American Dreams, Immigrant Nightmares

I have a recurring dream—and I do mean recurring; I’ve had it for almost ten years now, and as recently as last week. In it, I am back in Brazil, at the bank where I used to work right up until I moved to New York. The plot of the dream varies, but two core elements remain true: a) people there are happy to see me, greeting me with excitement, and b) I am not happy to be there, because it means that my life in the U.S. failed.

Why do I keep having it? It’s been a decade since I left Brazil (which, it should be noted, is not my homeland—I was born and raised in Argentina, and only arrived there at twelve years old). Especially after I got my green card, now almost two years ago, the chances of me returning are slim. And yet… it continues to happen. It haunts me.

Why “haunt?” Would it be the worst thing in the world to return to Brazil? Not only is it a beautiful country, but, in so many ways, an easier one in which to live (universal health care, comprehensive labor rights, a humane immigration system). The entertainment industry is smaller, sure, but my time in the U.S. would probably empower me to get a good job, even if not my “dream one.” More crucially, I would be close to my family again, able to support my parents as they get old and to watch my niblings grow.

And yet. I can’t shake the perception that to return would be to fail. I can actually pinpoint the moment that perception crystallized for me. I’d told one of my bosses at the bank that I was going to the U.S. to do a master’s degree, and she said, “Let me tell you, you’re never coming back.” I was not, she was saying, just coming to America for a spell, to brush up on my knowledge and then apply it back in Brazil. I had something in me, some inherent quality, that meant that I was leveling up, coming to play in the big leagues with a chance to make it all the way. But the compliment is context-dependent. I often wonder what would’ve happened if I had delivered the same news to her but my master’s was, I don’t know, in Japan, or South Africa, or Mexico. What would she have said? “Cool, see you in two years?” Everyone celebrated my going to New York—despite the fact that I was walking away from a high-paying job at Brazil’s largest advertiser with a pretty much set career in front of me, to go be an artist in one of the most expensive cities in the world—as an unqualified good life choice.

Ostensibly, I must have felt the same way (since, you know, I did it). But living in America was never a particular dream of mine. Ever since I was a kid in Mendoza, I dreamt of traveling the world; I was an avid reader of adventure novels, so I imagined my destiny was deep in some jungle or out in a desert, fighting for my life before I uncovered a priceless ancient relic or made contact with a lost civilization. As I grew up, I did imagine moving for college; first I wanted to go to Buenos Aires, then to London. The United States did not feel very appealing to me; I might have associated it too much (as a lot of people in Latin America do) with Disney World, which had a plasticky feel to it. I wanted a place old enough to have cursed tombs in it, not a The Mummy tie-in ride (no shade to The Mummy, which was a formative movie I hold in my heart and will never pass up an opportunity to watch).

This might’ve changed only after I visited, once I started working at the bank and my salary afforded me international travel. I really liked New York, its architecture and its international vibe, how many people here are from somewhere else. But what might’ve swayed me the most was the feeling I had of being in a movie, that the life I had always seen portrayed in this fantasy medium was somehow now achievable. I could be in a rom-com, working my columnist job at a magazine, then going home to a gigantic loft overlooking Central Park. I could be in the action film, making seedy deals in an alley (there are actually barely alleys in Manhattan, but whatever); I could be in a drama, undergoing a painful divorce in my brownstone in the Upper West Side, crying as I stroll Amsterdam Avenue. Do people raised in New York ever get this feeling? For me, it was like being in Neverland or Middle Earth. Even hearing people talk, their accents and the slang they used, made me feel larger-than-life.

Immigration and Imperialism

The term “American dream” often means the supposed reward that this country doles out to those who put in the work—but America’s soft-(and not-so-soft)-power rule over the rest of this world can give that expression a different meaning. The American dream, to me, is the tale that is told through its culture, aggressively exported so as to carpet every corner of the known world (and some of the unknown as well—who knows how far out in the galaxy those TV waves carrying episodes of Friends have gotten). It’s a tale of people who follow their heart and get their wish, of a world where good triumphs over evil no matter the odds, where the limits of what can be achieved are only in the protagonist’s mind. It’s a vision not just of something to aspire to, but even just of normalcy: this is what life is. Anything that is not this either doesn’t exist or is simply not as good.

Case in point: I remember one time, when I was a kid, my dad was helping me make some cardboard airplane wings, which I was going to wear to a school function where I was… playing a warplane? I don’t know. But I do know that we got into a discussion of how to paint the Argentinian flag on the wings (shall we do blue-white-blue concentric circles, or acknowledge the sun in the middle and do yellow-white-blue?), until my older sister interjected: “what if instead we do red-white-blue circles with stars over the blue part?” My dad got angry. “Why does it always have to be the United States?” My sister and I had no idea what he was talking about. To us, red-white-blue-stars was something that we’d seen in Bugs Bunny cartoons, a symbol that meant “military plane.” It wasn’t a flag of any particular country. It was just normal. 

The American dream is the tale that is told through its culture, aggressively exported so as to carpet every corner of the known world.

Which is why it’s so disorienting, of course, to come here following that dream, that tale, and then be treated the way America treats its immigrants. I just could not understand why I had to prove, getting my student visa, that I had absolutely no intention of moving to this country. Why would it be so bad for me to want to move? Didn’t every movie this country ever made say this was the thing to do if one wanted to be happy? Hell, not even move here, just visiting already meant suspicion; agents at the airport were incredibly rude, yelling at us like we were cattle instead of, you know, people who were coming to spend money on their commerce. Even after finally crossing the border, I really struggled with how my presence was questioned at every turn. The message was clear: you shouldn’t be here. But if you’re gonna, please don’t take up any space—no spots at a university, no jobs in the marketplace, no claims to any government benefits (regardless of the fact that the IRS, that most welcoming of government agencies, started collecting its share since my very first paycheck). 

