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How Immigrant Fiction Can Reshape American Realities
As the politicos do their darndest to render the Statue of Liberty little more than a New York City tourist trinket, what can American immigrant literary fiction offer our nation in terms of imagining a more welcoming, inclusive, and promising future?
Aug 20, 2025
Immigrants have been reshaping America since the pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. Or perhaps earlier than that fateful day in 1620, if you count Viking excursions dating back to 1021 and Spaniards landing in Florida in 1513. After the subjugation and genocide of the continent’s Indigenous people, and the establishment of the United States, wave after wave of newcomers from all over the globe, forced and unforced, have helped build what so many call “a nation of immigrants.”
Despite those facts, immigration has always been a topic of debate and a lightning rod for racism, xenophobia, and nationalism, a tool of political manipulation that appeals to people’s worst instincts and fears. Since the political rise of Donald Trump and his descent down that golden escalator in 2015, the debate on immigration and the US-Mexico border has shifted considerably to the right, after decades of centering on moderate concepts calling for comprehensive immigration reform and enhanced border security.
In the 2024 election cycle, both parties have skewed further in the same direction, narrowing the debate and placing immigrants and their advocates in an ever-tightening corner, with Republicans calling for mass deportations and Democrats supporting limits to asylum for refugees and backing away from providing public services (such as health and education) to undocumented immigrants and their children.
As the politicos do their darndest to render the Statue of Liberty little more than a New York City tourist trinket, what can American immigrant literary fiction offer our nation in terms of imagining a more welcoming, inclusive, and promising future?
Humanity, New Visions, and Hope
We are all human beings. To me, that’s what any good book reminds us of at its core. Authentic immigrant stories chronicle the desperation, urgency, and desire for safety and progress that drive immigrants to America’s shores in the first place. Immigrant and multicultural literature explore the process of becoming American, the rifts between immigrant generations and those born and raised here, and the sacrifices and rewards experienced by families and communities through acculturation, assimilation, and simply the act of living in a country full of promise yet also torn apart by a legacy of racism and discrimination. But, no matter where the readers and the writers come from, when one walks in the shoes of another, one gains empathy. In this way, immigrant literature builds bridges that foster unity in our shared humanity and multigenerational American experience.
Before embarking on my own journey as a writer of literary fiction steeped in the immigrant experience, some of the books that most deeply touched me were likewise immigrant or multicultural narratives. Even though they may not have been specifically about the Latino perspective, I saw myself and my family reflected in their characters’ struggles and dreams. At an early age, that experience as a reader opened my mind to cultures other than my own.
I did not get to New York City until I was a college student in New England, but I felt like I’d been there as a child making Jewish friends in the tenements of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep. I never spent a night in Harlem, but I could feel the dust on the floorboards and the tension between father and son in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. I’d never seen a ghost, but I saw myself and began to recognize my own voice as a writer in Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
When we recognize our genuine shared God-given humanity, the man-made machinations of maps fall into the shadows and the hope of who we could be and what we could do if we embrace each other lights the way in a blaze of glory.
When we see each other as more the same than “other” and “different,” we see that artificial constructs—such as borders and citizenship and legal documents providing permission for human beings to live in peace on various patches of the Earth’s soil drawn on maps by men who waged and won wars decades or centuries past—are just that: artificial, man-made, and by their very nature should be malleable. To connect and lift each other up, we must work toward more togetherness and less division.
Immigrant fiction is a laboratory for the creation of new visions for where we could go as a nation, as a continent, as a people united rather than divided. Just like science fiction has laid out blueprints for many of the high-tech devices and inventions that are now either fixtures in our daily lives or soon to revolutionize the way we live, immigrant fiction can help us imagine, envision, and thus create a new reality.
In my novel, The Resurrection of Fulgencio Ramirez, I imagine a world where a multigenerational utopia is built on a city that straddles both sides of the Rio Grande, a place where not just the borders between nations fade away but also those between life and death. In a manuscript I’m currently working on, I envision an America where someday there will be no borders at all. The walls and fences will be pulled down. The coils of razor wire will be retired. The militarized forces will be deployed elsewhere, far from the fertile farmlands of the Rio Grande Valley, far from the vast and perilous Chihuahuan Desert. The river will gleam with promise and flow in tranquility as it snakes its way like a shimmering serpent toward the Gulf of Mexico. Bridges will be built. And people will move safely back and forth, north and south, along with trade and commerce. When this happens, cultural harmony will rise, economies will boom, and illegal narcotics, weapons, and human trafficking will become ancient history.
