Dear Reader,
I grew up believing I was alone in feeling stuck between cultures. I didn’t know other Americans shared my experience, because I never saw my story told. I tried shaping an identity that would make sense to other people by shedding pieces of myself and attempting to assimilate.
Ironically, the opportunities to fulfill my dreams were the ones that required me to embrace my unique identity. I didn’t get my career-making roles in Real Women Have Curves, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and Ugly Betty in spite of who I was, I got them because of who I was: someone who didn’t fit easily into any preexisting mold. All the labels that I had been told my whole life would keep me from success—brown, short, chubby, too Americanized, too ethnic-looking, et cetera—were the very aspects that made me perfect for the roles that would make my dream career a reality.
I learned quickly that my particular challenges gave me the power to connect to others. Everywhere I went I met people who also felt underrepresented, unseen, and like they didn’t fit in to fixed boxes. I found something I never could have imagined as a child: a larger community that, like me, struggled to find identity between the cracks of cultures. Finding community and a sense of belonging emboldened me to not only own my experiences but to also celebrate them and to create from them.
I invited my friends, peers, and heroes to share their stories in this book so that we might build community; so that we could identify our whole selves within a larger culture that tends to leave important pieces of our stories out; so that our voices would amplify one another’s as we declare who we actually are. We are kids with no key chains, daughters carrying history in the gaps of our teeth. We are the sons of parents who don’t speak of the past, inheritors of warriors’ blood and mad bargaining skills. We are the grandchildren of survival: legacies, delivered from genocide, colonization, and enslavement. We are the slayers of “impossible.” We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors’ dreams wearing the weight of their sacrifice on our backs. Our love is radical; our unstraightened hair, a tiny revolution. We are here to survive, to thrive, to live. We connect to our roots clumsily, unknowingly, unceasingly. We call ourselves “American” enthusiastically, reluctantly, or not at all. We take fragments of what was broken, severed, or lost in history, and we create whole selves, new families, and better futures. We live as citizens of a country that does not always claim us or even see us, and yet, we continue to build, to create, and to compel it toward its own promise.
Dear reader, there is great power in your story, especially in the pieces that have never been seen or told before. Please add your voice to ours so that we can see ever more authentic reflections of our realities in the culture that surrounds us. I am grateful and proud to be a part of this growing generation of Americans rewriting and reshaping the narrative to include our lived experiences.
Truly yours,
America