We the Dreamers

This week at the Guadalajara’s International Book Fair (FIL), Josefina Vasquez Mota launched her new book, Nosotros Los Dreamers, in which she has compiled 44 personal stories of immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as young children. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DREAM) Act currently protects the young immigrants referred to as “Dreamers” from deportation, but they face a very uncertain future, because US President-elect Trump has promised to scrap the Act.

I think of Carla, the second grader I tutored last spring and this fall in North Carolina. Her parents from Ecuador, though they are both contributing to the US economy, have not been able to secure green cards. They and their three children are considered illegals. How on earth can my shining eight-year-old friend, or any human, be an illegal being?

Such terms remind me that nearly five decades back, my son was labeled another brand of illegal. As a ferocious new mother, I knew immediately that life is apart from law, and that a term like illegitimate was nothing but twisted thinking. My son crawled straight out of the label cage they wanted him in, and my young friend Carla’s spirit is already more spacious than their crazy legal definitions of her.

It is time for all of us to dream much, much larger than we ever have in the past. May Vasquez Mota’s We the Dreamers refer to every one of us. May we see and create a world, not just without walls, but without national borders of any kind. One world, where all the new young dreamers of the planet have clean water that runs free, abundant healthy food, sweet shelter, and love without labels or green cards, love without limitations. Let us all now become Big Dreamers who can imagine such a world, and therefore be able and determined to make it so.