In general, whenever we hear about illegal immigrants, there is a negative connotation. We perceive these “illegal aliens” as people who came to America and are trying to cheat the system by getting illegal jobs and not paying taxes. A lot of the time, we especially associate these “aliens” as Mexicans who hopped the boarder. Alyshia Galvez offers a refreshing point of view on the situation. Rather than coming to America and slacking off, they come in pursuits of working hard and starting a new life. Many of them are honest people, something that we don’t often think about. We keep reading about immigrants and their life in America, but we don’t really think about their process of becoming citizens, which this second chapter introduces. I guess I never really thought about how difficult it is to become a citizen, and how hard these immigrants work- especially the “illegal aliens”.
Something that stood out to me in the reading was that many of the undocumented immigrants are literally undocumented anywhere. They didn’t bring their papers from Mexico and they have no records. Some of them were willing to do that so they could work hard and get the benefits that Americans get, although sadly, it was harder than they would have hoped to get citizenship. In relation to not being a legal citizen, they can not freely travel to Mexico and visit their family or their homeland, something that many of them would like to be able to do.
Another part in the reading that stood out and was new to me was hearing about these organizations Los Comites Guadalupanos and Asociacion Tepeyac. I think that it’s great that these immigrants have somewhere they can go to meet up with people and know that they are desrving of American rights, rather than just getting put down from the prejudices in society. I can imagine it is extremely difficult for them to get jobs that they may be derserving of or qualified for, and having a support system is always important.
In class I hope we go over this concept of “cultural citizenship” because I’m not sure I fully understand what that means.
