How do we learn from the youth? MacArthur Genius and co-founder of United We Dream Cristina Jiménez join us to talk organizing and creating youth-led movements, and about repair through the eyes of young immigrant kids. She talks about the moment her young son got his first passport and the generational transformation that brings for her as a formerly undocumented person. Anyways, the youth are inspiring us all with their willingness to challenge ideas.

An Edited Transcript of Our Convo:

Amy S. Choi: You are listening to The Mash-Up Americans.

Rebecca Lehrer: Hey, I’m Rebecca Lehrer.

Amy S. Choi: And I’m Amy S. Choi. And we are The Mash-Up Americans. And Rebecca, today I want to talk about dreams. What was your greatest wildest dream as a child?

Rebecca Lehrer: Oh my goodness. Well, I think, one, I thought I would somehow win an Oscar. I would do a lot of acting out dramatic scenes in the full-length mirror in my parents’ bathroom. So I think there was some dream in that, but I also think I dreamed of just having a really delicious family. I feel like as a young kid, I was like, Oh, I’m going to be a parent and I’m going to have a cool job and I’m going to do interesting things.” And it kind of came true.

Amy S. Choi: Oh my God, she’s living her dream, right.

Rebecca Lehrer: Amy, what was your dream.

Amy S. Choi: Oh, I wanted to be architecture.

Rebecca Lehrer: You wanted to be it or be an architect?

Amy S. Choi: No, no, no, no. I wanted to be architecture. I had many instances in which I said that and that I have that recorded in journals and reports. In hindsight, I actually don’t think it was just that I didn’t know the difference in the words that I wanted to be an architect, but I just said architecture. You come from a family of architects. But I think it’s similar. It probably would’ve been more accurate if I had said I wanted to be a library. But I think the thing that always stood out to me, and I grew up outside of Chicago, the city of big, bold buildings and skylines and very audacious looking properties, that I wanted to be something that lasted. I wanted something that would be big and strong and as permanent as I could possibly imagine, and something that people always saw and went back to. And I think that’s ultimately why I became a writer. I always thought like, “Oh, everything fades except words. If you can live in a library, if you can be in a library, then you’re kind of living forever.”

Rebecca Lehrer: Don’t get to the end of Babel by R. F. Kuang.

Amy S. Choi: Yeah, R.F. Love you.

Rebecca Lehrer: Yeah, that’s a beautiful dream.

Amy S. Choi: I wanted to be architecture.

Rebecca Lehrer: Yeah, architecture. Why not? I think, yeah, I think we’re talking about young kid dreams. I think a lot of them were all about storytelling. We’ve talked about it in first grade when my best friend and I made a book that we drew called the Two Best Friends of Different Religions, just like clearly I was on a certain path.

Amy S. Choi: You were always on brand.

Rebecca Lehrer: I was on brand. So this face has been the same. A lot of this energy, it’s just actually I feel like my life’s work is the alignment of it all, but that a lot of the pieces are there. But I think dreaming in a lot of ways, especially as I grew a little older than that elementary age dreams, were about this sense of knowing myself or alignment and being strong to advocate for other people. To know that you could stand up and know what was right and do something that has always been extremely dreamy to me. And I knew when I didn’t feel good if I didn’t do it, and I knew how good it felt and important it felt when I did do it. And so I feel like this is a nice way to introduce our dear friend, Cristina Jiménez. We want to talk about dreams and dreaming and dreamers and knowing how to create security and stability and how to tell big stories. And she’s just extraordinary.

Amy S. Choi: Yeah, I think also the thing that Cristina teaches us is that there’s no right sizing of a dream. We can say dreams get smaller or dreams get bigger, or our adult visions of a world or of our imaginations or our dreams, they seem, I don’t know, somehow compromised by the realities. But actually it’s like, no, those dreams are the most important things to hold onto because that’s what makes a life. And we are so excited to have Cristina. She’s an award-winning community organizer, political strategist, a leading voice in movements for social justice. She’s the co-founder and former executive director of United We Dream, the largest immigrant youth-led organization in the country. She’s an Ecuadorian immigrant who grew up undocumented in Queens, New York, and she is a tiny, beautiful powerhouse of dreams and we love her.

