American Like Me

by America Ferrera

  Self-doubt finally gave way to confidence and opportunity. Some of which I had to create myself, and some which I was fortunate enough to have the chance to earn through more traditional venues (internships, climbing the ladder of jobs, and so on). Finally, after years of struggle, I had a few movies under my belt and a regular, steady acting job on the TV show House.

  In the middle of 2007, I decided to sign up to make a trip to Iowa to help then senator Barack Obama out with his presidential campaign. At the time, Obama was trailing in the polls and was fairly unpopular within his own political party, which was very busy telling him that what he was doing was quite impossible. This was something I could relate to. He was also honest and shared many of my core values.

  By my second day in Des Moines I had met most of the Obama campaign team (who were also idealistic and in their twenties). Seeing their hard work, dedication, and refusal to say no to conventional thinking (which said that a black guy from Hawaii shouldn’t run for president among other “impossible” things) was enough to make me join them full-time by moving to Iowa until the caucuses took place.II In these new campaign friends I found my people. More than ten years later, I regularly find myself thinking, Man, the goal may have been to get Barack Obama elected, but if you had told me that these people with whom I was having late work nights (and sleeping on floors and couches of campaign offices) would become some of my best friends, I would have looked at you like you were crazy. Not because I thought we couldn’t do it, but because I didn’t realize what would come next.

  After Barack Obama became president of the United States, I left my lucrative TV job on House, took a sabbatical from my acting career, and joined those amazing campaign friends at the White House. We had the honor of serving in the halls of the highest office in the greatest democracy on Earth; we had the chance to work on some small part of the history-making progress, and again had late work nights (and were sleeping on floors and couches, this time at the White House, across the government, and around the world).

  I think the reason we were able to overcome the impossible in this realm is in part because we were doing things for the right reasons. We never set out for the coveted West Wing job, or the ride on Air Force One. We volunteered for Barack Obama because we had friends overseas in Iraq, and buddies who couldn’t afford tuition. We are all normal people. What business did we have changing the world? It still brings a smile to my face.

  My story of going from Hollywood into public service is not unique. My story really is the same as thousands of other young Americans who volunteered for then Senator Obama’s campaign, took a leave of absence from school or a private-sector job, and served for a few years in the federal government as a presidential appointee. The only reason that my appointment garnered more press attention than some of the others is because I am an actor, something else I’m deeply proud of. Something else that was supposed to have been impossible.

  It’s hard to explain what it feels like when former Obama White House aides see each other now. Our hearts instantly feel ten times bigger and our faceholes involuntarily smile when we bump into each other on the street, or at an airport, or on the subway. We knew that things were not mutually exclusive in our America. We didn’t take “No, you can’t do that” for an answer. We don’t believe in impossible.

  Which brings us back to Air Force One. The unspoken rite of passage says that when you first fly on Air Force One, you’re allowed a personal phone call or two. This is really more selfish and emotional than anything else; you pick up the phone at your seat, and the operator says, “Good afternoon, Mr. Modi,III how can I help you?” You tell the operator that you want to make a phone call, give her the number to dial, and wait for her to call you back as soon as a connection is made. The whole thing is pretty patriotic and extremely badass, because when the person at the other end picks up, the operator says to them, “Hello, so-and-so, you have a call from Mr. Kalpen Modi aboard Air Force One, please hold.” The phone at your seat then rings, and you say hello to whichever stunned human you’ve decided to call. So, as I said, for my first call, I knew I was going to phone my parents.

  Thirty-four years before, my dad had left his parents, who had marched with Gandhi, behind in India. Like many other beautiful immigrant clichés, he moved to America with $12 in his pocket and the dream of a better life for his kids, and here I was flying aboard Air Force One as an aide to the first black president of the United States. What the heck were the chances that any of this could happen? America is the kind of place where the impossible becomes possible. We can take our deepest insecurities, our communities’ worst fears, our neighbors’ greatest hesitations, and with a lot of work, a lot of hardship, a lot of turmoil, turn them into something incredible for each other. Let’s support each other. Let’s keep doing those beautiful, impossible things.

