American Like Me

by America Ferrera

  Victoria Castro was born in Coahuila, Mexico, sometime around 1914. She told us that her parents owned a small store during the time of the Mexican Revolution. Her father, Victoriano, left to fight in the war and never made it back home. Her mother, Anastacia, cared for my grandmother and her younger sister, Trinidad, until Anastacia developed tuberculosis, an especially lethal disease in Mexico at the time. Victoria talked often—wistfully but also angrily—about her final days by her mom’s side at the hospital. Throughout her life she never forgave her grandmother, who took her away from her mom days before she succumbed to the disease. Perhaps her grandmother didn’t want the young girls to see the final ravages of tuberculosis on their mother’s body. Maybe she figured they might get sick as well. Whatever the reason, Victoria never understood it or accepted it. All she could come back to is the goodbye she never got with her mother.

  The closest relatives who could take in the orphaned young girls were north of the border in San Antonio, Texas. Like the Irish who, upon arriving in cities such as Boston and New York, were greeted by signs that read NO IRISH NEED APPLY, my grandmother encountered signs above Texas establishments that read NO DOGS OR MEXICANS ALLOWED. She settled with relatives on San Antonio’s heavily Mexican-American west side in a home that at times housed three generations of extended family. She never made it past elementary school, and spent most of her life working as a maid, babysitter, and cook.

  By the time Julian and I came along she had raised my mom to be the first in their family to go to college. And after forty years as a legal resident, she become a citizen during the Camelot years of America’s first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy. The young girl who came to America with nothing, disconnected from her origins and formally uneducated—taught herself to read and write in Spanish and English. I would watch her hunch over Agatha Christie novels with a large magnifying glass, and then I’d borrow it to burn candy wrappers in the Texas sun for amusement.

  By a combination of historical accident and familial dysfunction, Victoria Castro was the only grandparent I ever knew. What I know of my other grandparents—which is very little—is just a precious inventory of random facts. My mom, Rosie, was Victoria’s only child—the product of a relationship with a man many years her junior. I don’t believe I ever met Rosie’s father, Edward Perez, but either in my memory or imagination he once gave my mom $200 to pass along to Julian and me. My own parents were together for ten years but never married. Legally they could not since my dad, Jesse Guzman, was married with five children when his marriage fell apart and he started a new life with my mom. His mother, Trinidad, died from liver failure—perhaps from drinking—five years before I was born. His father, whom I only met once or twice, served in the Army Air Forces during World War II. People sometimes talk about the deep roots and long branches of family trees; they hold family gatherings with custom-made T-shirts where multiple generations share stories and quibble about the details. I wish I’d had a chance to know all my grandparents, but Victoria’s story is the only one I have to tell, a single branch disconnected from its roots.

  My mom, Rosie, was the first person in our family to get involved in politics. By the time I was born, in 1974, my parents were deeply committed to the Mexican-American civil rights movement. They helped run candidates for office, organized marches, and stayed up all night at favorite hangouts talking with friends about the oppressiveness of “the system” toward people like us. I used to fall asleep to the sounds of a living room full of my parents’ friends laughing, arguing, and talking about issues I wouldn’t be able to grasp until years later. Choco, Danny, Irma, Bill, Lucille, Manuel, George. Some of them are still close friends, some have passed away or disappeared from our lives long ago. My mom’s fiery passion for politics, for taking injustice head-on through democratic means, was in stark contrast to my immigrant grandmother. Victoria never took much of an interest in politics.

  She never could’ve imagined that her grandsons would someday lead the American city that gave her refuge as a young, orphaned girl. Despite having such a difficult life, with complicated roots, she always tried her best to just enjoy her everyday life. She didn’t concern herself with the daily grind of politics the way her daughter did, the way her grandsons still do. It is hard for me to imagine a life where public service was not my calling. Growing up with parents who lived and breathed politics, I came to believe that when government works right, it can create opportunities in people’s lives.

  Many in government believe that America should fundamentally change its immigration laws. Rather than the poor and huddled masses welcomed by the Statue of Liberty, many argue that we should measure a person’s value before admitting them. What can they do for us? That’s the new standard. By this logic, computer scientists, chemical engineers, laboratory researchers, and other “high-skilled” immigrants would predominate. Our nation undoubtedly benefits from the fact that brilliant, accomplished people want to make a life here. But our success has never depended upon it. America did not cherry-pick her way to greatness. Instead, we created a system—an infrastructure of opportunity—that enables the pursuit of the American dream through hard work. Just as there’s an infrastructure of streets and highways that helps everyone get to where we want to go on the road, in America there’s an infrastructure of opportunity that helps us get to where we want to go as a society. Good schools, a strong health-care system, and well-paying jobs are pieces of that infrastructure. My mom and so many others fought hard over the years in the civil rights and women’s rights movements, for example, to make sure that everyone has access to the American infrastructure of opportunity.