I would like to say that my very first time meeting Cristina in person, there were some things that maybe shouldn’t be talked about publicly.

Rebecca Lehrer: No, we should not talk about.

Amy S. Choi: However, I will say that I sold so many lipsticks for Rihanna at that dinner.

Cristina Jiménez: You need to get a commission, Amy.

Amy S. Choi: Thank you. Thank you. Riri, give me a call because Cristina put on my red Fenty lip stain, and I was just like, “Who is this new woman?” And then two days later on the group text, she was like, “Well, I went to Sephora and I bought it.”

Rebecca Lehrer: Absolutely. Go big or go home. That’s something I’ve noticed about organizers.

Amy S. Choi: Oh, organizers are all go big or go home. And you also, for all of the work you do, we’d all enjoy a little, I don’t know,

Rebecca Lehrer: Lipstick.

Amy S. Choi: Fenty lipstick, capitalism therapy. Sometimes we just need to shop for things to make ourselves happy.

Cristina Jiménez: Sometimes we just got to stop at Sephora and get your power lipstick.

Amy S. Choi: My God. Well, so we’re talking about repair and we want to talk about what it means to repair your corner of the world and one of the big reasons why we want to talk to you about immigration, about organizing, but also you so much with young people. And I think that is something that as proud Rebecca and I, elder millennials who often don’t understand what the youngs are saying, we would like to know how we can learn more from them. But maybe we can step back a little bit first and just talk about all of our immigrant stories. So Rebecca and I are both first generation, our parents were immigrants, so we call ourselves immigrant kids being influenced by-

Rebecca Lehrer: I’m a mix. I’m a one first gen and one side grandparents and one side mom.

Amy S. Choi: And mine are… My parents came in the seventies. And so we’re not immigrants ourselves, but obviously deeply influenced by immigrant culture and being an immigrant family. And you were 13 when you came to the US from Ecuador. And so it’s something that we think about a lot is kind of grappling with and trying to live out, in some ways, our parents’ dreams or our parents’ vision of America. But you were old enough when you came here to have your own. And now I have an 11-year-old son, so I think about you being 13 and coming here. So what were your own kind of hopes and dreams and expectations when you knew you were coming?

Cristina Jiménez: I think when you raised this question about dreams, the thing about being an immigrant child, and I think even being a child of immigrants, is that so much of your dreams are actually shaped by your parents’ dreams. And it’s both a source of inspiration, but he’s also really heavy to carry for a child and a young person. And I say that to say my dad dreamed of becoming a lawyer. And in Ecuador, my dad was actually abandoned by his mom really young, and he ends up having to live in the streets of Quito without a home and without family that could take care of him. So really from the get-go, hope that he will be able to pursue higher education. Law school was not really in the realm of possibility for him. And he shared that with me once, that he had a dream of becoming a lawyer.

And that became my dream, without a question in my child mind. It became a quest of fulfilling my dad’s dream through my experience on this planet and in many ways to honor him and my mom’s sacrifices and their risk-taking in migrating here, seeking a better life for me. So much of, I think also, immigrant culture and immigrant families is this idea of an education and the value of education. And that was one of the big motivators in my family to come.

And so when they experienced just such a level of poverty and political instability and they weren’t able to pay for school in Ecuador anymore, ensuring that we could have an education, particularly a college education, which is something that both of their dreamed about, but they couldn’t have became a big source of motivation for them to come. And so for me, the dream was becoming the lawyer and achieving that college education as not only my dream but our family’s dream. And then in many ways, the way that I think about my experience is that growing up undocumented here, holding onto that dream so dearly, but also being so near losing it all and having that dream fully crushed was the moment that was a turning point for me in moving from a place of fear and a lot of just powerlessness to meet young people and immigrant justice organizers in New York City at a time where I felt like I was not going to be able to go to college.

Rebecca Lehrer: Wait, I have so many follow-up questions, so please indulge me. One thing is about thinking about the dreams piece, and this is we won’t unpack all of our ancestral trauma here.

Amy S. Choi: Oh, there’s so much.

