100 Stories

I really try getting rid of things. Every so often I'll take a day and try to re-organize everything I threw into drawers, closets, or on my bedside table the past month or two. At the end of my most recent "be an adult and clean up" day, I stepped back into the frame of my bedroom door to observe my success... aaand I laughed. My bedside table, which is actually a coffee table I picked up off the curb, was covered in stacks of various books and journals, picture frames I still hadn't figured out where to hang, dried flowers, an old sauce jar full of pens, and a flower pot I grabbed from a co-worker's yard sale sat on the back end, holding two traditional fans I had requested from my parent's travels to Spain. To top it off, additional family heirlooms lined a portion of the windowsill right above the organized chaos that it is my bedside table.

"I am not a person of few things," I said to myself in cheerful surrender as I turned around and walked down the hall towards my kitchen, probably for a snack."I am a person of a hundred things from a hundred places."

Just a couple weeks earlier I'd explored the Library of Congress and stepped into a temporary exhibition on the evolution of photography in the U.S. As I watched the associated short film, for the first time it hit me that the history it showed wasn't really my history.

In a way it was. I'm American, born and raised in this land. I grew up with the same U.S. history classes as most everyone else, assuming that because it was the history of the country in which I lived, it was my history. And again, in a way it is. But until 50 years ago, neither side of my family lived in this country...so is it?

Ask 100 people what it means to be American and you'll probably get a lot of different answers and sentiments. Ask 100 first generation Americans the same question and they won't know what to say.

At the end of last year, I stumbled upon America Ferrera's "American Like Me," a collection of stories about the experience of growing up between cultures - largely because of some sort of immigration in the family's more immediate history. Even though I'm a first generation American, it never occurred to me that stories from immigrants or descendants of immigrants would resonate with me. So it surprised me that when reading these stories written by people from all over the world, I saw glimpses of my own story and found a home I didn't know existed.

I took this knowledge with me to D.C. as I considered my place not only in American history but in its future evolution. I'm convinced that too many people have come from too many places to fall into one neatly written script. The story of America cannot be written from one perspective. We are a people made of a hundred things from a hundred places, with a hundred stories to tell.

I would have thought my hardest sell on this theory would be to those with culturally ordinary heritage. But then I meet people like Eduardo. Eduardo is an older gentleman who teaches Spanish to first graders and wasn't too pleased with me when I initially thought he'd said his name was Ricardo. During our 30 minute airport conversation, I found out that Eduardo (not Ricardo) had immigrated to the U.S from Mexico and was on his way back from visiting his son who now lives in Germany. I told him my own cultural heritage (Spain & India) to which he repeatedly and without jest insisted I was not Indian because my skin wasn't dark enough. I went back and forth with him, even pulling up a photo of my family as proof but he was relentless. I finally gave up, ending that portion of the conversation with something along the lines of "I don't know how you're going to tell me what I am but alright then."

Was I bothered? Yes. But these moments don’t define me, they interest me. How does a man born in Mexico, immigrate to the US, and have a son living in Germany not know to be open to surprises? Maybe it was his personality that showed through his disputes around my heritage and not a lack of awareness. Or maybe a world so close to his heart is still far from his mind's understanding.

That wasn't the end of my time with Eduardo. It turned out we were on the same connecting flight and walked together to the next gate. Misunderstandings don't need to separate us. As people made of a hundred things from a hundred places, we are bound to misunderstand one another. The question is - how do we move forward together?

That's how I see the future of the American story. Hundreds of people from hundreds of places trying to make sense of how we all got here and how we move forward together

Me and my (sort of) grandma checking out the capital. Maybe Eduardo would have allowed her to be Indian? Ironically, a Spanish-speaking couple took our photo. That's my kind of America.