Imagine that. Instead of masses huddled along fences and politicians saber rattling and fearmongering, countries will work together to solve the hemispheric problems that they cannot solve alone. Stronger than ever, fueled by access to opportunity and more affordable labor, the combined Americas will be able to compete with the surging global powerhouses of China and India.
For that to happen, we must stop seeing the border as a problem and seize it as an opportunity. We need stories that inspire hope in us, faith that we can see past each other’s differences and find the common ground that binds us together: a love of family and freedom; a desire for each generation to do better than the one that came before; a respect for our fellow human beings regardless of where they were born, the color of their skin, or the language their mother whispered into their ears as newborn babies cradled in their arms.
We all have hearts that ache for love, minds that crave understanding, souls that yearn to be seen. This human connection—cognizant of the pain we all bear as living, bleeding beings but fiercely determined to cling to an optimistic view of the future we can share—drives the narrative arc of my new novel, The Border Between Us. It is the story of an immigrant family, of a young American raised on the border and kept afloat by the love of family and irrepressible buoyancy of the American dream. And many people who have read it have told me how they were touched by it in varied ways.
People didn’t focus so much on the border or the immigrant aspects when they shared their reactions. They mention seeing their own lives reflected in the novel: the strains of complex parent-child relationships, the balancing act between pursuing one’s own aspirations while living up to family responsibilities and obligations, the grief and hardship of losing loved ones before their time. When we recognize our genuine shared God-given humanity, the man-made machinations of maps fall into the shadows and the hope of who we could be and what we could do if we embrace each other lights the way in a blaze of glory.
Listen to me, America. I’m from the border, born and raised. I love the border. And, I believe the borders should be erased. Anyone supporting the proposed mass deportations (as well as the racial and ethnic profiling and vast detentions these would entail) should read Farewell to Manzanar, chronicling the mistreatment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. They should also do some research on the inhumane Operation Wetback, through which over 1 million Mexican migrant workers were deported in the 1950s. These are cautionary tales from our not-so-distant past.
We can be more than we are today as a nation and as a people. For that to happen, we must avoid the errors of the past, stop limiting ourselves, and expand our horizons. Until then, pick up some immigrant or multicultural fiction, learn from history, and imagine the possibilities. Someday, we can turn honest memories and empathetic visions into a new and more welcoming reality.
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I Went to See Superman As an Escape from Reality—Reality Was Still There
Why what I thought was going to be two hours of mindless fun ended up feeling so familiar and so important.
Jul 19, 2025
I am not going to pretend I know exactly what Director James Gunn’s intentions were with his recent adaptation of Superman, which was released in theaters last week. But I didn’t need the 72-feet wide and 50-feet tall IMAX screen to see clear connections to the hate directed toward immigrants here in the United States, as well as the horrific genocide in Gaza.
To take a small break from the emotionally draining work I do, and to celebrate my son’s recent graduation from high school, we drove the hour and 40 minutes from our home in Mississippi to an early screening of Superman in New Orleans last week. As an avid fan of superheroes and comics, the release of Superman was the highlight of the summer for my son. For me, it was just a chance to unplug and disconnect from the harrowing news for a bit and spend some time with him doing what he loves the most. So you can imagine my surprise when what I thought was going to be two hours of mindless fun ended up feeling so familiar and so important.
[I guess this is the part where I should announce spoilers. So SPOILERS!]
The Immigrant Justice Message
Even though I do not have the vast knowledge of superheroes and comics that my son has, I did grow up with the old Christopher Reeve Superman movies, so that is my frame of reference. At the core of those earlier movies was the idea that Superman was an “illegal alien” in our world—something he felt he always had to hide for his protection. Superman has always been billed as an alien orphan, but somehow this reference in Gunn’s latest, where he is vilified as “alien,” has some of the worst people trying to swallow massive amounts of cope. The idea that the person deemed “illegal,” the person who is “not from here,” could be the good guy, contradicts everything bigots are trying to peddle these days, but that underlying message has always been there. What critics don’t like about the storyline this go-around is that it rightfully pegs them as the “evil” Lex Luthor. Hit dogs do hollar, I guess.