Rebecca Lehrer: But we’ve done it on many… We’ve done it on most of our episodes before, so it’s always good for a theme, but I wonder the underside of a dream is the… It’s like every utopia is built on a dystopia or something. And I think something that we’ve been wrestling with is the story as immigrants, or as our immigrant parents that we are told, is so important and it is, storytelling is important, that it’s also storytelling a future. And we want to talk about that. Dreaming a future together, one that you’re envisioning but maybe don’t know how to get to and then you’re going to make it happen.

Also, everyone’s sitting with all of this heaviness like you’re saying, which is maybe not something other than we feel their sacrifice for us or we understand they went through something, but actually the details of it are often really confusing, untouchable, especially as the children to understand what were your actual feelings like when you flew here without papers and were going to bring your children here. What did that feel like in your body? Where did you put it off to while you made a life happen? Because it went somewhere. I am wondering if as you’ve become a parent and are figuring this out yourself, if you’re have any new insight into your own, where you’re holding some of that stuff for yourself, or see it in your parents, the kind of other part of that.

Cristina Jiménez: Sure. For sure. I have had some time to process some of these experiences and feelings as you’re pointing out to in the journey of writing my book, my upcoming book, Dreaming of Home, which speaks to a lot of my experience as a young person. And I will say that one of the things that I was not able to articulate as a young person that I can now, is that actually so much of the dreams are shaped by the sacrifices, but also by the constraints and the limitations of the conditions that we live in, that actually I wasn’t free to dream.

I say that because when I think about then, so what is the repair to that young girl that carried a heavy responsibility of making her parents proud and honoring their sacrifices? And so much of the dreams actually were confined by the conditions of being an immigrant, of feeling ashamed of her accent, of the color of her skin, afraid of being separated from her family by deportation. A young girl that grew up also in post-9/11 America, that turned Muslims and immigrants into a national security threat. And so I think of younger Cristina living in the shadows and not having necessarily the freedom to dream, and feeling powerless about it. But not only that, very alone and rejected by the place that I call home.

And so the healing for me in that has been actually my entire journey becoming a community organizer. It’s not just becoming a community organizer out of survival and necessity to protect and defend my community from deportation, my own family, but also to heal from a lot of these experiences that we just named. And so me, where the healing has happened is the moment that I met other fierce and courageous young people that were already fighting deportations in the early 2000s, especially after the Bush Administration created the Department of Homeland Security and our enforcement and targeting of immigrants went on steroids, and you start seeing more deportations and separation of family. There were young people like Marie Gonzalez who was fighting the deportation of her and her family, and meeting her and meeting others like her transformed my shame and my fear into self-love into pride and power. But it also invited me and helped me challenge the constraints around what I could dream about. And it is in the movement for immigrant justice and in the immigrant youth movement that I actually get to have the experience of have the freedom to dream.

Rebecca Lehrer: Totally.

Cristina Jiménez: To dream of a world where young people like me and immigrants and my parents don’t feel like the targets, but rather feel part of the community and feel seen and beautiful, and that we are worthy like everybody else of dreaming and of living in peace and in dignity.

Amy S. Choi: Yeah, it’s so beautiful and profound to hear you say that. And I was actually just joking with my husband, and I swear this is connected, but I recently got my first tattoos and it was… I’m 45, I’m 45 years old, I also got multiple ear piercings all in one week.

Rebecca Lehrer: It was probably a midlife crisis.

Amy S. Choi: Perhaps.

Cristina Jiménez: Or a midlife opportunity.

Amy S. Choi: But part of it was like I was joking with him the other day, I was like, “I feel like I did a lot of work as an immigrant kid, that I was born here, so I did not have the incredible challenges of being undocumented.” But I really feel what you’re saying about the idea or conception of America or possibility of being constrained. It was actually very much a very small box in which my sister and I and kids our generation and my family were allowed to operate in. And I was like, well, I feel like we’ve done so much. I’ve worked on healing my inner child, but now it’s like I’m healing my teenager. And something about it is like, oh, I can just do things. And it’s suddenly the world of possibility seems open to me with very silly things and also big, big things and what you’re saying about being like…

Rebecca Lehrer: It’s like being an adult when you have enough money.

Amy S. Choi: And you’re like-

Rebecca Lehrer: I’m just going to buy that lipstick. I’m just going to do that. I don’t actually have to ask anybody.

