American Like Me

by America Ferrera

  General Gregorio Ferrera was my father’s grandfather, my great-grandfather. He was the son of humble farmers Sebastián and Gregoria Ferrera. Gregorio spent his life as a revolutionary general, calling the people of Honduras to rise up multiple times against dictatorial regimes and to take up arms for free and fair elections. He was a passionate man who died at the age of fifty fighting on the battlefield for the rights of his fellow citizens.

  My great-grandfather, the man my father was named after, was an activist. Like me. I sat there on camera, reading a letter General Ferrera had written to his countrymen and -women, calling them to take up arms to defend their right to democracy. My limbs began to tingle, my hearing dulled, and my vision blurred. For the first time in my life I was recognizing a huge part of myself in my family history.

  I recognized the five-year-old me who wanted to be both an actress and a civil rights lawyer; and the fifteen-year-old me who rushed from after-school play rehearsals to late-night political science classes at the community college; and the eighteen-year-old me who doggedly completed her International Relations course work while traveling between film sets. I recognized the ambitious young woman who struggled to juggle her passion for acting with her passion for engaging with the wider world; the forever curious student who continued to educate herself on the issues that mattered to her, like access to education, immigrants’ rights, voting rights, and the empowerment of girls and women around the world; the lover of democracy who traveled the United States campaigning for candidates and registering people to vote.

  Even though I fought to follow my passions, I had spent my whole life questioning the legitimacy of my activism. I battled a critical voice within that said I was just an actress pretending to be an activist; an egomaniac with a God complex. The voice was constantly asking, What gives you the right to try to change the world?

  But as I read my great-grandfather’s letter to the people of Honduras, calling them to “rise to the defense of liberty, justice, and the law,” I all of a sudden knew what Harry Potter felt when Hagrid found him in the lighthouse and declared, “You’re a wizard, Harry!” So much became clear to me in a matter of seconds. I wasn’t a hack, or an imposter, or an egomaniac! I was a wizard! Okay, maybe not a wizard, but I was the great-granddaughter of a general! A revolutionary! A man who went to battle for the betterment of his country and for the rights of his fellow citizens! My urge to fight for what is right, which I had felt deep down in my bones since I was a child, was not made up or phony, it was in fact rooted deep down in my bones; in the blood that coursed through my veins. This part of my identity, which I had doubted and struggled with for decades, was not only my right; it was my inheritance.

  It was always hard for me to imagine what I had inherited from my father beyond the almond-shaped eyes and the sharp peaking brows. I never got to fully know him, and what I did know about him seemed so distant from my own nature. I assumed there was very little of my identity defined by his side of my gene pool. I could have never imagined that he would be the link to an ancestor I so deeply identified with, an ancestor who reflected back to me such a vital and unexplained aspect of myself.

  As I walked through the village of San Jeronimo where my great-grandfather was born, past the tiny church where he was baptized and married, past the land that used to be his father’s farm, past the local community center named after him, I was struck by a brand-new and complicated feeling. I had only ever been taught to think of my family’s immigration to the United States as a great gift; to give thanks for my life in the United States and to appreciate what I’d gained. It had never crossed my mind to mourn what I’d lost: hundreds of years of history, of connection, of identity, of family, of knowing the people and the land that I come from, of knowing myself.

  I stood in the mountains of Honduras wondering what else there was to discover about the blood I carry, wondering who I might have been if my parents hadn’t left, imagining the life they could’ve lived if Honduras was a country that held promise and opportunity for them and their children. For the first time I caught a glimpse of the unlived version of my life, and it wasn’t as simple as I wanted it to be.

