#immigrant

Foisting an identity on people rather than allowing them the freedom and space to create their own is shady. ↗

— Raquel Cepeda

#freedom-of-thought #hispanic #identity #immigrant-experience #latino-americans

The gaping hole in her heart is amplified when she catches a glimpse of the strands of silver hair framing her once young face in the mirror. ↗

— Raquel Cepeda

#rocio #self-image #stressed #experience

Superorganism. A biologist coined that word for our great African ant colonies, claiming that consciousness and intelligence resided not in the individual ant but in the collective ant mind. The trail of red taillights stretching to the horizon as day broke around us made me think of that term. Order and purpose must reside somewhere other than within each vehicle. That morning I heard the hum, the respiration of the superorganism. It's a sound the new immigrant hears but not for long. By the time I learned to say "6-inch Number 7 on rye with Swiss hold the lettuce," the sound, too, was gone. It became part of the what the mind would label silence. You were subsumed into the superorganism. ↗

— Abraham Verghese

#consciousness #immigrants #new-york #intelligence

I am from there. I am from here. I am not there and I am not here. I have two names, which meet and part, and I have two languages. I forget which of them I dream in. ↗

— Mahmoud Darwish

#immigrants #dreams