  * * *

  I. “Why you can’t be doctor or engineer like my kids?” —Sadena Auntie, circa 1997.

  II. Iowa is the first state in the country to weigh in on the presidential primary process. It’s totally nuts.

  III. Kal Penn is just a stage/screen name, sort of like Whoopi Goldberg (at least I assume that’s not her birth name, but I could be wrong). At the White House, you go by your legal name for security clearances, IDs, et cetera. I went by Kalpen Modi, which is my legal name.

  Anjelah Johnson-Reyes is a comedian, actress, and music artist most well known for her character Bon Qui Qui from MADtv and her joke “Nail Salon,” which has more than eighty million views on YouTube. She has four comedy specials under her belt and continues to tour the country to sold-out crowds. She hails from San Jose, California, and lives with her husband in Los Angeles, where they sit on the board of the anti–human trafficking organization Unlikely Heroes.

  Anjelah Johnson-Reyes

  GROWING UP, I WANTED to be more Latino than I felt I actually was. My name is Anjelah Nicole Johnson. Legally it’s spelled Angela, which isn’t exactly the spicy Latina name I wished I had. You know, like Jazmine Sanchez, Yvette Gonzalez, or really anything that ends in ez.

  Johnson is a white last name (or black, depending on how you say it), I don’t speak Spanish, and I didn’t grow up in a super Mexican area. But like many Mexican-Americans, I have a huge family who takes pride in honoring Latino traditions. But we’d always throw in the good ol’ American ones as well. For example, we eat tamales with rice and beans for Christmas, but we have ham and mashed potatoes on the side. We have a family reunion every two years with more than five hundred people in attendance. Only a Mexican family can pull that off. However, at this reunion we take part in some good ol’ American traditional things like bingo, potato-sack races, bobbing for apples, barbecue, and a game of horseshoes.

  I grew up in a neighborhood in San Jose, California, that was home to many different ethnicities. We had Latinos, Asians, Portuguese, white people, approximately three Indians, and one black guy. We lived down the street from big technology companies right in the heart of the Silicon Valley—Cisco Systems, 3Com, Sun Microsystems, and IBM, just to name a few. My neighbors were some of the smartest people in the Bay Area, but I didn’t aspire to be smart and work for a tech company.

  My dream was to be a chola.

  Around the age of twelve, I had made up my mind. I wanted to wear the dark lip liner, the bandanna, the feathered hair. I wanted the Nike Cortez with creased-up Dickies pants held up with an oversize belt buckle that was engraved with my initials. Or better yet the initials of a guy I could be dating who had tattoos all over his neck and looked like Benjamin Bratt in the movie Blood In Blood Out. So dreamy. I wanted to listen to oldies and go cruising downtown in a lowrider. A ’64 Impala with hydraulics to be specific.

  Unfortunately for me, cholas didn’t exist in my neighborhood—they lived in downtown San Jose or on the east side. And even more unfortunate for me, I was just your run-of-the-mill prepubescent brown girl. My typical afternoon activities included doing Pop Warner cheerleading and playing with my
friends outside. When I was first allowed to wear makeup my mom wanted me to start off light. So she got me just one lip liner and a ChapStick. Little did she know she had handed me the chola starter kit I had always dreamed of. Now all I needed was some eye liner and a can of Aqua Net hair spray and I’d be on my way.

  There was just something so appealing about being a tough chick. They didn’t care what other people thought of them. They didn’t wish to be more Latino than they felt they actually were—the way I did. Plus, I think my parents’ divorce may have had a bigger effect on me than I let on, making me want to avoid ever feeling vulnerable. I became driven in my early teens to protect myself from ever getting hurt. And what better way than to surround myself with a gang—or at least people who looked like they were in a gang? My mind was set on it—except I couldn’t really handle being in a gang, because that would mean I would have to get “jumped in.” And I have a very low tolerance for pain. I can hardly handle emotional pain, much less physical. I can’t even watch sad movies because I think about them as if they were my own life and my body doesn’t know the difference. After a movie I walk around depressed—visibly so. People are like, “What happened?” And I’m like, “She had room for Jack on that piece of wood! He didn’t have to die!”

