By Mary Turck
A “red-and-white-polka-dotted Minnie Mouse dress” stands for Soraya Membreno’s experience in attending a small, elite liberal arts college, as an immigrant from a non-upper-class background. She chooses this dress for graduation, and then sees all of her classmates in “a very specific kind of dress, a white or cream-colored or pale pastel shift, simple and strapless.”
Her mother cannot get a visa to come from Nicaragua for Membreno’s graduation. Her father manages to attend but looks as out of place as she feels.
“Somewhere along the line, in the flurry of niceties and ceremonies, with my father relegated to the sidelines of my peripheral vision, that weekend made clear the very thing I had been denying for the past four years: I was being subsumed by something else, going to a place where my family could not follow. I stood out like hell, a polka-dotted dress in a sea of white, but there I was, still in it. Still part of it. And he could do no more than snap a picture.” A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty writers on immigration, family, and the meaning of home. Edited by Nicole Chung and Mensa Demary. Catapult, 2020.
Membreno is one of twenty immigrant writers in A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home (Edited by Nicole Chung and Mensa Demary. Catapult, 2020). They do not tell coming-to-America stories, but rather deeply personal stories: crossing the India-Pakistan border at partition and 60 years later, haircuts and Miyazaki heroines, and growing up on both sides of the border in El Paso/Ciudad Juárez.
These twenty stories, in twenty voices, raise many of the same ethical issues of connection and separation, unjust social structures, and individual responsibility and possibility as philosopher Jennifer Morton’s Moving Up without Losing Your Way (Princeton University Press, 2019.)
Both books, in their different ways, do the work that Morton describes as “think[ing] more critically and reflectively about the broader social, political, and economic context of both one’s adopted country and one’s home, and how one might play a role in changing them for the better.”
Mary Turck is a freelance writer and editor and teaches writing and journalism at Metropolitan State University and Macalester College. She pens the News Day, Immigration News and Community Journalism blogs. She is also the former editor of the TC Daily Planet and of the award-winning Connection to the Americas and AMERICAS.ORG, a recovering attorney, and the author of many books for young people (and a few for adults), mostly focusing on historical and social issues.