Borderlands/La Frontera
The Moments We Remember Most
But, if you seek the most complete account of our time here, you have to remember the joy we felt — a necessary antidote to the bitter poison we faced. Sometimes they came in small bursts, sometimes large ones, but either way they sustained us.
Whose Harvard? Yours.
I knew what the acceptance signified — success, socioeconomic mobility, prestige, and worth — but I felt unsure how I fit into it. Perhaps this is what you — Class of 2023 admittee — are feeling. You might be wondering what it means to have the Harvard name attached to yours.
Los Vendidos, The Sellouts
Ten years later, my Harvard enrollment signified endless educational opportunity in exchange for being a minority at a predominantly white institution. Doors opened for my first-generation, low-income Latina hands. Doors that had always been closed to those before me. With that opportunity came the transformation of “don’t forget where you come from” to “don’t sell out.”
Breaking Latinx Gender Roles
I sit there, wondering how he makes it so easy to be comfortable with his body, how he’s able to release a music video like that knowing that a deluge of questions will follow: Is Bad Bunny gay or bisexual? Why would he paint his nails, wear that outfit, act so out of line with what a man should be?
When’d You Start Caring About Immigrants?
R: Immigration is an increasingly hot topic of conversation and of academic study. But migration is as old as mankind and people’s critiques of immigration control have been consistent. Though many turned a blind eye to it, activists constantly criticized then-President Barack Obama for deporting more people than any president before him. The academics I cite have been studying Salvadoran immigration for decades — showing the pernicious, harmful effects of our immigration system. Well-meaning, self-identified progressives decry the Trump’s treatment of children in detention centers, and I can’t help but wonder if they noticed the photographs of kids in cages, laying on mats, covered in shiny emergency blankets back in 2014.
Z: There are memories I can’t forget. Memories of begging Harvard institutions to fund events for undocumented students on campus in the pre-Trump world. Memories of rejection, when they told me that we just weren’t “inclusive” enough. They’d act like my friends had to sell their stories, just to get support the university should’ve been providing. As if their identities were so easy to reveal when Obama, the “Deporter-in-Chief,” was in office. In the same breath, those Harvard students and the institutions they represented claimed progressive politics and rejected giving us the only help we could have hoped for. It wasn’t fair.
R: If the current buzz has finally motivated folks to genuinely start talking about immigration, that’s great. But they’ll have to acknowledge that immigration is complex. Approaching it, whether in academic spaces or day-to-day conversations, requires hours of sustained reflection. Those of us whose lives have been shaped by immigration have — out of necessity — spent hours reflecting on our present and imagining alternatives to our current immigration system. Individuals with the luxury of ignoring the effect of U.S. immigration policies run the risk of treating immigration as an abstract issue, putting themselves at such a distance that they forget the very real implications of their stances. It’s simple to claim to care about immigration or develop an ideological stance on the topic when it’s nothing but a timely, flashy thought-experience. A real, long-standing commitment to the cause is much, much harder.
