Daisy Hernández argues 'Citizenship' has never been a fixed legal status

Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day, I'm Andrew Limbong.

Any immigrant or immigrant family knows that citizenship can often feel like the last

piece of the puzzle.

You spend years and years jumping through hoops filling out this form and that, making

sure your teeth are crossed and your eyes are dotted just for that one piece of paper

that puts you on the other side of that line.

The official document that says, you were once this and now you're that.

Of course, things in life are rarely so binary.

The book Citizenship Notes on an American Myth by Daisy Hernandez is an exploration into

how complex the very concept of citizenship actually is.

She tells Empire's Emily Kwong that in America we're constantly changing what it means

to be an American citizen.

That's a head.

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Citizenship is a game of tic-tac-toe.

Your father had a Cuban passport, your father won.

That's how Daisy Hernandez sets up her new book Citizenship Notes on an American Myth,

a collection of essays that combines history with memoir.

The daughter of a refugee of Castro's Cuba and a mother from Columbia, Hernandez presents

the US immigration system as a game whose rules are always changing.

Daisy Hernandez is with us now.

Welcome to all things considered.

Hi.

Thank you so much for having me.

Your mom is from Columbia and she told you stories about how she came to this country

at bedtime.

You write about being a kid with your sister, like, in darkness, under the covers listening

to her stories and you write, quote, I learned as a child that Citizenship was a private story.

One woman told in the dark where faces could not be seen.

So I'm wondering, what made you want to write this book and bring these stories into

the light?

Yeah, I think part of it was growing up in that immigrant family, not only with my

mom and my father, but I also had an uncle from Peru, another uncle from Puerto Rico.

We had family friends from Mexico, Argentina, Guatemala.

So I tell people I grew up in the United Nations of Latinos, located in New Jersey.

Everywhere.

Yes.

Union City, New Jersey.

Union City, New Jersey.

So Citizenship was so at the center of my life and when I was a child, this is 1986,

the Reagan administration passed legislation with Congress, creating a pathway to Citizenship

for three million people, mostly Mexicans.

And to me, it's been so revealing that, you know, four decades later, we now have such

a deadly persecution of immigrant families.

So part of working on this book was to investigate that change and what citizenship has meant

to us.

The book is so deeply researched with history and also with, I really want to make this

clear with concepts, because I don't think we've always had the language to talk about

immigration and about citizenship as a country.

We just don't know the words and we don't use the same words.

And one concept I found really powerful is the idea of social citizenship.

Can you describe what that is?

It's a type of citizenship that not all citizens have.

Yeah, this arc is back to the work of the sociologist, T.H. Marshall, who was looking

at the history of England and so described the trajectory of citizenship, starting with

civil citizenship and the right to own property, to have free speech, to then political citizenship,

which the right to have your vote.

But then social citizenship, he saw as emerging in the 20th century with essentially having

I think he called it the right to a civilized life, but what is your access to medical care?

What is your access to education?

Does everyone get equal opportunities for this?

And it really gave me the language to think about, yeah, what many people of color in

the United States experience, which is a very limited social citizenship.

It means that, yes, we don't all have the same access to schooling, to medical care,

to housing, and we often describe it here in the U.S. as a case of racism, of socioeconomics,

things along those lines, these isms, you know, but we could also define it as having

a very limited social citizenship here in the U.S.

Yeah, all that reminds me of a line that really got me when you talk about marriage as a

pathway towards citizenship, and you say, and you have a sweetie, and of your own, but

you said, you write, quote, I didn't want to marry my girlfriend, who had a job with

health insurance.

I wanted to marry my mother to give her health insurance, to extend her social citizenship

in that way.

I did, and it's important to acknowledge here that both of my parents worked in factories

when I was growing up in New Jersey and textile factories, and initially there was some health

insurance coverage, but, you know, as the years went on, and unions came under attack,

there were sort of fewer and fewer benefits, and so for most of my childhood, neither my parents,

my sister and her eye had health insurance, so we relied on community clinics, I write

in the book about my mother into her fifties, relying on these health fares that, you know,

would pop up in local parks, run by nurse practitioners.

So yeah, so there was so much that we did not have access to, and for me, when I got my

first job out of college, I mean, that was the first time that I had a robust health insurance

plan, and I absolutely, I actually, you know, called the insurance company to find out

if I could include my mom and my dad and my sister and my auntie.

You wanted to name them as insurance?

I wanted to name them as my dependents, and I still remember this very kind insurance

representative on the phone with me who said, I'm so sorry, but you can't claim them as

dependents for the purposes of insurance, and it was so painful because I only had that

job, and this was a job in publishing, and I only had that college education because this

whole family of people had supported me and made that possible, but they couldn't reap

the rewards of the labors.

Here you are kind of showing the ways that citizenship is almost like a social construct, like

race, like gender, it can get remade, it can get rewritten by those in power, but there

are those who say, no, no, no, citizenship is this well-defined legal status.

There are laws about it, et cetera.

What would you say to them?

Yeah, citizenship is definitely not a single fixed status, and it just never has been,

so when we look back at the history of our country, starting in 1790, Congress said,

you can only naturalize if you're a free white immigrant in this country, and then less

than a hundred years later, we had a civil war to abolish slavery and to determine the

citizenship of black Americans.

In that time period, we created the Chinese Exclusion Act that led to the exclusion of almost

everyone from Asia, from coming to the country, from naturalizing in the early 1900s, women

with birthright citizenship could lose that citizenship if they married a foreigner.

In the 1930s, we deported more than a million Mexican Americans, half of them were US citizens

during that time, and I would tell them, you know, in the 1960s and 70s, when we had

the civil rights movement, the gay liberation movement, women's movement, all of that was

an expansion of social citizenship, right?

It was an expansion of what citizenship could mean for those who had technically been born

with it, so we have just been constantly changing what citizenship means.

It's quite a reckoning we're having right now, and maybe every generation goes through

this, but we're definitely going through this, and as far as your contribution goes at

the very end of the book, you reveal that a friend asks you, like, is it safe to produce

a book about citizenship now?

What ultimately brought you to this decision to keep going and publish this?

I think that we lose democracy more quickly when we stay silent.

And silence is what the rise of a fascist government wants, so I wanted to do my part, however

tiny it might be, to keep our democracy alive.

Daisy Hernandez, thank you so much for speaking with us.

Thank you.

Citizenship Notes on an American Myth is out now.

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