At the end of the day, Superman is a story about hope—even when it feels like the world is against you.
In the latest film, another very obvious reference to the current authoritarianism and inhuman treatment of immigrants is the establishment of the character Ultraman, who was tasked with bringing down the world’s most famous “illegal alien.” Ultraman is part of a masked security force that operates outside of normal law enforcement with no public accountability. It is not hard to draw the line between the evil, masked, lawless security force and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which now has a budget larger than most countries’ militaries and is given a free pass to rain down terror without due process on the migrant community, or people they simply don’t consider “one of us.” Then came the ironic and very telling reveal that Ultraman shared DNA with Superman—a nod at the idea that we have more in common with those we deem “different,” with those we are told we are supposed to oppose, than with the people who are playing us against each other in the first place.
Needless to say, no one should have been shocked or caught off guard that a movie about a child from another world who was sent to the United States by his parents because their Indigenous land was being destroyed and their civilization was dying, who ended up being the ultimate good guy (questionable journalistic ethics aside), had a pro-immigrant message. That was always the story. However, what was a little surprising, at least in this current political environment, was Gunn’s portrayal of the fictional countries of Boravia and Jarhanpur.
The Palestine-Israel Message
As I already mentioned, I cannot speak to James Gunn’s intentions with his new take on Superman. There is a lot of debate going on right now about that. But you really can’t deny the similarities between Gunn’s fictional Boravia and Jarhanpur, which are central to the story, to Israel and Palestine. While the drama in the United States between the falsely accused and vilified Superman was playing out, across the globe was the story of a very powerful, heavily militarized country of Boravia that was working behind the scenes with evil fascist Lex Luthor to manufacture consent for the invasion and occupation of the very unarmed, Middle Eastern, brown-skinned population of Jarhanpur.
Some will tell you Boravia was supposed to characterize Russia, I guess, somehow implying that Jarhanpur is Ukraine. However, that comparison falls short when you finally get to the scene where Boravai’s military, with every weapon of war available to them, knocks down the border fence separating the Jarhapurans from them. On the other side of the fence is the Jarhapuran population, who very much look like Palestinians and are only armed with nothing but their fists, a few handheld objects, and a lot of hope and resistance. While watching the movie, and this scene in particular, I couldn’t help but conjure up images of slingshot-wielding Palestinian children defending their homes and lands against the deadly, militarized tanks of Israel.
James Gunn may not have intended to make a pro-Palestinian film, but I believe that, since we live in a world where a genocide is impossible to ignore, he subconsciously made one.
Even without X-ray vision, the visual representation in this climactic scene, intentionally or unintentionally, very clearly captures the decades-long struggle of the Palestinians against Israel. And what is that struggle and the fictional battle between Boravia and Jarhhanpur about? At the center is land, or the desire to take someone’s land through military force.
Just like the immigrant justice messaging, this mirroring of Israel as the evil army of Boraiva and Palestine as the innocent, disarmed population of Jarhapur has a lot of folks crashing out. In my opinion, that says more about them than the movie. It tells me that their whole ideology relies on lies and disinformation, on distortion and projection, and when a movie, whose message has been obvious for years, exposes their contradictions, they sulk and cower, as Lex Luther’s character did at the end of Gunn’s Superman.
The Most Important Message
When I took off work last Tuesday to go see Superman, I thought I was leaving behind the reality of all the injustices that, through our work, we’re forced to confront every day. But what I realized is that we are surrounded by a world of injustice, and no matter how hard we try, no matter how hard we may want to sometimes, we cannot look away. I can escape into a dark theater for a couple of hours, but that doesn’t stop the fact that thousands upon thousands of people are currently being hunted, illegally detained, and often beaten by rogue pseudo-police forces. It doesn’t stop the bombs and bullets that are constantly raining down on innocent children who are only left to defend themselves with a small rock. James Gunn may not have intended to make a pro-Palestinian film, but I believe that, since we live in a world where a genocide is impossible to ignore, he subconsciously made one. Because at the end of the day, through all the millions of dollars worth of propaganda created to obscure truth and reality, our psyche cannot deny the obvious.
