made was medicine that healed the spirit wounds of children who weren’t even granted the privilege of knowing they were undergoing food violence.

  Enduring food violence has become a necessary survival skill for Lakotas. Lakota people’s main source of food, tools, hide, and life was the buffalo. We followed their migration, and they provided us with all sources of life. We lived in balance with the buffalo nation until colonizers decimated the buffalo population on this continent in a coordinated, systemic effort to annihilate our main source of food, tools, and clothing. This is why buffalo are an endangered species today. When foreign invaders took all our food and left us with nothing but processed, unhealthy, death-camp rations to eat, people like my grandmother found ways to turn those rations into meals filled with love and stories of survival.

  I was twenty years old when I realized for the first time that I too was an alchemist. My mom’s brother had just died tragically in a ranch accident, leaving behind a gaping wound in my family that nothing could fill. Like most rez families, my family is no stranger to trauma and tragedy, but when relatives die unexpectedly, there’s always this sort of numbness that pervades within everyone. Being an artist and an empath, this meant for me taking on the burden of feeling everyone’s pain and sadness—in addition to my own—and it seemed almost too much to carry. I did the only thing I knew how to do—I started making a beat and writing a song. Along with my cousin-in-law from Virginia, I wrote a song called “Heavy” about my uncle’s death. I broke into tears while recording my verse of the song, but I held it together enough to get one of the most emotional vocal takes I’ve ever done. Before I took the song to the local radio station on our rez, I gathered my family to let them hear it first. It had been hard for my family to talk about my uncle’s death, because sometimes surviving means not talking about the pain. But by the end of the song, everyone was silently in tears. My grandma asked to hear the song again and we played it over and over until we all felt a little less heavy. I realized I can take the pain, frustration, and loss I feel and transform it into a song that can help others process and heal. I realized I’m an alchemist like my grandmother before me.

  Being Lakota and being from a reservation gives me a unique perspective as an artist. Even though I am an American citizen and was born and raised in America, I don’t consider myself American. I am Sicangu Lakota. I don’t recognize the colonial borders that were forced onto our stolen lands. I do not believe settlers in an illegal settler colony have the political or ethical right to label other colonized people “illegal” or “alien.” Everything illegal and alien on Turtle IslandI was brought here by settlers.

  My grandmother never had the privilege to think about things like this. She was too busy raising eleven kids with my grandfather on one of the poorest Indian reservations in the United States. I feel like it’s my duty to carry these stories and truths with me and sing them around the world. I always tell people I come from a family of artists who don’t realize they’re artists. My grandma taught us all to be survivors in our own way. We’re all alchemists. It’s in our blood. My music is my gold.

  My grandmother is an educator, an artist, and a change maker. My grandmother is many things to many people. However, all those labels and Western terms still can’t fully capture the beauty and depth of her spirit. My grandmother is an alchemist trapped in a death camp, or you can just say my grandmother is Lakota.

  * * *

  I. North America

  PHOTO BY PUANANI CRAVALHO

  Auli’i Cravalho is a singer and actress. She is of proud Hawaiian, Puerto Rican, Portuguese, Chinese, and Irish heritage.

  Auli’i Cravalho

  THIS IS WHAT I remember from my childhood.

  I always woke with the sun in my eyes. The warmth and light seeping through the panels. I grew up in my mama and papa’s plantation home in Hawai’i where its single-wall construction will do that: allow you to wake with the sun. I grew up in the same house my father did; Mama and Papa were my paternal grandparents. I slept on top of my mama’s quilts, in my papa’s worn shirts, and left the windows with their ripped screens wide-open. The tangerine trees outside were warm, bright orange and robust, fruit I held with two hands pinching the skin, tasting it through my nose like my papa taught me. Running across the lanai, across the front yard, across the driveway. Past the hibiscus hedge, through the macadamia nut grove, down, down, knowing every dip in the concrete, jumping over, skirting around the memories of skinned knees in the past. Barefoot and sweaty. Face flushed with warmth, cheeks in a constant blush. I ran hot those days. Hot with curiosity and love and adventure. I begged for stories of the past and barreled over the worry of rudeness or sensitivity to get
them. I read until my head was full of adventure, and listened to my papa tell me stories about Puerto Rico and the humid tropical nights until my heart ached for its waters. The floor of the living room was my stage, and I spent hours reenacting fact and fiction; kissing mirrors and dancing to seventies radio. I knew exactly who I was. Exactly who I was, at that early age of five.

  By the time I hit double digits, I felt as though I knew everything about everything. And thirteen-year-old me? Forget about it. I’ve come to learn that “who I am” is not exact at all. That each piece of my character was spontaneously created years ago, and nurtured since. Culture, held together with glitter glue and adorned with googly eyes. Genealogy, forever branching with love from each and every family member. “Growing up” taught me that my dreams were supposed to fit in standard-size envelopes. But Five-Year-Old Me covers the page with Dora stickers and hand-delivers it instead. Sixteen-Year-Old Me types my aspirations in Times New Roman and writes in MLA format but allows Seven-Year-Old Me to go in with a pen to add hearts over the i’s in my name. And yes, my college essay is going to be totally dope and possibly covered in stickers. But it will only be so because I keep looking back to that bright-eyed kid and asking her, “Does this feel right?” And in the future, when I look back—even just five years from now—will I be able to see my own growth?

  Take sixth grade. Ten-Year-Old Me had a show-and-tell, and I was so proud to talk about my family. I shared stories that had been told by my paternal grandparents. How my mama was full Portuguese, and my papa was all Puerto Rican. How just before Mama passed, my father told me she never wanted to stop holding me, even though her Parkinson’s disease was so bad she could hardly walk. I told them how I used to dance and constantly step on my papa’s tired feet because all I wanted to do was twirl whenever I heard a mariachi band play on the old cassette tapes. I shared everything I remembered about them with the class: their food, their cultures, their love. I shared about my maternal grandparents too, how my mother was the seventh child of seven children, how family get-togethers meant three-day-long parties and sleepovers filled with music and an endless supply of food. I learned how to weave flowers into hakus (flower crowns) and how to fish like the best of them (the best I could anyway).