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2685 Redefining AmericaBut the bill was rejected and reintroduced, again and again, for years. It never passed. And, in a distinctly American twist, its gauzy rhetoric was all that survived. Now there was a new term on the block: %u201cDreamers.%u201d Politicians began to use it to refer to the %u201cgood%u201d children of immigrants, the ones who did well in school and stayed off the mean streets%u2014the innocents. There are about a million undocumented children in America. The non-innocents, one presumes, are the ones in cages, covered in foil blankets, or lost, disappeared by the government.I never called myself a Dreamer. The word was saccharine and dumb, and it yoked basic human rights to getting an A on a report card. Dreamers couldn%u2019t flunk out of high school, or have D.U.I.s, or work at McDonald%u2019s. Those kids lived with the pressure of needing a literal miracle in order to save their families, but the miracle didn%u2019t happen, because the odds were against them, because the odds were against all of us. And so America decided that they didn%u2019t deserve an I.D.The Dream, as it turned out, needed to demonize others in order to help the chosen few. Our parents, too, would be sacrificed. The price of our innocence was the guilt of our loved ones. Jeff Sessions, while he was Attorney General, suggested that we had been trafficked against our will. People actually pitied me because my parents brought me to America. Without even consulting me.The irony, of course, is that the Dream was our inheritance. We were Dreamers because our parents had dreams.It%u2019s painful to think about this. My mother, an aspiring interior designer, has gone twenty20eight years without a sick day. My dad, who loves problem-solving, has spent his life wanting a restaurant. He%u2019s a talented cook and a brilliant manager, and he often did the work of his actual managers for them. But, without papers, he could advance only so far in a job. He needed to be paid in cash; he could never receive benefits.He often used a soccer metaphor to describe our journey in America. Our family was a team, but I scored the goals. Everything my family did was, in some sense, a pass to me. Then the American Dream could be mine, and then we could start passing to my brother. That%u2019s how my dad explained his limp every night, his feet blistered from speed-running deliveries. It%u2019s why we sometimes didn%u2019t have money for electricity or shampoo. Those were fouls. Sometimes my parents did tricky things to survive that you%u2019ll never know about. Those were nutmegs. In 2015, when the U.S. women%u2019s team won the World Cup, my dad went to the parade and sent me a selfie. %u201cGirl power!%u201d the text read.My father is a passionate, diatribe-loving feminist, though his feminism often seems to exclude my mother. When I was in elementary school, he would take me to the local branch of the Queens Public Library and check out the memoir of Rosal%u00eda Arteaga Serrano, the only female President in Ecuador%u2019s history. Serrano was ousted from office, seemingly because she was a woman. My father would read aloud from the book for hours, pausing to tell me that I%u2019d need to toughen up. He would read from dictators%u2019 speeches %u2014 not for the politics, but for the power of persuasive oratory. We went to the library nearly every weekend for thirteen years.My mother left her factory job to give me, the anointed one, full-time academic support. She pulled all-nighters to help me make extravagant posters. She grilled me with vocabulary flash What are some of the consequences of Villavicencio%u2019s parents being undocumented? Why does her father believe that life in the U.S., even undocumented, was worthwhile?33Copyright %u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.