Amy S. Choi: But that’s the thing is that it took 45 years for me to realize that I didn’t need to permission to just have a different thought or have a different possibility open up. And as a mother, I’m like, “Oh, but being American and being an immigrant to them is so wildly different in conception.” And so when you think about how you frame up, you’re raising an American-born kid, and how do you think about their relationship to their American identity and to your work, to your life’s work, do you see that that healing and repair is kind of… It’s really reflected just in your family even?

Cristina Jiménez: Yeah, we joke around about just how drastically life will be different for him.

Rebecca Lehrer: You mean your tiny little gringo you’re raising?

Cristina Jiménez: Our 2-year-old? Our 2-year-old, yeah, he’s the first one in our household to be born here. Although our fur baby Santi, born in Vermont, may disagree.

Rebecca Lehrer: I’m sure Santi would disagree.

Cristina Jiménez: But when we submitted the application for his passport, and a lot of these things just become mundane, like paperwork, drop it off at the post office, whatever.

Rebecca Lehrer: Take a hilarious picture.

Amy S. Choi: Your baby up against wall.

Cristina Jiménez: Oh, absolutely.

Rebecca Lehrer: Just as a passport, FYI, this is a very mashup conversation, but I needed to take my… In 2016 I had to take my daughter to my cousin’s wedding in Guatemala, and I wanted her to meet my grandmother in El Salvador. So we went. So three weeks old, I took her pictures and they just changed the rules, just to be clear of a baby’s pictures used to be that they could see no shadows, so you’d have to somehow get a baby with no neck control to keep its face forward.

Cristina Jiménez: Oh my god.

Rebecca Lehrer: Anyways, one day I’ll send you guys all-

Amy S. Choi: Oh, please.

Rebecca Lehrer: Hundreds of outtakes. We tried multiple times.

Amy S. Choi: But the process to get it right is so not ceremonious, right? It’s very mundane. You just try to get all these paperwork. Anyway, so when we get the package, the envelope at home, it was like getting the Holy Grail. It’s like, “Oh my God, the passport has arrived.” And this whole thing, everybody sat down around the living room, my parents were home, and my husband takes out the passport from the envelope and just tears from the rest of us down our cheeks.

So I’m saying that to say just the fact that a piece of paper can make such a big difference in terms of protecting his life and defining the realm of possibility for him. Just by that, his life is going to be so different. So for me, I think that where the healing is happening, certainly there’s material things and systematic things that will be different for him. And then there will be things that I think remain the same, even just as we speak, whether he will be considered to be an American.

This is a brown kid with a US passport, but would people see him that way? Would he be treated in that way? And I think as an organizer and now as a mom who has lived so closely and had been impacted by racial profiling by police, my brother was targeted when he was really young and assaulted by a police officer in New York City. I know that to some extent may still be true, and I feel confident, and even with more ganas, the more courage to keep fighting to make sure that we are in a country and a world where the color of his skin and the way that he looks is not going to define anything about his life, his safety, his dreams, his trajectory and his sense of possibility. So for me, that’s where the healing is. He’s giving me the strength to continue to do this work.

Now I do it for him and for all of the children in our communities, but also because I think that part of the healing, going back to what I was sharing earlier, younger Cristina, just feeling so alone and so ashamed of who she is in the context of this country. And I think having now the role as a mom and as a parent, I do have power in ensuring that he feels beautiful and loved and he has a community around him and that he feels proud of who he is, of where he comes from, of his ancestors. I did not have the experience that many young people right now, young people a lot are going back into questioning ancestors right now. And there is a coming back of a lot of indigenous practices and curiosity around ritual and tradition and culture, which I find so hopeful and inspiring.

I didn’t have that though. I grew up in a family quite much, very much colonized around the idea that, oh, indigenous people are less than the colonizer. It’s great. We should actually be striving to… Marrying a gringo or white person to better the race. These are the expressions and the comments that I grew up hearing and my family in Ecuador. And so I did not come with a sense of feeling proud of who I am and how I look and my ancestors and just understanding even what happens in the process of a colonized people. And now I can give him a different gift, which is like, “Yeah, know your history, know where you come from, and feel proud about that. That’s a superpower.”