  Today, many are afraid of immigrants, of providing them this access. But do they realize there is something far scarier than being the country everyone wants to come to? What if we become the country no one wants to come to? Fifty years ago, if you asked someone living in Europe, Asia—or anywhere else, really—where they would go if they had to leave their home country, the answer was clear. For all the work we still had to do on civil rights, voting rights, and women’s rights, the answer was almost always the United States of America. Because here, the world saw an infrastructure of opportunity with ample room for the high-skilled and the hardworking; the refugees and the dreamers.

  But under the standards many are proposing now, my grandmother would never have been allowed into the country. She would have been deemed completely worthless.

  Victoria deserved the same opportunities as the rest of us. She belonged in a country that allowed her to pursue her dreams. Yet, her life also made me realize that we can’t just measure the American dream in material terms. Measured only by those standards, my grandmother and so many people never achieved the American dream. When my brother, Julian, gave the keynote address at the 2012 Democratic National Convention to urge his fellow Americans to reelect our nation’s first African-American president, he talked about the American dream exactly as Victoria’s grandson understood it:

  In the end, the American dream is not a sprint, or even a marathon, but a relay. Our families don’t always cross the finish line in the span of one generation. But each generation passes on to the next the fruits of their labor. My grandmother never owned a house. She cleaned other people’s houses so she could afford to rent her own. But she saw her daughter become the first in her family to graduate from college. And my mother fought hard for civil rights so that instead of a mop, I could hold this microphone.

  My grandmother sparked my curiosity and imagination through the stories she told me and the love she gave me. She was the branch in a family tree that left me otherwise disconnected from my past. My grandmother showed me that people who start out with nothing—those who would be considered worthless under new immigration standards—can be the seeds that bear significant contributions to American society. She passed the baton to my parents so that I could one day have it too. She helped me imagine a better country and believe in the dream for the next generation after me.


  And she also continues to remind me that all of us here in this country are equally deserving of health and happiness—whether we are immigrants or indigenous people; whether our ancestors have been here for generations or whether we just arrived. For years I never knew whether my grandmother came to the United States legally. I never asked or even thought to. But the day before Julian spoke at the Democratic National Convention, a genealogist researched our family’s history and published what she’d found in the Huffington Post. A copy of the document that allowed Victoria to enter the United States demonstrated the thin line in the 1920s—and for most of America’s history—between documented and undocumented. Under the description for the purpose of her visit are scrawled the words To Live.

  CONCLUSION

  America Ferrera

  Dear Reader,

  I grew up believing I was alone in feeling stuck between cultures. I didn’t know other Americans shared my experience, because I never saw my story told. I tried shaping an identity that would make sense to other people by shedding pieces of myself and attempting to assimilate.

  Ironically, the opportunities to fulfill my dreams were the ones that required me to embrace my unique identity. I didn’t get my career-making roles in Real Women Have Curves, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and Ugly Betty in spite of who I was, I got them because of who I was: someone who didn’t fit easily into any preexisting mold. All the labels that I had been told my whole life would keep me from success—brown, short, chubby, too Americanized, too ethnic-looking, et cetera—were the very aspects that made me perfect for the roles that would make my dream career a reality.

  I learned quickly that my particular challenges gave me the power to connect to others. Everywhere I went I met people who also felt underrepresented, unseen, and like they didn’t fit in to fixed boxes. I found something I never could have imagined as a child: a larger community that, like me, struggled to find identity between the cracks of cultures. Finding community and a sense of belonging emboldened me to not only own my experiences but to also celebrate them and to create from them.

  I invited my friends, peers, and heroes to share their stories in this book so that we might build community; so that we could identify our whole selves within a larger culture that tends to leave important pieces of our stories out; so that our voices would amplify one another’s as we declare who we actually are. We are kids with no key chains, daughters carrying history in the gaps of our teeth. We are the sons of parents who don’t speak of the past, inheritors of warriors’ blood and mad bargaining skills. We are the grandchildren of survival: legacies, delivered from genocide, colonization, and enslavement. We are the slayers of “impossible.” We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors’ dreams wearing the weight of their sacrifice on our backs. Our love is radical; our unstraightened hair, a tiny revolution. We are here to survive, to thrive, to live. We connect to our roots clumsily, unknowingly, unceasingly. We call ourselves “American” enthusiastically, reluctantly, or not at all. We take fragments of what was broken, severed, or lost in history, and we create whole selves, new families, and better futures. We live as citizens of a country that does not always claim us or even see us, and yet, we continue to build, to create, and to compel it toward its own promise.

