about
I'm an immigrant. My father was an undocumented immigrant. I come from a community, a Dominican community that's part of a larger Latino community. And listen, you don't have to be a particularly awake person to know that for the last couple years, immigrants, Latinos and folks who have anything to do with undocumented immigration, have been just demonized by our politicians.
The contributions that we make as a community have been completely erased. Our presence has been sort of maligned and deformed so that we're some sort of demonic cancer on the body politic instead of this vital, regenerative force that we are. And it's sort of this kind of bittersweet irony, this sort of wild irony that on the one hand as an individual who comes out of this community I'm sort of being recognized, but my actual community that in many ways is the genius that - the real genius in this little formula, you know, it's been under sort of a steady, just horrible assault for the last few years.
And I'm really aware of that because I came up as a kid who, you know, whether you're going under this assault right now, or it's sort of, you know, more quiescent, this sort of anti-Latino vibe in the country, I always grew up with the idea that the people that I was going to end up writing about and the people who I came out of that we were not people's go-to idea of what genius was, even though I myself coming up in this community looked around and was always just sort of astonished by the sort of human talent, astonished by the creativity, astonished by the incredible hard work and the adventurousness of an entire group of people who leave their country behind and try to make a new life in another place.
And not only was this a source of inspiration for me as a person, but it was a source of inspiration for my art.
credits
released February 3, 2015
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