The migrant soul is painful, sorrowful, wistful.

Héctor Tobar is a professor, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and author of Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of Latino.

The son of Guatemalan immigrants, Hector grew up in L.A. but like many other Latinos always lived with the shadow of his Latin American roots. 

“My parents arrived in Los Angeles, like so many others, leaving behind a country whose history had been shaped by the power of the United States. Guatemala supplies coffee and bananas and cotton and other crops to the Global North—and also mothers to raise children and cook family meals."

“The migrant arrives in a city of runaways reaching for dreams in a landscape of man-made affluence and man-made poverty, where the locals are united in the unfettered pursuit of individualism, and in their collective indifference to the suffering of others."

“The experience of having been uprooted from one way of life and transported into another, entirely different way of living marks the collective psyche of Latino people in the real-life empire of the United States of America."

In the shadows, the U.S. Latino relationship has long been a dark one.

“We live in a world of migrating peoples and interconnected markets, a global system of wealth creation built upon acts of violence."

“We have become the scaffolding of the United States, its plumbing, its daily meal, the roof over the head of its children."

“Millions of us, and of our ancestors, were encouraged and allowed to live and work here—and they were eventually hated and mocked and racialized and transformed into a class of “illegal aliens”."

“There are now Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices deep in the “heartland of America,” in places like Salt Lake City, Atlanta, and Omaha. In the modern United States, the border is everywhere."

“Many of us live with the everyday fear that the agents of the empire will arrive at our front doors … in trying to subjugate us, the empire darkens us, in more than one sense of that word. Melanin is what makes us darker, and melancholy is a darkening of the spirit."

Yet even in the shadows, there is light.

“Race is a story we tell ourselves about one another. In the case of people of Latin American descent, that story was born from a history of conquest and exploitation, and from our own acts of resistance to exploitation and prejudice."

“If you become the “Dreamer” in the newspaper story—4.0 GPA, war hero, PhD, top of your class—then you will show this country our people are worthy. Undocumented activists fight back explicitly against this idea; they reject the lie of the “Dreamer” label and narrative, the idea that there are perfect and worthy immigrants, and “bad” criminal immigrants."

“The undocumented undergraduates I’ve met have told me, more than once, “We are winning the culture war.” By this they mean that we are creating in United States culture an image of an American nation with Latinx people in it."

May the light shine upon all of us.

“Have you heard?” is our way of sharing another point of view on commonly held beliefs. Through this we hope to encourage curiosity, dialogue, and tolerance of diverse ideas.