Rebecca Lehrer: Yeah, it’s huge. And as a recipient of that, certainly with a confidence that I think over time happened in my own family, in our Jewishness and just a sense of pride and in our Salvadoran-ness and that mix of things, it does feel different. My swagger is such that I’m like, if someone says something, I’m like, “No, no, you’re wrong.” And he will have because of that a sure-footedness, there is a, just like a, “No, I’m proud.” And that pride, it transfers also, which is interesting. Although I think then the next thing in generational stuff, which is also challenging the next generation after us is a different kind of liberation to not have to represent something in a different way, but then there’s also no need… They don’t feel the same feeling of…

Amy S. Choi: Proving yourself.

Rebecca Lehrer: And also the way we’re going to feel annoyed when they’re not interested in doing some cultural stuff that we really want them to do.

Amy S. Choi: I don’t even know what you’re talking about.

Rebecca Lehrer: Yeah, exactly. Because they’ll be like, “Well, I don’t have to do that.” And I’ll be like, “No, you do actually.” I wanted to talk, I think this is so helpful, especially the story about the passports. It’s so moving and so resonant what these things represent to us. And one of the things we wanted to talk about, I would love to know if there’s an Ecuadorian phrase for this, but the idea of how do you see past your nose? We learned from our friend John Maeda, the term lacuna instead of blind spot. What are the lacunas that we all have? And I think this example of the passport is a beautiful one for those of us who were born into it and for whom it was never a challenge, that kind of security, in the US specifically. We don’t see it that way. I’m just like, “Get your global entry because it’s annoying to me that we can’t just check in quickly.” It doesn’t feel like a privilege.

Amy S. Choi: But it’s also interesting because both you and I, and we’ve discussed this, there is no anxiety that I have that is greater than when my passport is being renewed and I don’t have our documents.

Rebecca Lehrer: But that’s because we are afraid we’re going to have to escape, not because we’re afraid they’re not going to give it back to us. Those are different [inaudible 00:27:15]

Cristina Jiménez: Or the fear that you are coming back and you’re not going to be allowed in. I have a US passport, but I still, every time I have to go through customs…

Amy S. Choi: Just a little bit of holding your breath.

Cristina Jiménez: I am holding my breath all the time.

Amy S. Choi: Is going to work this time?

Cristina Jiménez: Am I going to be allowed back in?

Rebecca Lehrer: Yes. Yeah. We don’t have that. We have like, “Oh God, what if we need to leave because they hate us.” Which is likely to happen, and we need our passports and a bunch of cash. So this is like we’re talking about different ancestral, a different grief since traumas. But I’m curious, I think this idea of you don’t know what you don’t know.

How do we embolden ourselves to have more openness to seeing what we don’t know? What questions can we ask in conversations that help us challenge that some of our expectations that everyone’s coming from the same point of view. How has that empowered you in your work, which is clearly so dynamic and moving even as you’re in a [inaudible 00:28:23] you are a citizen, you are able to move and operate with a different level of freedom, but how do you unlock some of your own lacunas when you’re talking to people, to understand how you might not know something about them?

Cristina Jiménez: A lot of my work has been really with educators and students from all across the country, and I’ve been in large settings, smaller settings, and often I get questions from educators about how to support their immigrant students, especially in places where there’s not a lot of historical presence of community. And there’s these new gateways, like new places where immigrants are growing their families and building a presence in. And I do hold that sometimes we don’t know. And it’s systematic. And that’s part of the awareness. And I think the analysis that it’s helpful for those of us doing work, advocating for communities and empowering communities through organizing, for example, that we have to hold that genuinely some people just don’t know, and genuinely, some people are also just fearful.

Because by design, many of our systems have told us to be afraid often of people, of immigrants, of defending immigrants, of welcoming immigrants, of saying something is wrong or speaking up for what’s right. And so I do think that part of what we need to be able to hold is where people are at and holding that with grace and compassion. I think of it as also my own process. I write about this in the book, which is I grew up in a family that wasn’t super devoted to the Catholic Church, but quite Catholic. And then my sister battled cancer for over a year, and she unfortunately passed away. And our family is left with this big grief and loss. And we find collectively, well, especially my mom and I, a place of healing and support in evangelical church in Ecuador after the passing.

