“Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth” by Daisy Hernández attempts to define what it means to be a citizen by braiding together vignettes from her childhood in an immigrant household against the backdrop of U.S. immigration policy. In an interview, Hernández said she thinks of a memoir as an “entryway into the history and political context, because that’s where you’re going to have the feelings.” Hernández is a queer daughter of a Colombian mother and a father who fled Cuba as a political refugee.
Hernández writes about how she “felt incredibly American but not exactly a citizen,” fearing a teacher might turn her over to immigration authorities. As she grew older, she realized the fear came from her lack of ‘social citizenship.’ T.H. Marshall, an English sociologist, defines social citizenship as every person in a state having “the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society.” Yet, as Hernández points out, a person can possess full civil and political citizenship, like the right to vote, but still have unequal social citizenship. Hernández gives the example of a public health department vaccinating children for free, while her mother had to pay for basic pediatric vaccines in cash envelopes. Hernández is wholly aware of her place within the hierarchy of social citizenship and of the language that defines her as a citizen.
In her exploration of unpacking what citizenship means, she examines the restrictive citizenship laws for Black, Native, and Asian Americans in the 1800s. She also delves into U.S. foreign policy in Latin America in the 1900s, birthright citizenship, gerrymandering, healthcare, queer citizenship and more. But if you are looking for an in-depth and comprehensive look into citizenship in U.S. history, I would point you in the other direction, as the history lessons in the book may bore a history buff.
The book was ambitious at times, attempting to tackle more than the 304 pages could cover. Citizenship has been endlessly contested throughout American history with shifting legal boundaries and cultural definitions. To define such a nebulous concept is already a Herculean task, but to define and layer her research with personal stories strains the reader and distracts them from the main takeaway. There were times when I found the jump between personal anecdotes, historical facts and scholarly references jarring.
What Hernández does achieve successfully is turning a hypothetically dry nonfiction book into something more suitable for recreational reading on a park bench or on the subway. If you’re like me, someone who is not majoring in history or international relations and gets turned off by dense history books, you might enjoy the conversational, almost poetic narrative style of writing.
Next time you pick up your newspaper or tune into the news and hear the word ‘citizenship,’ think about how Hernández writes that “authors, editors, and journalists speak of immigrants as a flood, a tidal wave, a surge of water that cannot be controlled. The insistence on water, this fear of being drowned by the Other, says nothing, of course, about immigrants, but a great deal about the political anxieties of the creative class in the United States.”