  Of course I am grateful for the life and rights I have as an American. The harsh reality is that it is very unlikely that a young, working-class girl like me would find the opportunity to express her talents and fulfill her wildest dreams in Honduras. Honduras is a country where women who speak up for social justice, women like the fierce environmental activist Berta Cáceres, who was assassinated in the very town of La Esperanza, are targeted and systematically silenced. My parents knew that, and they knew that the United States held a brighter future for me, but they probably also knew that Honduras would always be the only place that held the richness of my past and the links to my historical identity. I stood on the land that generations of my family stood on before me and let myself feel the full depth and complexity of the role immigration played in my life. The opportunities and the gifts and the dreams it afforded, and for the first time understanding what it truly cost.

  PHOTO BY RAVI V. PATEL

  Ravi V. Patel is an actor, director, writer, and entrepreneur. He codirected the Emmy-nominated documentary Meet the Patels. Ravi has also appeared on numerous popular shows over the course of his career, including but not limited to Master of None, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Scrubs, Hawaii Five-0, and Grey’s Anatomy. He is also the cofounder of the snack company This Bar Saves Lives, which has recently expanded to over 8,500 Starbucks worldwide.

  Ravi V. Patel

  DAD WANTED TO “TREAT” us. That was the premise of this family vacation. And when Dad’s “treating,” that means only one thing: savings will be had. It was Labor Day weekend (actually, it was the three-day weekend before Labor Day weekend, because Patel), and Dad had booked an all-inclusive Carnival cruise for the entire family. We were to board this giant vessel of economies of scale at a port in Long Beach, and on the drive down there—we were late, because Patel—my wife, Mahaley, asked me if I had brought our passports. “Why do we need passports for a cruise?” “What do you mean it goes to Mexico?”

  Cut to my wife, Mahaley, and I sitting in the Carnival cruise lines holding area, a sad place for sad people who just found out the vacation they spent all year saving up for may not happen; it was like the opposite of a carnival. My wife was understandably mad at me—I guess she had told me to grab the passports when I was doing that thing where I don’t hear her talking. Probably worth mentioning about the last twelve months: we got married, bought and renovated a new home, got pregnant (during which time Mahaley vomited almost every day for nine months) just after I had visited three Zika-infested countries. Since we had our daughter, Amelie, I worked an average of twelve hours a day every day including weekends. We were out of the country most of that time because of acting work, meaning sleep training was not going well, meaning my wife was essentially a single mother to a constantly cranky baby without any of her close friends nearby. I guess you could say our marriage was under a lot of stress. I had gained twenty pounds. All in all, this just didn’t seem like the right time to share close quarters with a crying baby, overwhelmingly happy grandparents, and unlimited amounts of ice cream.

  We had called our neighbors at home, telling them that if they could locate our birth certificates and email copies, that we could get on this boat. We had zero confidence that we even possessed these documents at home. I was secretly hoping we didn’t.

  Dad must have called me twenty times to reiterate the urgency of getting on this cruise (as if somehow that was helping): this was the first family trip with Geeta’s new boyfriend and our new baby daughter, but more important, the tickets were nonrefundable; savings were at risk. Cheap travel was a great joy to him. Along with the giant Patel nose I inherited from him, it was a part of his legacy.

  * * *

  Fifty years ago, he had come to America for the first time.

  He came here so he could “make it” for
his family. He is a Patel, and that means something. With Indians, last names aren’t just familial, they are tribal. You can meet an Indian, ask their last name, and identify what part of India they are from, what language they speak, their religion, and (if you were born in India) a bunch of inappropriate stereotypes like:

  1) Patels are cheap and loud.

  2) Patels are adventurous and entrepreneurial.

  3) Patels stick together.

  Patel is one of the most common last names in India, and because of said stereotypes, one of the most successful communities worldwide. Patel is a Gujarati last name, meaning we descend from the state of Gujarat, and we speak the language of Gujarati (yes, it’s different from Hindi). To be a Patel is to be part of the biggest family in the world.

  In 1945, my dad was born in Utraj, a small farming village in the state of Gujarat—the kind of village you see in National Geographic: no electricity, no shoes, small bungalows with patios made from dried cow dung. Water was retrieved daily from the village well, which was then boiled for consumption and bathing.

