Our Migrant Souls

The author and narrator, Héctor Tobar, begins by addressing his university students, the US-born children of Latin American immigrants. He reflects on the stories of trauma and resilience they have shared in their writing and states his mission is to help them understand their shared histories. He questions the terms "Latino," "Latinx," and "Hispanic," noting they are European-rooted labels that erase Indigenous and African pasts and are often treated as a "race" by US society. Tobar deconstructs race as a social invention and asserts that the stories of his students are woven into the fabric of the United States. His exploration of these themes begins in his hometown of Los Angeles.

Tobar connects popular fantasy narratives about empires, like Star Wars, to the real-life experience of Latino people living within the US empire. The US-Mexico border wall is a physical expression of this imperial power, which "darkens" Latino people through both skin color and the melancholy of being uprooted. He critiques racist stereotypes of "Mexicanness" while also sharing a student's story about her father, a former rebel in El Salvador's civil war whose trauma from the US-backed conflict led to his suicide in San Francisco. The empire obscures its own real-world violence by presenting such conflicts as fantasy. He recalls a family trip to the Tijuana border fence, an attempt to show his young children the physical reality of the empire.

Contrasting the modern, militarized border with its past as an open frontier, Tobar recounts the story of the 19th-century Donner Party. He presents their eating of their Mexican teamster, Antonio, after he died of exposure, and their killing and eating of two Miwok men, Luis and Salvador, as an allegory for the violent foundations of the American West. The border barrier evolved from a single marble obelisk in 1849 to the current multi-layered steel walls, a process accelerated by the 1990s policy of Operation Gatekeeper. He introduces Gloria Itzel Montiel, a DACA recipient who frequently visits the border to confront her fractured past. Tobar discusses the trauma of modern border crossings, citing stories of sexual assault by smugglers and a hostage situation in Compton. He identifies a central paradox in US policy, a dependence on immigrant labor combined with a deep-seated fear of immigrants, which the historian Mae Ngai calls "imported colonialism."

Tobar describes the optimistic arrival stories migrants tell, contrasting the relatively carefree crossings of the 1960s with the dangerous journeys of the 21st century. He shares his own family's origin: his parents arrived in Los Angeles from Guatemala in 1962, eight years after the US-backed coup, with his mother pregnant with him. He posits that Latino barrios are created as much by the passions of youth as by economic factors. He presents two versions of his parents' story, the sanitized tale of hard work and success, and the unsanitized reality of their turbulent youth in 1960s Los Angeles. He concludes by describing his innocent childhood in East Hollywood, where his parents shielded him from the city's deep racial divisions.

Tobar traces the racial history of Los Angeles, from its founding by settlers of mixed heritage to the creation of the "Californio" identity, which was later replaced by the racialized, lower-caste term "Mexican" after the US conquest. He recounts being mistaken for an ice cream vendor by a white child who had learned to associate that role with people of Tobar's appearance, an example of being put in his racialized "place." He explains how racist housing policies like redlining shaped the city's geography, leading to the rise of defiant youth cultures like "pachucos" and "cholos." He then reveals that from late 1967 to early 1968, his neighbor in East Hollywood was James Earl Ray, the future assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Tobar analyzes James Earl Ray as a man who clung to the idea of "whiteness" to combat his own feelings of powerlessness. He contrasts Ray's story with that of Booker Wade, a Black civil rights activist from Memphis who befriended Tobar's pregnant mother and became his godfather. The "Latino" story, Tobar shows, is inseparable from the American drama of "Black" and "white." He deconstructs race as a pseudoscientific fairy tale and discusses his own family's mixed Indigenous heritage, as well as the colorism and denial of Blackness within many Latino families. He concludes that the US is a "mestizo" and "mulatto" country, and the intimacy between its peoples is a force that is simultaneously holding the nation together and tearing it apart.

