I was born in Mexico City but have lived in the United States for almost half my life. As a child, I lived in Florida, Indiana, and New Jersey. As an adult, I lived in Massachusetts and New York. When I was 11, I received a green card because of my father’s job. Ten years later, when I was 21 I renounced it, thinking I would never move permanently to the United States. Neither did I wish to become a US citizen. I still remember the disbelief of the US Embassy officer in Mexico City who asked me twice if I understood what I was doing by renouncing a green card. My nuclear family also holds strong ties to the United States. My sister was born in Indiana and holds an American passport. My parents are not American citizens but both live in the United States. My father lives in Pennsylvania and my mother recently relocated to Florida from Mexico City.
It would be an understatement to say that my life has been influenced by the United States. My relationship with the United States and its politics has unequivocally shaped my life. I was eleven years old and lived in Central New Jersey when the Twin Towers were hit by airplanes hijacked by terrorists. I vividly remember being in 6th-grade homeroom when we were convened to an assembly, during which the principal announced that “we are under terrorist attack.” I was confused and scared, thinking the school itself had been sieged by terrorists. The Spanish teacher soothed me and explained the school was safe. Still, I didn’t understand what had happened. When I got home that afternoon and saw the footage of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center, I screamed in horror. My family and I planted an American flag outside our house in solidarity.
A few months after 9/11, I was playing with a friend during recess behind the gymnasium. When no other children or adults were around, she slapped me across the face and called me a ‘wetback.’ She told me to go back to Mexico. I remember being shocked at first, feeling shame for how I had failed to react, to slap her back. Days passed before I finally told my mother who immediately reported the incident to the school. Before the slapping incident, I had experienced a few micro-racist aggressions. Friends asked me if I traveled by donkey in Mexico and were genuinely surprised when I told them we had cars, just like in the United States. However, as a child, I always dismissed these racist comments as ‘ignorance.’ I naively thought that my American classmates simply did not have the same privilege I did; the privilege of living in different countries. It wasn’t until I was slapped across the face that afternoon, that a darker, more hurtful feeling settled within me. Yet, I did not have the words to describe it.
In 2003, my family moved back to Mexico City where I lived until I moved back to the United States for grad school. In 2016, I was awarded the Fulbright-García Robles scholarship. The accolade symbolized an accomplishment I had dreamt of since I was a tween living a few miles away from Princeton University; the University awed me from a young age and I had since dreamt of attending an Ivy League University. As a Fulbright scholar, I was now academically and financially poised to enter the graduate school of my dreams – the Harvard Kennedy School. I genuinely believed that my Mexican nationality would be an asset, a strength that contributed to the diversity and multicultural richness of the Harvard Kennedy School. Then Trump was elected.
As a proud and somewhat naive feminist in my early twenties, I full-heartedly supported Hillary Clinton. I dismissed Bernie Sanders as a loud, angry man and ached to see a woman be proclaimed President of the United States. I religiously watched every debate and memorized the FiveThirtyEight electoral map and the electoral vote permutations required for a Clinton win. At first, I thought Trump’s presidential bid was laughable. I stopped laughing when he called Mexican men “bad hombres” and rapists. On election day, I cried myself to sleep when Trump was declared winner.
In the next months, the sadness waned and anger settled in instead. I was not angry at Trump for saying what had previously been deemed unthinkably cruel. I was angry with Americans. I was angry with everyone who had voted for him. I was angry with everyone who had failed to stop him. I was supposed to move to Cambridge, Massachusetts to start my Master’s in Public Policy in August 2017 and was considering giving up my scholarship and approximately two-hundred-thousand-dollar admission to Harvard. In the end, I decided to go.
My time at Harvard was difficult. I could not stop thinking about how the (electoral) majority of the country where I now lived had endorsed Trump's racist, mysogynist views. I didn't just feel unwelcomed in the United States after 2016, I knew I was unwelcomed and always had been. Admittedly, Cambridge is an extremely progressive and wealthy city; an outlier in the country. Still, I constantly felt threatened by what I assumed was hidden misogyny and racism from my American classmates. I always wondered “What if this or that person voted for Trump? What if their parents of siblings voted for Trump? If so, how can I be friends with them?” I could not separate “good” Americans from “bad” Americans. After all, the country as a whole and its flawed political system had helped elect Donald Trump. Everyone played a part and I held everyone who was American responsible. I struggled to make friends, especially with my American classmates and eventually fell into a depression during the end of my first year. During my second year, I found my footing again, I fell in love and nurtured life-long friendships with other international students from India, Turkey, Colombia, Australia, Chile, Spain, and Venezuela.
During my two years of grad school, I also wrestled with my identity in ways I hadn't before. For the first time in my life, I was labeled as “a woman of color” even though I was considered a “Whitexican” back home. For the first time also, I felt unseen and unheard. I understood that my participation in class was only valuable because of my identity as a Mexican woman, not for its actual content. At the same time, I was considered offensive for many politically incorrect behaviors. I incorrectly assumed all the Latino students spoke Spanish even though they were second-generation Americans. I criticized organized religion and US military interventionism before learning that there is an unspoken bipartisan agreement on the two things all Americans love regardless of political affiliations, race, class, or gender: God and the military.
When I graduated, I moved to New York City with my Australian my partner and now husband, who I met in grad school. For months, I battled to get a visa that would allow me to stay in the United States with my partner. Eventually, I found a job in the New York City government and succeeded in getting a TN visa. I lived in New York City for four years during most of the COVID-19 pandemic. When Biden was elected, I banged pots and pans outside the window of our Brooklyn apartment, filled with joy and relief. I remember thinking that perhaps the past four years had been a glitch and that my childhood instincts were right. Maybe I had been wrong, and the United States, and its people, were not so bad. When January 6th rioters desecrated the Capitol Building, I cried while looking at the images during a vacation in Mexico. In 2022, when Roe v. Wade was overturned, I attended the protest in lower Manhattan wearing the same green handkerchief I had worn to protest abortion bans in Mexico a few years prior.
Two years ago, I moved from the United States to Australia to pursue a PhD and live closer to my husband’s family. As the 2024 presidential cycle approached, I consciously made the decision to avoid obsessing over the polls or the news coming from the United States. When Biden dropped out of the election, I was intrigued by the prospect of Kamala Harris becoming the first female and South Asian President of the United States. I began listening to The Daily and Ezra Klein again.
Listening to the news coming out of the United States, I am once dismayed by the idea that so many Americans are willing to vote for Donald Trump. A cynical side of me cannot help but laugh at the unfruitful pleas from Democrats to vote for Harris even though so few Trump supporters and so-called "undecided voters" are likely to change their minds. Another side of me wonders about what a female US presidency would look like and hurts at the prospect that both of Trump’s victories will be against women. According to most polls and political pundits, the election will once again be a toss-up and the few Americans who will turn the election will decide who they vote for as they drive to the polling station. Still, so many Americans will refrain from voting at all.
A few weeks ago, talking to my dad on the phone, he told me that roughly 2 out of 100 students from the community college in Pennsylvania where he teaches are registered to vote. How is it possible that hundreds of young Americans in the most decisive state for the presidential elections are unaware of their unique position and power? How is it possible that the American political system is so broken that potentially decisive voters will skip voting all together? In just a few days, the entire world will be looking at Pennsylvania yet these students seem unaware of this fact. Perhaps they simply don’t care. And if, indeed they do not care, then why do I care? After all, I am not even American.
