An essential read to better understand America and its immigrant stories.
A personal narrative that dismantles the myth of assimilation as a pathway to belonging and success for people of color.
At age 14, Arce was an undocumented Mexican immigrant whose parents “ate American exceptionalism like it was holy communion on Sunday.” All things were possible, they believed, for those who worked hard and kept their noses clean, and belonging in the land of the free was simply a matter of intelligence, English, and money. As an adult, the author became an American citizen and landed a coveted job at Goldman Sachs, where she “made enough money to be considered upper middle class.” Yet her journey is not an illustration of meritocracy. Rather, Arce exposes the idea of the American dream as mendacious propaganda and shows the deep harm it causes to people of color, including immigrants, who are urged to chase Whiteness as a pathway to success. The author examines how assimilation makes a person smaller, obscuring “the most essential and beautiful parts of ourselves, our history, and our culture.” Arce, the author of My (Underground) American Dream and Someone Like Me, reaches into the histories of immigration, Mexico, and Latinidad for important context, explaining the complications of colonialism, race, and the slave trade. She cogently makes the case that a nation founded on the idea that “all men are created equal” must embrace, support, and love its citizens of color for who they are, and she convincingly argues that the American dream should not demand any person’s erasure. This is an important book that challenges the idea of American exceptionalism with equal parts passion, fury, intimacy, and ignored history. Arce celebrates the Mexican American immigrant experience in all its vibrancy and nuance while fearlessly naming the pain inflicted by American racism, ethnocentrism, and xenophobia.
An essential read to better understand America and its immigrant stories.Pub Date: March 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-78701-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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