  Maybe this is also why I wanted to look tougher. I wanted that life where I could just call my homegirls if I ever needed backup in a fight (even though I would try to avoid fights at all costs). I got myself a voice mail pager to feel more like I had a huge crew at all times. For those of you young kids who have no idea how things used to work, the pager was a device I would wear on my belt or sticking out of my pants pocket that would beep at me whenever someone called a number to leave me a voice message. I could then find a landline or pay phone and call the number to check my voice messages. It was a three-step process. Very gangsta. Or they could just page me their call-back number and it would appear on my pager screen. Everyone had their own pager code. Mine was the #7. So I could page a guy I liked my phone number with code #7 and he would know that it was me paging. Kind of like texting through a landline phone. You could also send coded messages. For instance, if you wanted to say “I miss you” to someone, you would page “1 177155 400”—because that is supposed to look like the words “I miss you.” Some popular shortcut codes were 143 for I love you, 823 for I’m thinking of you, and, on a different note, 187, which meant death or I will kill you.

  My homegirl Monica and I would change the voice mail greeting every week to tell people to leave a message but also to either give a shout-out to a boy we liked or to call out some girls who were trying to fight us. It would sound something like, “Yeah, what’s up what’s up, you know who you got a hold of. Go ahead and drop that message after the beep and we’ll get back to you. I just wanna say, What up to Hector, a.k.a Little Smiley. And if this is that one chick who keeps paging us 187, why don’t you just go ahead and leave a time and a place and we can meet up and you can tell us that to our face. Yeah, that’s what I thought. You ain’t down. Aight then. Late, peace, outtie, I’m gone. Al rato vato.”

  I also started romanticizing what it was like living on the east side. They had taquerias and panaderias on every corner. Meanwhile, in my neighborhood we had one Chinese restaurant, a liquor store, and a bunch of airport hotels because I lived five minutes away from San Jose International Airport. In my part of town we didn’t have easy access to tacos and pan dulces. The best we could do is walk over to the liquor store and stock up on chile picante Corn Nuts and a Charleston Chew.

  The only time my sister and I ventured to the east side was to pick up our friends or go cruising on the weekends. Cruising was our favorite thing to do as teenagers. We would get all dressed up in our “going-out pants,” which were basically black leggings and whatever cute top we bought at Contempo Casuals, 5-7-9, Judy’s, or the brand-new Forever 21. We would pile on makeup, use foundation and powder that were too pale for our faces, dark lip liner with ChapStick, and we’d have some freshly plucked eyebrows. We would jump in the car and drive down Santa Clara Street all the way to Story and King Roads. Then we would just turn around and drive all the way back. It was obviously a complete waste of gas, but when you’re not old enough to get in the club, or can’t afford the cover charge—or didn’t get on the guest list by calling in the radio station—then you settle for pitching in for gas money and cruising.

  Cruising music depended on the mood or the car we were in. If we were in a lowrider car like an Impala, Cutlass, or any classic car we would listen to oldies. If we were in my sister’s Honda or my friend Ana’s Jeep we probably listened to freestyle/high-energy music. Windows would be rolled all the way down. If it was a packed night and cars were bumper to bumper, we would sit on the windowsill and talk to all the guys who were either driving next to us or pulled over on the side of the street. Motorcycle clubs would all park at the 7-Eleven or our favorite taqueria. Those guys would always have extra helmets in case any of us girls wanted to go for a ride. Sometimes we did, but don’t tell my mom.

  After we went cruising, we would get dropped off back at home in our safe neighborhood on the other side of town. No drive-bys, no drug deals—just families, senior citizens, and working streetlights. And I resented it. I wanted to be tough and cool. I wanted to change the first three numbers of my phone number from 452 to 279 like all my chola friends’ phone numbers. Because if your phone number started with 279, then you were legit from the barrio.