And if you insist on taking space, well, you deserve what’s coming to you.

Dreaming Beyond America

I guess I failed to pay attention to the American dream: whenever our culture appeared in it, it was always in a completely ignorant manner at best, if not downright offensive. The sole mention of Argentina on Friends (that I could clock) is a song Phoebe sings (which you can watch on the show’s official account because they don’t seem to think it’s problematic): “There’s a country called Argentina / It’s a place I’ve never been / But I’m told for fifty pesos / You can buy a human spleen.” I love Friends, and I love the character of Phoebe, so it never occurred to me to think that it was not okay for her to sing that. If nothing else, because it’s not true: as one Facebook commenter notes in the video, you can buy nothing for 50 pesos in Argentina. Let’s not even get into the whole Argentina arc for Robin in How I Met Your Mother, which sadly lasts for the entire show (she moves there more than once) and is at no point even remotely accurate, let alone respectful. But it makes sense—if America is normal, anything that is not America is abnormal. Even the (I imagine) kind-hearted, liberal voters who staffed those writers’ rooms and who would struggle to hear themselves described as xenophobes could not help espousing that notion. And the fucked up thing is, growing up, I never saw it as a problem either; I found it funny. I, too, must have taken it for granted that America was superior.

Living ten years in this country rid me of that notion. The American dream is akin to the smell outside a McDonald’s—it irresistibly entices you to enter, but cannot truly be had, because none of the food actually tastes like it (it is, according to my internet research, the smell of fat burning as the fries and burgers cook). I do not live in a gigantic condo overlooking the park, or make seedy deals in back alleys, and if I ever cried down Amsterdam avenue, it was not because my partner kept the brownstone in the divorce, but rather because the MTA failed me once again and left me stranded (don’t get me started on the expectation that Hollywood sets up about the NYC subway because we’ll be here all day).

And yet. Some part of me still thinks of being here as a success, I guess, since I keep having the nightmare. The idea of having to go back still haunts me. And not just me: the concept of my play USCIS: Immigrant Nightmares Division–which imagines a department of the U.S. government that’s tasked with giving immigrants nightmares about deportation to keep them compliant with the system–is based on the fact that other immigrants had this same nightmare. The president breaking into their apartment to take them by force; being unable to speak to their parents because they no longer share the same language; finding themselves stranded in an airport with nowhere to go. These images were frightening us even before this last election; the American dream has been broadcast for decades now, colonizing our minds as well as our lands, and engendering the fear of not achieving it. 

Something that has stuck out to me as I conduct interviews during my R&D residency is that none of the people I talked to came here because they had a particular love for America per se, but rather because they wanted a different life, the life they had dreamed for themselves, and it seemed like it was possible here. And that is not a complete fiction; as one of my interviewees put it:

“The strongest case for America is that it’s a highly resourced, multi-cultural empire. The resources are only possible because of its status as empire; its technological advancements are due to a massive brain drain from other nations. But America has also created the circumstances where those people can come here and do that kind of work. So I gotta give them that.”

There are resources in the U.S., no doubt about that—and that includes theater, which, as much as I complain about it, exists here in a way that it does not in most other countries (albeit without the governmental support it gets in Europe, but that’s a topic for another post). But it is perhaps the notion that those resources would be available for the taking, that those who put in the work would receive them, that has started to crumble for me. As I see so many of the images that showed up in folks’ nightmares start to also show up on my screen when I read the news, I look around at my life and wonder: how much of what I truly love depends on me being here? The things I’m most zealous about are personal, spiritual, artisic. Resources-wise, sure, I’ve had a successful career, but that speaks more to my work and those who supported it than to this industry or to this country, both of which have asked much more than they have given.

Revisiting the Dream

Interestingly enough, I had the dream again the other day, and it was still a nightmare–but for a different reason. I was back in Brazil, interviewing for a job at the bank; in this case, the company had purchased a theater and was looking for an artistic director for it (and lest that seems too far-fetched, the bank actually owns a bunch of cultural stuff in real life, including an art gallery and a cinema). The thing that made it a nightmare was that the interviewer was an asshole because he felt threatened by my demeanor (a problem I ran into a lot in Brazil, land of smiles and never saying no). But the part about being back was actually exciting! Though I was daunted by the prospect of running a whole-ass theater, I figured that my experience here would give me a leg up. I was already planning which friends to hit up again to get something going. I was happy to start a new chapter, or maybe revisit an old one in a new light.

Maybe my nightmares will stop being mine; maybe they’ll turn back against the people who created them, and not in the way they might think. America’s biggest threat may not be outsiders coming in and taking up space, but outsiders not caring about it, not even trying to come in because they don’t dream about this country anymore. In the nightmare, Americans will have no one to watch their movies and TV shows because their own companies will have decided it’s more lucrative to produce content for other markets; no one will buy their products because tariffs will have made them too expensive; no one will develop their technology because the brains that would do so will stay in their own countries, afraid to come here and be mistreated. If that day comes when America is no longer number one in our minds, a rude awakening awaits its citizens, now sufferers of the nightmares that we’ll be finally rid of. ✦

Extended Play is a project of The Civilians. To learn more about The Civilians and to access exclusive discounts to shows, visit us and join our email list at TheCivilians.org.