ADRIAN MA, HOST:
We've all heard the concept of legal citizenship, but a new book looks at the concept of social citizenship. My colleague Emily Kwong spoke with the author, Daisy Hernandez, about this idea of what it means to be a U.S. citizen.
EMILY KWONG, BYLINE: 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 Colombia, Hernandez presents the U.S. immigration system as a game whose rules are always changing. Daisy Hernandez is with us now. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Hi.
DAISY HERNANDEZ: Thank you so much for having me.
KWONG: Your mom is from Colombia, 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 women 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?
HERNANDEZ: 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 (laughter).
KWONG: Everywhere. Yes. Union City, New Jersey.
HERNANDEZ: 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 3 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.
KWONG: 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. Like, 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.
HERNANDEZ: Yeah. This hearkens 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.
KWONG: Yeah.
HERNANDEZ: 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.
KWONG: Yes. Yes.
HERNANDEZ: 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, you know, 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 (ph), you know? But we could also define it as having a very limited social citizenship here in the U.S.
KWONG: Yeah. Well, 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 I - 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."
HERNANDEZ: 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, in 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 nor I had health insurance, so we relied on community clinics. I write in the book about my mother, into her 50s, relying on these health fairs 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...
KWONG: Yeah.
HERNANDEZ: ...And 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...
KWONG: Oh.
HERNANDEZ: ...Auntie.
KWONG: You wanted to name them as your dependents?
HERNANDEZ: I wanted to name them as my dependents.
KWONG: Oh.
HERNANDEZ: 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 their labors.
KWONG: 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, etc. What would you say to them?
HERNANDEZ: 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 U.S. 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.
KWONG: 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 asked you, like, is it safe to produce a book about citizenship now? What ultimately brought you to the decision to keep going and publish this?
HERNANDEZ: 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.
KWONG: Daisy Hernandez, thank you so much for speaking with us.
HERNANDEZ: Thank you.
KWONG: "Citizenship: Notes On An American Myth" is out now.
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