Using sociologist Mary Romero's book The Maid’s Daughter, Tobar explores the complex, intimate relationships between white employers and Latina domestic workers. Latino labor, he posits, is essential to maintaining the "movie set of white perfection" in affluent America, yet this labor is rendered invisible. He connects modern immigration laws to historical slave codes, both of which are designed to enforce racial discipline. He shares the story of Julia Rodriguez, a Nahuatl-speaking immigrant who learns to read in her thirties, and reveals that his own grandmother was illiterate, a secret that fueled his father's passion for education. He recalls his childhood visits to the Beverly Hills home where his aunt worked, a "palace" that shrank to a normal-sized house when he saw it with adult eyes.

Tobar analyzes the artist Frida Kahlo as a symbol of Latinidad, noting her complex identity and her use of Indigenous dress, which reflected her Oaxacan family's practices. He reveals a secret from his own family: a man he knew as an adopted orphan was actually the son of the family's Indigenous servant, Silveria, who left him as an infant but was prevented from reclaiming him when she returned four years later. He discusses "ethnogenesis," the creation of new identities like "Chicano" and "Latinx," and traces the European-centric origins of the terms "Hispanic" and "Latin America." He concludes that "Latino" is a synonym for "mixed" and "hidden," reflecting a five-century history of criminalized, cross-racial intimacies.

Tobar links his personal obsession with the Holocaust to the state-sponsored violence in Central America and the deaths of hundreds of migrants each year in the Sonoran Desert, a result of the US Border Patrol's policy of "Prevention Through Deterrence." Citing anthropologist Jason De León, he explains how the desert acts as a "killing machine" that erases evidence of mass death. He notes that while the "zero tolerance" family separation policy briefly exposed the barbarism of the US immigration system, the daily, less spectacular violence remains largely invisible. He concludes that the violence required to maintain the US racial order erodes the nation's moral fabric.

Tobar critiques two opposing but equally dehumanizing narratives about Latinos: the liberal portrayal of immigrants as helpless victims ("immigration porn") and the right-wing conspiracy theory of immigrants as a dangerous mob. He deconstructs the Hollywood trope of Latinos as agents of chaos in cartel dramas, presenting these films as allegories for white male powerlessness. He then tells the story of Gisel Villagómez, who, when detained by ICE at age 18, asserted her agency by translating for other detainees and advocating for their rights, ultimately convincing a supervisor to release her. This "immigration-enforcement spectacle" ultimately defines US citizenship as the right not to be subjected to the state's arbitrary cruelty.

Tobar begins the book's final section with the story of Wong Kim Ark, whose 1898 Supreme Court case established birthright citizenship. He parallels Wong's transnational life between San Francisco and China with the "split consciousness" of modern Latino families divided by borders. He describes his own journey back to Guatemala, where he confronts his family's history and the pain of separation experienced by relatives whose children are in the US. He travels to his father's hometown of Gualán, a place he only knows from stories, and discovers a complex history of migration and conflict. He visits the site of his father's traumatic childhood and his grandfather's unmarked grave before finding the spot in Guatemala City where his parents met, coming to terms with his own "accidental" origins as part of a global story of migration.

Tobar then embarks on a series of cross-country road trips to find the meaning of "home" for Latinos across the United States. He meets a diverse cast of characters, including a Purépecha state legislator in Oregon, a non-citizen Trump supporter in Idaho, a Chicano painter in Utah, Cuban exiles in Miami, and a Guatemalan family in Pennsylvania. In El Paso, he visits the Walmart that was the site of an anti-Latino mass shooting, finding the horror erased by commerce. He concludes his journey by returning to Los Angeles, feeling more "American" than ever and seeing his country as a fragile collection of diverse, enduring tribes.

In the conclusion, Tobar uses the concept of a "queer future," inspired by the work of José Esteban Muñoz, as a model for imagining a world beyond the "prison house" of the present. He looks back at the "performance of rebellion" by 1960s militants like the Black Panthers and Young Lords but warns that performance alone is not enough, critiquing how corporate America appropriated the Black Lives Matter movement while fundamental inequalities remained. Since race is a performance, he suggests, people can create new identities that defy old categories, like the "Blaxicans" of Los Angeles. He ends with the story of Itzcali, a young DACA recipient and aspiring writer. In her small apartment, Tobar experiences déjà vu, recognizing the scene as identical to his own childhood home, creating a "time loop" of immigrant intellectual aspiration that carries the hope of an "unwritten" future.