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...
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, an 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.
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
Excerpt from "Bad Dream," published in The New Yorker