This Latinx Heritage Month, we’re telling the untold stories of women, women of color and LGBTQ+ people. Subscribe to our daily newsletter.
Latinx people in the United States are the nation’s largest ethnic minority, a kaleidoscope that encompasses one in five Americans representing immeasurable stories and experiences. And yet so often, we are told what shape our futures should take here. The flavor of the American Dream we should strive for.
This month, some of the Latinx staff at The 19th are reclaiming that narrative. We are looking at all the ways that our families and our communities have crafted their own path. The ways that they have been pioneers of change and written their own versions of their American Dreams. Some have carried their families through sheer will. Others have served as a crucial tether to the communities we had to leave behind. In other ways, we are still figuring it out. The story isn’t always simple in a country that hasn’t always welcomed us.
The 19th thanks our sponsors. Become one.
And yet we push on. And we each do it in our own way, for the benefit of those who come next. Recuerda: Progress can come in many flavors.
A note on the title of this year’s celebration
At The 19th, we are constantly and collaboratively exploring how we can represent ourselves and the communities we cover through our storytelling. During a recent brainstorming session over the celebration of Latin American heritage, we talked about whether to use the name that has historically been used to mark the occasion.
“Hispanic Heritage Month” first came about as a weeklong commemoration under President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. President Ronald Reagan expanded it into a month in 1988. That year, there were 19.1 million persons of Latin American descent in the United States, or 8.1 percent of the country’s population.
Much has changed about the size and composition of this group since then. Today, people from or with roots in Latin America account for 19 percent of U.S. residents, a cohort that is increasingly more diverse. Demographics isn’t the only thing that has shifted, though. We have also evolved in our understanding of a colonizer’s role in subjugating peoples and cultures and our definition of gender.
After our brainstorming session and a staff poll, we decided to call the commemorative month that begins on September 15 “Latinx Heritage Month.”
Latinx is perhaps the most common word accepted as a gender-neutral representation of Latin Americans in the United States. It’s far from perfect, but it is, for now, the best alternative to the binary options available — Latino and Latina — and to “Hispanic,” an exclusionary term that signals the presence of Spain as a colonial power.
Here’s what’s not changing: We will continue to defer to how our sources want to identify by asking them. This intention remains a crucial part of our practice in the newsroom.
Our identities and lexicon continue to develop, much like our country, so this is not a closed case for us. Though a decision has been made for this year, we’ll remain open and alert to opportunities to do representative journalism well. — Fernanda Santos, managing editor
Nearly half a century ago now, my dad was sitting on a beach in Cuba when he got the news that a boat had arrived for him. It was May 1980, when thousands of Cubans were leaving the island to seek asylum in the United States in what would become known as the Mariel boatlift. But dad didn’t want to leave. He didn’t know what to expect in this new country and, besides, he was 14. He had a quinces that night with a hot date (Hi, mom).
Eventually, his family convinced him to go, and he packed into a shipping vessel with 250 other people for a wet, 12-hour overnight trip to Key West. He eventually settled in Miami to start life as a high school freshman.
It was just him, his dad and his sister then. He had floppy black hair and wore donated bell bottom jeans and T-shirts. They navigated life as outsiders in a town that was being flooded by them. More than 100,000 Cubans arrived in the United States by that fall, most of them to Miami.
Dad was brilliant — and applied. He graduated sixth in his high school class despite speaking only broken English, and he scored a scholarship to work at Ford Motor Company and study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had a baby then — my sister — and turned it all down to stay close to home, working two jobs at UPS and a shoe store while attending college for engineering.
Then, 16 years after he stood her up, he returned to Cuba to find my mom. Her marriage to my biological father was dissolving, and she agreed to meet him at a reunion party with their old friends. I was just four. They were married later that same year and he helped bring her and I over to the United States (Dad is my stepdad, but he’s always been “dad” to me).
We were first, followed by at least three dozen others he has helped bring to the United States over 44 years, all of them in search of something bigger than what they left behind. He has shepherded us through a journey not dissimilar to his own, full of unanswered questions, strange looks and broken English. And in doing so he has created engineers and nurses and analysts and a journalist. His very own Mariel. — Chabeli Carrazana, reporter
My Abuela turned 99 and a half last month, and while most people say her age is a testament to her resilience, she usually replies with, “no, solo soy vieja.” (I’m just old.) But our legacies are defined in some part by the memories we share, and when you’ve been around for a century, they’re endless.
Her stories are shrinking from long, detailed retellings of the past to short novellas she asks my mom to piece together for her when she gets confused. But her hands reflect years of cooking arroz con pollo, churros and natilla for neighbors in Key West. Her eyes still reveal the love she carries for my Pop and the life they built together. Her tiny feet tap along in bed any time we play her favorite music. Even without words, every inch of Aba is the greatest story I’ve ever known.
I don’t know how much time I have left with the strongest tie to my Cuban heritage, the invisible string holding my identity together whether she realizes it or not. In some ways, though, she is my future — she’s shaped the person I’m still becoming and is a 4’10” pillar behind the lessons I hold tight. For now, I’m embracing the simplicity of our time together, soaking up every joke she cracks and every moment — big or small — she’s able to recount from the long life that led her to me. — Megan Kearney, digital producer
This upcoming December, my family and I will mark 20 years since we immigrated to the United States. We came through a visa program for entrepreneurs, and for a few years, lived in a state of limbo all too familiar to many immigrants.
The day our green cards were granted in 2009, we celebrated over cheap wine and cheese with extended family — a collection of second and third cousins who were also trying to forge new lives here. Those green cards set off a countdown: In five years, we’d be eligible to apply for U.S. citizenship. In that five-year stretch, I graduated from high school, then college, and accepted my first full-time job as a reporter. With some exceptions, permanent residency allowed me to live and thrive like the American citizens around me. It also allowed me to ignore bigger questions about my identity: The more settled we got, the more our accents disappeared, the more our Dominicaness became American Latinidad, the more I was pestered by the question, “Are we, American?”
Eventually, the door to citizenship opened, and each member of our family seemed to approach it differently. For my parents, it was the culmination of a lifetime of striving. For me, the moment marked the first time I had to make a personal decision about my immigration story, and for all the time I’d spent here, I wasn’t eager to walk through that door. It was 2015, a banner year for the brand of anti-immigrant sentiments that would shape national politics in the era of former President Donald Trump. U.S. citizenship would come with the right to vote, but I was plagued by what some experts call the “guest complex,” the feeling that regardless of your immigration status, you don’t have an equal stake in the future of this country.
Eventually, my dad sold me on a pragmatic approach: He said an American passport would make international travel easier and safer. After the ceremony was over, a woman gave me a form and asked if I wanted to register to vote on the spot. I declined. Over the 10 years that followed, I cemented my career in political journalism, met and married my husband, un Americano, and gave birth to my daughter, who next month will have both U.S. and Dominican citizenship.
I learned a lot of things in that time, most importantly, that my family and I are not guests here. By divine providence and sheer willpower, we opened doors to a great and complicated future that my parents couldn’t have imagined 20 years ago. Our lives became tangled up in the fabric of everything that is the United States, one inextricable from the other. When I cast a vote this November, I’ll be helping shape its future, too. — Mel Leonor Barclay, reporter
