Reality v. the American Dream as an Immigrant Latina in NYC

I first arrived in New York in 2016 from Argentina to pursue my master’s degree in digital media and journalism at New York University. Setting foot on one of the city’s tiles felt like reaching for the stars. New York had been my beloved mecca since my dancing years—I spent my childhood and adolescence watching two movies on loop: Fame and Natalie Wood’s West Side Story—not to mention the fascination my brother and I had with George Gershwin’s music and musicals. Later on, my artistic aspirations were replaced by my journalism dreams, for which New York also stood as the ultimate destination.

I spent over a year preparing to apply to five different journalism and communication programs. I spent endless nights doing Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) mock exams, writing essays, and translating documents. I don’t remember being very anxious, but I was extremely busy. At the beginning of 2016, the results started coming in. The miracle had happened: I was admitted to all the programs I had applied for. The tingling sense of total disbelief and absolute excitement still runs through my body sometimes, even after eight years.

So, off I went. By August 2016, my parents dropped me off at Ezeiza Airport in Buenos Aires. My grandma had given me a tiny pink bear with a handwritten tag saying she loved me and would always be with me. I squeezed it tightly in my pocket while saying goodbye. In retrospect, I had never been so happy and sad at the same time, if such a thing is possible.

Going through a migration experience is like getting to know the world — and yourself — all over again from scratch, maybe just like a child trying to learn the social and cultural cues of their community. Only, as an adult, you don’t have a guardian or parent guiding you through the process. You need to figure it out on your own.

Along the way, you go through different degrees of loneliness, uncertainty, confusion, and fear. The primal anxiety sparked by almost anything at first eases up after a few years as you gain more experience. But those feelings are always there a little bit, no matter how far along you are in the process. I was recently having a conversation with a good friend from Colombia who has been living in the U.S. for many years, and we shared the feeling that anything bad happening here seems one hundred percent worse and more dramatic than if the same thing were happening in our homelands.

From Latin America, there is usually an idealistic perspective on life in the United States, especially in a historically highly-marketed city like New York. Reality tends to be more puzzling, deceitful, and crushing than those dreamy imaginations.

Three lessons from my immigration experience were particularly enlightening, all of them linked to the difficulties and challenges I went through. There is a part of me that always goes back to them to remind myself of my true north and to never lose myself, no matter how hard things get (because they always can get harder):

“Good” needs to be “good for you”

I am conscious that I arrived in the U.S. in a very privileged position to find my way through. I had a great scholarship to study for my master’s at a prestigious institution. Before that, I had graduated in Communication Sciences from the Universidad de Buenos Aires. I had extensive experience as a journalist and a researcher in my country. Rest assured, when I landed here, I relied on whatever worth I thought I had. I was determined and hard-working, and my work had always been very keenly reviewed.

But I faced the harsh reality of New York very early on. My first great cultural shock was at university. While I was eager to enjoy this experience for the intercultural exchange it encompassed—almost 80 percent of my classmates came from different countries—I quickly woke up to another mindset.

The class rapidly turned into a competition hub, overwhelmingly focused on fast and furious professional development, networking opportunities, and growing anxiety to become the favorite of this or that professor to land the next job opportunity in a renowned media/tech corporation.

Of course, I had my big dreams too, but I never imagined that everything needed to unfold so fast. I couldn’t keep up with the aggressiveness of the process taking place around me. The sense of student community that I was so used to in Argentina tore apart in favor of winning some kind of race against each other. After a short season of disbelief, I thought maybe they were right; that was exactly what the experience should be, and I was not following through. I started to feel a deep sense of discouragement, failure, and hopelessness, which were very new to me.

On another note, I did not seem to be finding my way academically either. All of a sudden, my writing style and theoretical perspectives on journalism were not welcome. When I asked about it, I felt constantly out of place. I knew I had many things to learn—that was why I was there—but I wondered why there seemed to be no time to make mistakes or discuss different points of view, given that we were all coming from other places with different backgrounds.