And in this church, I am being taught all your people are possessed and you got to pray for them for all of the demons to come out. And I always thought, “How does that even look like? Are they talking about what I have watched in the movie, the Exorcist? What are they talking about?” But you are a child and you’re hearing these things from adults. And then in college, I have my first openly gay professor, long hair, totally out and proud about being a gay man in this country. And there I am, and he’s teaching me about Civil Rights Movement, the constitution, all of these things. I’m like, “How does this even make sense that this person for some people may be possessed and may need help to get the evils out? And yet this person is actually teaching me about justice and about change and about how communities have made this country better.”

And so I share that story to say that I have gone through my own process of growing awareness and consciousness, and I think that we have to hold grace to meet people where they’re at and everybody’s going through their journey of awareness. And so when I’m in spaces where educators ask me about what do I do when my student is afraid? What do I do if I hear a raid? Or how can I support my student to apply for college if they’re undocumented? They don’t know what they don’t know, but there’s also consciousness that they want to get tools and find out a way to support people.

And that there is awareness about the place that you hold in our hierarchical order in our society. They know that you may not have a lot of power as a teacher, but you’re definitely a gatekeeper. You could definitely open or shut the door for some of these students. And you both are gatekeepers also. You open and close opportunities for voices, for narratives, for stories, and I am too. And so how are we holding that? It’s I think, very important. And remembering that the awareness to use our place of privilege or power, even if small, even if you’re an educator in a public school, can make such a big difference in people’s lives.

Amy S. Choi: And I think that gets to everything that we have been thinking about with repair and why we’re so fixated on this is that we know that we can all do something, whatever it is. And we’ve thought about this so much. There’s so many concurrent crises in the world, it’s just all coming from all directions. And you can get frozen and thinking about what it is, but as you said, we all hold power in different ways. So what can we do in that little corner?

And I think that that’s where that bridge between healing or even expanding our consciousness gets into repair is the acting part. How do we repair a system or how do we do our part to fix something that we know is unjust? One thing that we are challenged by a lot is that Rebecca and I get very tired of the discourse because the discourse on the internet then becomes discourse about the discourse. And then it’s just people being pissed off. “Nobody has perfect politics,” or “My politics are better than yours,” and then we’re just like, “Stop it. Just do something.” So how do you, as somebody who lives the work and is working, how do you navigate that piece of it?

Cristina Jiménez: Okay. Wow. This is such a good question. This is my jam, especially after I left United We Dream making space for the younger leadership to step up, I have been reflecting on what are we doing? To your point around the discourse, how are we investing our time? How are we building the power that we need to create a kind of change that we want to see and to accelerate that change? Because we are suffering, people are suffering, we’re all suffering. And then you think about the poli-crisis, like pandemics, climate crisis, democracy crisis. So there’s just so much going on that it’s easy to feel overwhelmed, but I think for me, the way that I approach this is how is what you’re doing building power to change things? And us canceling each other out for something that may not land as politically correct with some folks, how is investing energy in that building power to create the change that we want and that we need?

So I have been actually really focused on grounding on the sovereign reality that we have been in the last 20 years, growing different social movements. Movements have won a lot. You think about Occupy, you think about the immigrant youth movement, you think about the movement for black lives. And sure there’s still work to do and a lot to still achieve, but these have been significant movements that have disrupted and changed the way that we have conversations. And even then, we have not reached the number of people that we need to reach to be able to really defend our democracy and make this country better. And so the question for me is how are we talking to the people that are not part of the choir actually, and to the conversation that we were having earlier, meet them where they’re at. And to be real with you, some of them are my family members, some of them are my cousins and my aunties and my… Right?

Rebecca Lehrer: That’s actually the work. It’s hard.

Cristina Jiménez: It is actually the work because we need more people to win.

Rebecca Lehrer: Yeah.

Amy S. Choi: We’re wrapping up on our time here, but one of our goals as we discussed is getting into concrete things that our listeners can do, that our community can do, and asking you and all these people we admire so much that come onto our podcast. We were very inspired by our girl, Michelle.

