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Being American
These are your stories about how “American” is defined in L.A., a city shaped by immigrants.
The definition of American is elusive.
But in L.A., a city shaped by immigrants, we know that it does not refer to a race, an ethnicity, or a birthplace.
These are your stories, which together are helping us to continue the conversation about Americanness and who it belongs to that we started with our Race In L.A. series in 2020.
We’d love to hear from you
We want to hear your stories: about your families and how they built their lives here, about your struggles and successes, about the things that make you American and the ways in which you feel your Americanness is questioned.
Your Essays
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How life skills and a work ethic learned during a childhood of survival, picking crops and shining shoes, paved a migrant boy’s way to success as an entrepreneur. -
When you grow up Korean American in Hawaii, Utah, and South Korea, your perception of how you fit in changes from place to place. Then, you make it to L.A. -
In the 1950s and ‘60s, Creole families from New Orleans brought the tastes, sounds, and traditions of home to L.A.’s Jefferson Boulevard as they sought new opportunities, jobs, and “freedoms that they had never before experienced.” -
Reclaiming an age-old put-down as a badge of Mexican American identity. -
When you grow up in a multicultural “Chinese bubble” in a diaspora that’s divided culturally, politically, linguistically — and your family is no different. -
What it’s like to be “caught between dueling narratives” as a kid when the U.S. has invaded your parents’ homeland, and your people are being blamed for a tragedy they weren’t responsible for. Twenty years later, it still stings. -
When you grow up in Koreatown with parents from Oaxaca, speaking Spanish at home and learning Hangul with friends at school, equally at home with memelas and bibimbap, you develop a distinctly L.A. sense of what “American” is. -
When you feel invisible in the country you were born in — and even more so in the country that you adopt. -
During WWII, Japanese American servicemen from Hawaii formed a baseball team that drew local fans nearly everywhere they played. My father was one of them. -
When you come here determined to make it, with only “shoes with holes in them, a t-shirt, old pants, and big dreams.” -
Landing as a young immigrant in 1950s America was the start of a decades-long experience that was “a journey, not a destination.” -
When you grow up in Anaheim close enough to watch Disneyland fireworks every night while your family can’t afford to go, you can’t help but feel like you’re on the outside looking in.