  I wanted to accept a collect call from prison like all my chola friends who knew somebody who was locked up. They were always visiting prisons, but I didn’t even know where the prison was located. I would ask my mom if we had any family members behind bars, and she would just laugh. My mom was doing her best to raise four kids on her own and keep us out of trouble, and all I wanted to do was pretend to be in trouble.

  In the early days of my stand-up career, I was no longer pretending to be a chola, but I was sometimes trying to be who I thought people wanted me to be. I didn’t yet have a grasp of my own point of view, and the feelings of being embarrassed for not speaking Spanish as a kid were still too fresh for me. The only shows I performed in at first were the Latino shows like Refried Fridays. Most of the comics would use some Spanish in their sets or speak with an accent. I thought to myself, Oh. I can do that accent. So I would tell stories about my parents, doing voices for them where they spoke in broken English. But the truth is, they were born in California, just like me. They didn’t speak Spanish either. The only time I ever heard Spanish in my home was when my grandma was watching her “stories” on Telemundo or when she was on the phone with her sisters. Her calls would always end with ande pues, which means “alright then.” I only know that because I just googled it.

  Just so you know, I downloaded Rosetta Stone in 2006, but I’m still on level one. Much like my chola aspirations, I never really made it too far. But I am so grateful that my mom never fully let me walk down the road to Cholaville. It’s not an easy road. Most, if not all, of my childhood chola friends had kids in high school. Some went to prison. Some got heavy into drugs, alcohol, and partying. I tried my best. I got about halfway down the road and heard my mom’s voice telling me dinner was ready and also don’t make terrible decisions. Or maybe it was God’s voice, or maybe it was God speaking through my mom. Either way, I made a swift U-turn and came home.

  But when I look back on my entry-level chola days, I understand part of where I was coming from. Aside from just wanting to feel tough and protected, I wanted to be proud of my culture and my heritage. And cholas have that down. Cholas are strong, proud women who know who they are and aren’t afraid to show you. Or tell you. To your face. To be a chola you have to have a badass quality about you. You can’t just dress the part of a chola. You have to be the part. I admire this kind of loud strength and have carried it with me ever since my chola days. Today, I am confident in who I am. I say what I mean, and I mean what I say. And I hope you don’t like it! Sorry, that
’s my inner chola talking.

  As an actress and a comedian, I want to unapologetically tell all types of stories, including Latino stories, because they’re important. (Not to be confused with my grandma’s “stories.” The kind I want to tell will have less slapping and dramatic music and more laughing and heartfelt tears.) Back in the eighties and nineties when I was a kid, there weren’t many proud, educated, normal, hardworking Latino families on TV or in the movies to help point me in the right direction. There were no Latino Huxtables. No Huxtables-ez. So now, I want to tell chola stories, family stories, relationship stories, English stories, and Spanglish stories. I want to show the world that being Latino and American doesn’t just look like one thing.

  I don’t want other kids to feel the way I did—to want so badly to be more Latino than I felt I actually was. Even in the early days of my career, I thought I was supposed to prove myself. But how can you be more of something that you just inherently are? You can’t. And you shouldn’t. Instead, you just do you and do you well. Regardless of what that looks like. I’ve learned you can be unapologetically proud of your culture, your heritage, and your heart, and you can celebrate everything about yourself without justification.

  I try my hardest not to compare myself or my journey to anyone else’s. I trust that my path is specific for me and I live fully in that. It’s okay that I’ve ditched my brown lips for a soft pink. Today I’m surrounded by amazing family and friends who love me just as I am. I even connect with some of my old chola friends every now and then. We support each other, pray for each other (cholas go to church too, that’s a whole other story!), and sometimes we just share old pictures and reminisce. When I go home to San Jose to do stand-up shows I make sure to have my chola friends I grew up with come and experience the show VIP style. I want them to know that they are a part of who I am and how I got to where I am today.