Rebecca Lehrer: Oh, she looked beautiful.

Amy S. Choi: At the DNC.

Rebecca Lehrer: She really looked beautiful.

Amy S. Choi: And she said to do something, don’t just sit around and complain. It’s time to do something. So we would love to ask you a couple of questions related to your areas of expertise in your work and in your life. What’s one thing people can do? So this one’s a big one, but related to immigration, what is one thing people can do?

Cristina Jiménez: I think in a moment where immigrants just have been the target of so much hate, increasingly, not that it’s new, but it has definitely gotten worse. One thing that we can do is make our immigrant neighbors feel welcome, loved, and seen.

Amy S. Choi: Love that.

Rebecca Lehrer: Oh my God. Wait, can I just tell you a quick story from yesterday? I know this is supposed to be quick. My son is in kinder and we speak Spanish at home. We do a bunch. And also our nanny, who’s also Salvadoran, and so he speaks it, but he’s in a dual language program and a new girl started just this week. She must have just immigrated here, no English, and five years old. He’s just telling us a story. Oh, she said, “Como te llamas,” and he is shy to us to speak Spanish to us. He just responds in English and he said, “Me llamo Amos.” And then he just talked to her in Spanish. He was just telling us, “Well, I told her that I’ll be her friend in Spanish.” And I was like…

Cristina Jiménez: My heart, it’s melting.

Rebecca Lehrer: I was like, oh, this little blonde Latin Jewish kid in Los Angeles, he’s like, see, he just did it with his heart. Anyways, that’s all. Okay.

Cristina Jiménez: Yeah. Yeah. They’re teaching us the way to go.

Rebecca Lehrer: They’re teaching us.

Amy S. Choi: They’re teaching us. Okay. So related to this election, what is one thing people can do?

Cristina Jiménez: Vote and get all of your people to vote.

Amy S. Choi: Except for the ones that vote the wrong way. Just kidding, just kidding, just kidding.

Rebecca Lehrer: Okay. Related to breaking rules and looking past our noses, what is one thing people can do?

Cristina Jiménez: First of all, what rules?

Rebecca Lehrer: Yes, that’s a good one.

Cristina Jiménez: Well, who’s making the rules? We got to make the rules, change the rules, but I think on a real talk, I think I just go back to community and I think we will find strength and power in community, whatever the conditions are.

Rebecca Lehrer: Amen. What rules?

Amy S. Choi: Simply, that’s the headline for the episode. What rules?

Rebecca Lehrer: What rules? With Cristina Jiménez.

Cristina Jiménez: Well, I tell people all the time, I’ve been having lots of conversation with legal counsel about my manuscript, and the thing is, I would not be where I am. Our movement would not have achieved one of the most significant victories in immigration policy in the last 35 years if we had not broken the rules.

Rebecca Lehrer: Yeah.

Amy S. Choi: Yeah.

Rebecca Lehrer: Oh, absolutely agree. Cristina, thank you so much for this. What a joy. I already feel just richer and have more strength and ideas just from this conversation. So this is a part of community building, and we’re just-

Amy S. Choi: And our repair.

Rebecca Lehrer: Healing and community building and breaking the rules. I’ve love, loved this conversation. Thank you for all your work.

Amy S. Choi: Thank you so much, Cristina.

Cristina Jiménez: Thank you.

Amy S. Choi: We’ll talk soon.

Rebecca Lehrer: We’re going to break all the rules.

Cristina Jiménez: Talk soon.

Rebecca Lehrer: Thank you, Cristina, for helping us stretch our own imaginations, because I think as children of immigrants, we both live in our parents immigration stories and their dreams, but we don’t always get to understand their stories as clearly. We’re so in awe that you can both live and tell your story so beautifully and also be such an incredible leader to the movement.

And next week on The Mash-Up Americans, one of our favorite writers and journalists of our generation, Anna Holmes. Get ready.

CREDITS

This podcast is a production of The Mash-Up Americans. It is executive produced by Amy S. Choi, and Rebecca Lehrer, senior editor and producer is Sara Pellegrini, production manager is Shelby Sandlin. Thanks to DJ Rob Swift for our theme song, Salsa Scratch. Please make sure to follow and share the show with your friends.