  One of five brothers, he stood out academically right away. And the better he did, the farther he had to travel to attend a better school. By the sixth grade, he claims to have walked many, many miles each day along a dirt path, “often shoeless.” He loves talking about the time he got bit by a scorpion yet still went to school. What a student. What a Patel. High school sent him to the prestigious Vidyanagar School, which required a move to the dorms in the big city of Vadodara, a couple hours outside of his village (though today the roads are paved, and the drive takes less than half an hour). In that day and age, staying in school meant not making money for the family, so you only continued schooling if you did well. Two of Dad’s brothers had dropped out to work on the farm, and the other brothers worked toward professional jobs in the city after graduation. So the real pressure to ascend was laid entirely on Dad, and his father never ceased to let him know. If Dad could make it to the top high school in the state, and become one of the top students in that school, then maybe he could get accepted to a college in America, which meant eventually making more money in a week than the family made in an entire year.

  When Dad got into an American college, he became famous, a local celebrity. Everyone wanted to shake his hand. They even threw a celebration for him, which included a giant feast, schoolchildren performing choreographed dances, and a puja to give him good fortune in America. The day he left, the entire village followed him in a procession led by a band. The village wept as their favorite son walked with his small suitcase down the lone dirt path leading to the village entrance, where a rickshaw awaited him. Usually, this would have been a bus ride, but today was special.

  Dad’s dad had borrowed money from the entire village just to pay for his plane ticket and tuition. Make no mistake about it, this was a lot of money to the village, but they jumped at the chance to loan their life savings to him; this was an investment. His mission was clear: get to America, and you will change the lives of everyone around here. The minute he made enough money in America, he would send every extra penny back to repay the village. And then he would start bringing the village to America.

  In the winter of 1967, a four-foot-eleven somewhat-chubby Dad landed at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. He claims that he and his friends—six other nerds who placed in the top 1 percent in the state—threw their bags into their small studio apartmentI and immediately walked down Lakeshore Drive looking for work. They worked three jobs while also attending college full-time. The math doesn’t really work out there, but these immigrant stories cannot be questioned.

  Dad became a civil engineer (or is it civic?), eventually working for a company called Honeywell. In 1975, my sister, Geeta, was born, also a nerd. And in 1978, I was born in Freeport, Illinois, a couple hours outside of Chicago, not a nerd, but blessed with the ability to communicate with nerds. I was also blessed with Mom’s allergies and Dad’s nose (big, yet ironically bad sense of smell). At this point, Dad had built a house and married Mom, who had a similar story to his—in terms of being “the savior of a village.” However, she later told me that she used to sneak out of the house every night as a teenager and that she didn’t want to get married or fly to America to live with this “short and chubby guy” she had met only once during their (arranged) wedding ceremony. But the instructions Mom was given were very clear: get to America, and you will change the lives of everyone around here.

  Another Patel truth: Patels do not like working for other people. So Mom and Dad somehow decided that buying a résumé and career-consulting business would be a good idea for people with accents. Of course, their business did well. And while they were doing that together, they started importing the rest of the Patels in the world. Growing up, my house was like a Patel immigration halfway house. It was not uncommon for me to wake up and hear that we had to go pick up another family from the airport. Another family who spoke little to no English who would be taking over my bedroom, my home. Another set of kids I would have to show a good time, despite having nothing in common with them. It was the same drill every time: Mom and Dad would not only loan them money to get their lives started, but they would also assist with their immigration paperwork, job interviews, driving lessons, and learning English. This was a full-service program. And I had to go along with it.

  Actually, all the Patels in the world had to go along with it too. See, this was part of a larger business plan Patels had for world domination. Every other Patel who came to this country with my parents ran the same halfway house, and the relatives and villagers they brought over would eventually do the same. Here’s the tricky part: my parents’ generation was the cream of the crop, but the next generation they brought over was not necessarily the same. Many of them were not as educated or skilled in English. So how would they keep this Patel Ponzi scheme going?

