Citizenship

In this work of creative nonfiction, Daisy Hernández weaves memoir, family history, and political analysis to argue that citizenship in the United States is not a fixed legal fact but a social construct created and revised by those in power. Across seven essays, she traces how citizenship has functioned as a proxy for race, how it governs access to healthcare, and how its meaning shifts depending on geography, gender, sexuality, and the political moment.

The book opens with "Invitations," in which Hernández recounts a visit to the U.S. consulate in Toronto, the building where her pregnant mother once applied for a fiancée visa in the mid-1970s. Through bedtime stories, her mother, a Colombian seamstress, narrated her immigration as a chain of invitations: A co-worker in Bogotá invited her to New Jersey, an older sister bought her plane ticket, and a woman nicknamed La Coca-Cola introduced her to Ygnacio, a Cuban exile who proposed marriage. Hernández's father grew up poor in rural Cuba, joined the army of dictator Fulgencio Batista, and fled to Miami in January 1961 after the Cuban Revolution. The Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 granted green cards to Cubans who reached U.S. soil, giving him a path to citizenship that Colombians lacked. From this foundation, Hernández surveys U.S. immigration law from the 1790 restriction of naturalization to free white people through the 1965 Hart-Celler Act and chronicles military interventions in Central America that drove survivors northward. She details the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which created expedited removal, a fast-track deportation procedure, and turned minor offenses into deportable felonies. She concludes that citizenship is a fiction white men wrote to organize power.

In "Ajedrez" (Chess), Hernández explores the vocabulary and origins of citizenship through her Peruvian uncle's immigration struggles. At age eleven, she glimpsed her Tío José's permanent-resident card, labeled "Resident Alien," in his wallet at an appliance store. Her mother whispered that José was "fixing his papers," a phrase Hernández describes as a song whose meaning shifts with context and tone. She traces the word citizen to ancient Athens, where a politês belonged to a polis, or city-state, and follows it through Latin, Spanish, and Old English. Hernández reveals that José secretly married a Puerto Rican woman for his green card and that his eventual wife, Tía Dora, had been under a deportation order since 1982. She connects the before-and-after photographs of Tom Torlino, a Diné (Navajo) student forced to attend the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, to her uncle's careful self-presentation, noting that the government called its boarding school system "citizenship training." Invoking Hannah Arendt's description of citizenship as "the right to have rights," she underscores the absurdity that supposedly self-evident rights depend on belonging to a specific country. The essay closes with José's death from cancer and Tía Dora's naturalization interview, where an official amended her application from "married" to "widow."

"A Place Called Negro" argues that healthcare access constitutes a form of citizenship, drawing on what the British sociologist T. H. Marshall called social citizenship: the idea that political rights can coexist with a lack of access to healthcare. At age eleven, Hernández woke to find the right side of her face covered in scaly skin. Her mother tried aloe vera for weeks before paying a Cuban dermatologist out of pocket, teaching Hernández that healthcare was contingent on money. She traces this pattern to eighteenth-century New England, where towns classified poor or sick people as "foreigners" and expelled them. Research by legal historian Kunal Parker reveals that Massachusetts towns in the 1790s classified sick Black people as foreigners from "a place called Negro," conflating race with foreign origin to avoid paying for their care. Hernández connects this history to the 1996 welfare reform law, which for the first time banned legal permanent residents from Medicaid during their first five years, and catalogs the patchwork of coverage in 2024, where only California and Oregon offer full Medicaid regardless of citizenship. She recounts arguments with family members, including Tía Dora, who supported California's Proposition 187 to deny services to undocumented immigrants despite having once been under a deportation order herself.

