Dec 04, 2018
Confronting the Violence of Gentrification in Your Hometown
Moving home to Newark has been a surreal experience because I have had to mourn places that once were, but are no longer.
Moving home to Newark has been a surreal experience because I have had to mourn places that once were, but are no longer.
There are rules to who gets to live the American dream, and who doesn’t.
As a child growing up in a landlocked state, I’d imagined the flock of gulls as a cloud of wings, calls sounding like laughter. Now I was struggling to grasp all that we’d lost.
“I console myself regularly with the fact that the problem is not unique to me, that young people everywhere are trying to figure it out.”
The magic of the Bandikui church is that it stays, rests, and remains, despite the world moving on and away from it.
I grew up in the in-between: white, Hispanic, a pigment of mixtures that blended unevenly.
In Hindi, you don’t say ‘sorry;’ you ask for forgiveness. So, growing up, I made the mistake of apologizing for who I am.
“Nobody will stop a young blond girl, that’s the truth,” you said. This was when I grew angry with you, when I wanted to scrap our week-old friendship.
“I felt as if the world was coming to an end.”
The roadside cross is a jarring balance of the emotional poles, internal and external, surely an action by and for the remaining soul—not the one who has departed.
For me, loss of faith was hollowing. Can you believe in miracles without believing in God?
I felt my mom’s grip tighten around my hand as dozens surged across the Rio Grande, the water waist-high. Adults held children in their arms or carried them in rebozos across their backs. We watched as the Border Patrol agents caught and detained some people while dozens more ran past.
German chemists. They empowered us, they ruined us, they controlled so very much.
What makes immigrant parents like mine worthy of love, respect, and admiration in our country?
How two diasporas shaped who I am.
As a black man in the field of social work, my dad was, as a white female coworker of his once put it, “like a fly in buttermilk.”
I’d get up at six a.m. every Saturday, to be at the drugstore by seven. There I could fill my father's chemotherapy prescription.
“Today’s Turkey is a place where about half of the population is utterly dismayed by the state of affairs, while the other half couldn’t be more thrilled.”
This “heritage site” has been home to my family since the 1940s.
What a strange place the internet is, where we can reach a stranger by the slip of a key—or get their mail.