  The motel.

  Dad’s generation said, “Look, we have the capital. We will loan you money to buy a run-down motel, your whole family will live in the first three units, and the whole family will work there as well. We will train you to run the business, and we will help you find ways to run the business even better. All you have to do is work hard and drive a Toyota Camry and you will be rich.” When Patels like something, they all do it, and the motel business became our thing. It became our front for Patel-laundering for the next thirty years. Guess what? Today, all these motel Patels are millionaires. . . . I sometimes regret that I did not go this route instead of trying to be an actor, especially all the times I wish I had more money, which is all the time.

  In childhood, I visited extended family members at their motels, often staying weeks at a time in a Super 8 motel room owned by a family member. I was always put to work for people I’d often never even met and would never see again. When I got my driver’s license, I became much more valuable to the village. A typical (and actual) request from my mom I recall is being asked to pick up some guru from the airport and drop him off at some random auntie’s house. On the way home, I was to stop at a different auntie’s house to pick up some snacks for a dinner party our family friend was having. Mind you, Indian aunties don’t let you leave their house without eating a full meal and then some, so what I’m telling you is: that guru and I had two lunches together. Never saw him again. OMG, I just figured out why I was chubby.

  Food is a big deal in my culture. The Indian dinner parties were part of the cheap, loud, stick-together adventure that was Patel life in America. Every weekend, some innocent Caucasian neighbors would be walking their dogs and come upon a scene of two dozen cars and five dozen Indians dressed up, carrying trays of strong-smelling food that wafted up the street, mingling with all the loud Indian kids playing outside. This happened every weekend, all weekend long.

  In 1990, we moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, for warmer weather, where Mom and Dad would start what would eventually become Charlotte’s largest résumé and career-consulting company. By the time high school rol
led around, I was a typical Southerner with a Southern accent. I played a ton of sports, loved drinking and stealing the car at night to go toilet-paper a friend’s house. I smoked weed and pursued my favorite hobby, which was finding new ways to break old rules—my friends described me as an Indian Ferris Bueller (why not just say Ferris Bueller? I’ll tell you why, because back then, white people couldn’t stop noticing that I was Indian). I also cheated on literally every test, and I was class president every year (except for my senior year, because of said cheating addiction). When I would spend time at my non-Indian friends’ houses, it was always shocking how much privacy and space those kids had from their own immediate families. Another thing I found weird about my American friends was when they would say things like “I don’t care, it’s my parents’ money, not mine.” I wondered what it would be like to have that kind of freedom and sense of individuality, and to spend your parents’ cash as if it were Monopoly money. Especially as a teenager or a struggling young adult, there are times when you just want to be left alone. There are times when you do not want the input or audience of your parents, or your aunties, or your parents’ friends, or your distant cousins. But Patels don’t ever leave you alone. This is why I didn’t want to get on that cruise.

  College was more of the same. Despite being a terrible Patel (I was not into school at all), I was an incredible Patel in the sense that I could take any test and do well without ever having attended class. That’s how I double-majored in economics and international studies. That’s also how I got a job in investment banking after college (though I may have also faked my transcripts a bit).

  I was a horrible investment banker. I was always late, couldn’t focus. Hated the work. And they hated me. A few months into the gig, my boss Mike called me into a conference room to show me something. The TV was on—the Twin Towers had been hit. A couple of months after that, I got the call that our firm had been bought and I was being laid off. They were giving me something called a severance, and it was more money than I had ever seen. What they didn’t know was that I was already planning on quitting: I had decided I needed to be doing something on my own. Around the same time, Geeta had quit her finance job in NYC—she was also a terrible employee—because she decided she wanted to become a screenwriter. So in the same twelve-month span that all brown people became the antagonist to terrorist-fearing conservatives, my parents discovered that they had raised two unmarriageable kids. And it was because in part we were more Patel than your average Patel: my family does not like bosses!