Post Immigrant: Defined

I am not an immigrant; but the immigrant experience has informed my identity to such an extent that other more politicized terms like “Chicano,” “Hispanic,” or “Mexican American,” seem to me like foreign impositions. If anything, I would say that I am a “second generation immigrant,” whose roots are intricately tied to those of my parents--folks that, no matter how hard they try, will always be immigrants. Hence, the post-immigrant experience, one which sees us, second generation immigrants, furthering the projects of our forebearers, transgressing on new borders, occupying new territories, settling in new realms—still wary of deportation, but only symbolically (unless we are physically deported, which is still possible!). The borders which we’d like to cross are not the physical borders separating countries, but the borders of the immigrant imaginary, i.e., the dreams of those who dared to uproot some generations, decades, years, days ago. I live the post-immigrant experience because my biography has been interrupted by their immigrant experience. And while I don’t share in the immigrant experience which nurtured me and remains as trace deep within my subconscious, while I can no longer faithfully own up to it, I can’t help but be shaped by it. My post-immigrant experience thus speaks a difference rooted in the dreams of my father—in his own idea of conquest and colonization.