In "The White Man Who Loved Me," Hernández examines her father's whiteness and racism alongside the racial politics of the U.S. census. DNA tests revealed he was more than 86 percent European. She recounts his racism across her life, from refusing to stay at a beach when he spotted Black families to telling Hernández, whose skin had darkened during a trip to Cuba, that he "sent a white daughter to Cuba and a Black one came back." She interweaves her family narrative with that of Thomas Hofeller, a Republican redistricting strategist whose estranged daughter Stephanie discovered files on his hard drives after his death. Among them was a study concluding that drawing districts based only on citizens of voting age would advantage Republicans and non-Hispanic whites. Hofeller's legal argument for adding a citizenship question to the census was adopted nearly verbatim by the Trump administration; in 2019, the Supreme Court blocked the question. Hernández explains why Latino is classified on the census as an ethnicity rather than a race and documents a decline in white Latinx self-identification from more than 90 percent in 1970 to 17 percent in 2020. The 2020 census undercounted more than three million Latinx. Hernández's father died six months after she finished a draft of the book; the Bureau of Vital Statistics designated him as Cuban and white.

"Queer Kin" explores how queer citizenship is shaped by geography, capitalism, and political loyalties. In Hialeah, Florida, a city that is 95 percent Latinx, Hernández lies to a neighbor about having a husband rather than disclose her pansexual identity and nonbinary partner. She introduces Primo, a gay Cuban cousin in his sixties who escaped Cuba with his partner Miguel around 2001 and plans to vote for Trump. Primo was imprisoned in Cuba for four years for being gay, an experience that forged his conviction that all leftist governments are dictatorships. Hernández traces the history of queer exclusion from U.S. immigration, noting that gay immigrants were barred until 1990 and the HIV immigration ban lasted until 2010. She examines how the fight for gay marriage required presenting couples as self-sufficient citizens making no demands on government. Drawing on Isabel Wilkerson's Caste and Jonathan Metzl's Dying of Whiteness, she argues that Latinx Trump voters protect privileges of whiteness and masculinity. After Primo defended Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's massacres as political necessity, Hernández realized their relationship could not bear these differences and that calls for reconciliation can function as a way to avoid grief.

"Chingona Citizenship," structured as a series of vignettes, reclaims the figure of the chingona, the defiant woman, as an alternative model of citizenship rooted in the body and in resistance to white institutional norms. Hernández traces the word from Octavio Paz's 1950 meditation on chingar, a Spanish verb connoting violation and domination. She connects it to Malintzin, the Indigenous teenager enslaved by Hernán Cortés who became his interpreter and is regarded as the symbolic mother of Mexico's mestizo, or mixed Indigenous and European, population. Chicana feminists reclaimed both Malintzin and chingona as emblems of survival. She reveals that Tía Rosa, her mother's oldest sister, reentered the United States from Mexico, likely hidden in the trunk of a car, after overstaying her visa and returning to Colombia for a family funeral. In January 2024, two sisters from Mexico entered the Rio Grande with their three children; the Texas National Guard blocked Border Patrol agents from reaching them, and one mother and two of her children drowned. The essay closes with Hernández sorting donated shoes for immigrant families in Chicago, reflecting that the abundance makes tangible the excess of a wealthy country.

In the final essay, "The People," Hernández recounts visiting the Colombian consulate to inquire about dual citizenship, an idea that never occurred to her before Trump's first election in 2016. She documents the expansion of denaturalization, a process by which the government revokes citizenship from naturalized Americans, and tells the story of Norma Borgoño, a Peruvian grandmother whose citizenship the government tried to strip over a guilty plea connected to her employer's fraud. She examines citizenship as a commodity: Small nations sell citizenship through investment programs, the U.S. EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program offers a path starting at $800,000, and in early 2025 Trump proposed a separate $5 million "gold card" program. She details Florida's 2023 law barring Chinese nationals without citizenship from purchasing homes near military installations. At a church in Chicago, she interprets for elderly Mexican women taking the naturalization test in Spanish, a right granted by their age and years of residency. The book closes in early 2025, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detain international students and question members of the Diné Nation about their citizenship, and Hernández's university temporarily removes its diversity resource websites. Hernández asserts that she cannot allow someone else to write her community's story: "We are citizens of the stories we tell."