I could end this piece reaffirming the very obvious connections to immigration justice and the genocide in Gaza and occupation of Palestine (two issues that are very deeply connected in real life as well), but I would be remiss not to include another take on the film—one that I value a lot and one that everyone should walk away with.
When I told my son I was writing this, he asked if he could give me just a couple of notes. First, he asked that I try to stay away from the stupid argument over whether the film was “woke” or not because, as he explained, that word “woke” just gets thrown around without any meaning and distracts from the real message. That message, he said, is that at the end of the day, Superman is a story about hope—even when it feels like the world is against you.
Thinking about the immigrants trying to survive in a country that wants to vilify and imprison them, or the children in Gaza with nothing but innocence and heart facing down an army of hate, it is hope in the collectivity of goodness that gets us through, even in the face of all that insurmountable despair. Because, as history (and the Superman series) has proven time and time again, bad people do get exposed, evil empires do eventually fall, concentration camps can be freed, and defenseless populations, filled with hope and resilience, do find a way to protect the people and the planet.
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Superman Isn’t About Gaza—But It Sure Feels Like It
In Superman, we’re watching something hauntingly familiar: a powerful state waging war on a trapped civilian population, a global superpower choosing complicity over justice, and a narrative war where truth is the first casualty.
Jul 17, 2025
Director James Gunn insists the new Superman film isn’t a political allegory, noting the script was completed before the events of October 7, 2023. But art, especially in times of global crisis, often outgrows the intentions of its creators. Whether consciously crafted or not, the world is receiving this film as a lens through which to process grief, rage, and a collective hunger for justice for the Palestinian people.
Watching the film, I couldn’t help but cheer not only for Superman—but for the people of Jarhanpur, a battered, besieged territory subjected to ongoing military assault by its high-tech neighbor, Boravia. Jarhanpur’s residents are depicted as marginalized and vilified, living in ruins under constant threat. The imagery of bombed-out buildings, displaced families, and children pulled from rubble evokes the horrors of the Israeli assault on Gaza and the mounting toll on Palestinian civilians. The people of Jarhanpur are also racially coded to align with Arab identity: darker-skinned actors, traditional garments, accents, and names.
Another parallel lies in the politics of narrative. Boravia brands Jarhanpur’s fighters as terrorists—a label the film slowly dismantles by revealing the humanity, grief, and resistance of a people struggling to survive. It’s a powerful reflection of the Palestinian experience, where the word “terrorist” is weaponized to erase history, justify massacres, and delegitimize resistance.
Boravia, portrayed as the aggressor, fits the role of villainous state all too well: overwhelming military superiority, settler-style expansionism, and a narrative of perpetual self-defense. The film’s portrayal of Boravia’s government manipulating facts and weaponizing fear mirrors Israel’s real-world disinformation campaigns—and the Western media’s complicity in amplifying them.
Those of us who have taken a stand against Israel’s genocide should take advantage of this cultural moment.
Superman himself initially tries to remain neutral—but neutrality collapses in the face of genocide. He ultimately sides with the oppressed, recognizing that Jarhanpur’s people are fighting for survival, dignity, and freedom. This arc mirrors the global awakening we’re seeing today, as more and more people stand with Palestinians and reject the apartheid policies and war crimes of the Israeli state.
In Superman, we’re watching something hauntingly familiar: a powerful state waging war on a trapped civilian population, a global superpower choosing complicity over justice, and a narrative war where truth is the first casualty.
Those of us who have taken a stand against Israel’s genocide should take advantage of this cultural moment. Distribute flyers at film showings. Write your own reviews. Use this film as an educational tool to expose Israel’s atrocities and uplift the righteous struggle of the Palestinian people.
And maybe—just maybe—Superman can remind us that the world community, united with the Palestinian people, can become the real superpower that defeats Boravia… I mean, Israel.
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