  Dear reader, there is great power in your story, especially in the pieces that have never been seen or told before. Please add your voice to ours so that we can see ever more authentic reflections of our realities in the culture that surrounds us. I am grateful and proud to be a part of this growing generation of Americans rewriting and reshaping the narrative to include our lived experiences.

  Truly yours,

  America

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  DEAREST CONTRIBUTORS, thank you for accepting my invitation to share a piece of your life. You brought your history and hearts to these pages, and I am forever grateful that you believed in the power of this book.

  Cayce Dumont, my endlessly talented collaborator and coconspirator, this book would not have been possible without you. Thank you for so patiently and lovingly working with each contributor, including myself. You helped me find and illuminate the soul of this book. From beginning to end you were a fierce advocate for my vision and you were the one who brought it all together.

  David Kuhn, thanks for being an amazing book agent and for patiently waiting ten years for me to finally fall in love with a book idea. Oh, and thanks for coming up with the idea for the book and not giving me a chance to say no. To Kate Mack, my other book agent, thank you for your advice and steadfast support in helping with so many details throughout this process.

  Carrie Byalick, my manager and favorite BOSS, you make everything more fun. Thank you for encouraging my true voice through this process and for your constant creativity and inspiration.

  My fabulous team of publicists at IDPR—Molly Kawachi, Brianna Smith, and Lindsay Krug—you ladies are all class and I love you. Thank you for everything, always.

  To my lawyers Jodi Peikoff and Michael Mahan and the rest of my Peikoff-Mahan family, no one loves their lawyers more than I love all of you. Thank you for taking care of me my whole career (and for receiving all my mail).

  Tom Carr, thanks for always managing the business and helping me find ways to do the things I love.

  I am very grateful to all the people at Simon & Schuster and Gallery Books, including Carolyn Reidy, Jennifer Bergstrom, and Jennifer Robinson for believing in this project as much as I do and helping me get it into the hands of readers; Aimée Bell, Lisa Litwack, Jaime Putorti, and Davina Mock-Maniscalco for making the book look beautiful; Stephen Fallert, Elisa Rivlin, Monica Oluwek, Caroline Pallotta, and their teams for carefully tending to so many details behind the scenes.

  Thank you especially to my editor, Alison Callahan, who helped shape this book beautifully. Alison, thank you for believing this would work and for making it even better. And my very special thanks goes to Brita Lundberg, Alison’s editorial assistant, who has been endlessly helpful, smart, creative, and kind.

  Many thanks to my former assistant Jessica Chou. Jessica, thanks for being there in the early days and for contributing your many talents and boundless creativity to the recruiting process!

  A special thank-you to my longtime creative coach, Kim Gillingham, for helping me find my path to writing. Kim, I am so grateful for the decade of your wisdom, guidance, and friendship.

  Finally, thanks to Ryan, my phenomenal partner in life. Your love and support make all things possible. Your creativity is a constant source of inspiration to me. Thank you for always believing I can do whatever I set out to do, and thanks for being my witness in this life.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH BY ADAM FRANZINO

  America Ferrera is an award-winning actress, producer, director, and activist. Ferrera is best known for her breakthrough role as Betty Suarez on ABC’s hit comedy Ugly Betty, for which she won Golden Globe, Emmy, Screen Actors Guild, ALMA, and Imagen Awards. She produces and stars in the acclaimed NBC workplace comedy Superstore, currently in its fourth season. In 2016 Ferrera cofounded Harness, an organization connecting storytellers and activists to amplify the cultural narrative around social justice. She speaks throughout the country as an advocate for human and civil rights and was the opening speaker at the monumental Women’s March on Washington in January 2017. Ferrera resides in New York and Los Angeles with her husband, Ryan; their son, Sebastian; and their two golden retrievers.

  FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR:

  Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/America-Ferrera

  MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT

  SimonandSchuster.com

  Facebook.com/GalleryBooks

  @GalleryBooks

  We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

  * * *

  Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see
terms and conditions.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

  Gallery Books

  An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 2018 by America Ferrera

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  Certain names and identifying details have been changed.

  First Gallery Books hardcover edition September 2018

  GALLERY BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or business@simonandschuster.com.

  The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.