My apologies for the delay in posting; I have been in a geographic whirlwind these last eight months, and I’m finally settling down into my last year as an undergraduate. With that, I would like to invite the few (but beloved) readers I have to view a new project I’m doing: a blog documenting my experience writing a senior thesis.
Here is a post I recently wrote for it (it’s quite hot off the press). I will occasionally cross-post, but for the most part, you’ll find it over there. Without further ado, here’s a post from my blog, “F-ck Your Borders:”
Tonight, I went to a discussion about “Going Big” and what it means to pursue the concept of a “human family” in the midst of inequities, violence, overworking, underpayment, etc. The conversation was, to put it lightly, abstract and at times scattered. Some days I leave events at my school feeling disheartened instead of invigorated.
I pulled out the book that I quoted yesterday, Reform Without Justice: Latino Migrant Politics and the Homeland Security State and read some of the passages that I had already furiously begun to mark. So often at idealistic schools such as my own college we celebrate our promise to do, when in fact there is so much that needs to be done.
It made me think of the motivations behind this giant senior thesis I’m embarking on. Immigration is something that does not seem to affect me from the outside, but weighs heavily on my mind often. I am a privileged person, and I recognize that almost instantly.
It is because I know that when I step into college classrooms, I am doing something that my great grandmother did not, that my grandmother did not. I am doing something that my mom did while she carried me inside of her. I think about the young Latina mothers who feel that they can’t pursue their education because they need to work or sustain their family. I think about all the nights that my mother went without so that she could give to me. She crossed the border as a child, not even knowing that she would bring into this world a child who would study the very concepts of migration.
I have been asked many times why it is that I am so interested in immigration reform and migration politics. Typically I say something about my geographic location (Southern California) and how it’s an issue that permeates into the consciousness of most Californian residents.
But it’s so much more than that. It’s about the fact that I think of the pure sacrifice and struggle that my family and other Latin@ and other migrant families are undergoing just to live in this global capitalist society. Just to survive in this place we call the land of the “free.”
I think about that. I think about the fact that the United States is indeed what I call home, but it is not my heart. My heart is in my ancestry, it is in my blood, and it is with the countless migrant dreamers who are fighting to sustain their visions for a brighter future.
This project is going to take a lot out of me, but I am going to give it everything I have.
Life Writing, Spot Writing 