The main critique was that my prose was too extensive as if it would have been an academic essay mostly all the time. They expected something shorter, interlinked, more succint paragraphs. The good part was that my written English was neat, but the style was off what was expected. There is/was a dynamism to the digital environment that I had never been exposed to until I came here. In Argentina, things would walk sort of “slower”.

My main concern: how was I supposed to get a job if I was not fitting in?

My self-esteem and sense of professionalism started to crumble. Who was I in that environment? In that city? In that country? Why was I not good there? What did I need to do to be good here? How was I going to turn this game in my favor and make it productive and nurturing for me?

My cultural background was affecting my performance. After feeling confused and lost for some time, I decided to make a pact with myself. I would apply my own pace to things while trying to learn, adapt, and improve my position in class without letting it affect me terribly if anything did not go as expected.

I worked on regaining strength for myself, leaning into the abilities I had, and at the same time, embracing newness with curiosity and grace.

At the end of my master’s, I did not become the favorite student of any professor, nor did I start working at Facebook or Google, which have shaped the current cultural imagery of the American Dream for the last decades.

I ultimately found something even better—something that was great for me. My familia away from my familia, which was Impremedia, a Spanish-language media company. This company was the best thing that ever happened to me in the United States. Not only did they offer me a job—and very much-needed financial stability—but they also trusted me and gave me chances to grow professionally. It was thanks to this opportunity that I found the grounds to set my record straight in my inner realm.

Embrace Your “Otherness”

My arrival in New York was no bed of roses. Feeling like you’re failing over and over again at university, the one environment where all my bets were on, certainly caused a lot of frustration and sadness. Moreover, since it also determined my ability to sustain myself financially, it sparked an intense sense of vulnerability.

I had no clue how to navigate my “otherness” in a job market I had never explored before. Every time I tried to fill out an application, I felt alone, in the middle of a deserted, horribly vast unknown.

What was at stake was basically my identity: what I thought about myself, who I had been so far in my life, and the social and cultural definition of myself that I was carrying along. The question was how I was supposed to present myself to be more culturally relatable.

My husband believes that as a professional, you need to be impeccable to stand out when you are an immigrant (he is also from Argentina, but he arrived 25 years ago). I would add that you also need to understand a new code altogether that can help you rebuild yourself and help you fit in, at least to some extent. The burning pressure on my chest was that my whole subsistence depended on that understanding and on revolutionizing my identity, on transforming to accommodate my new environment so as to be able to show what I’m capable of in a manner acceptable here.

My lack of knowledge or experience in this market led me to feel seriously ashamed when I made mistakes. The process of reshaping myself left me stranded many times. But I kept trying because ultimately you are the only one you are giving up on. Nobody else really cares.

I practiced my accent and attitude in front of the mirror and repeated the word “schedule” countless times along with the voice of Google Translate. I studied American films to identify how to be more American.

Pronunciation comes with an attitude. And the attitude comes with a whole character. The character implies embodying a set of expectations and values… Or, better said, my perception of what those expectations and values were.

Never before had I been so aware of my “otherness.” How much of an “other” I was. That also made me root into my characterization as never before, fearing as much as cherishing that “otherness.”

I realized that here in the United States, I was eminently a Latina. I speak Spanish, and I speak English with many signs conveying my Latin heritage. And now I see so clearly that my identity is inscribed in the trajectory of a whole multi-faceted, multi-cultural community that populates this country.

I became an “other”, embedded within the Latinx community by those outside of it, which determines, affects, and implies many moving cultural, social, and economic aspects of my life in the U.S.

Realizing that you can always become an “other” also gifted me a renewed sense of empathy for others, established on an ongoing, progressively more mindful reflection about discrimination and the usually erroneous assumptions we base our judgments on.

Learn to exist in the in-between

I’ve recently been reading the newly released book The Myth of Making It: A Workplace Reckoning, which narrates the bittersweet experience of Samhita Mukhopadhyay, a former editor at Teen Vogue, and questions the usual idea of financial and professional success in the Big Apple. Her candid account of her failures made me reflect on my immigration journey, which is so intertwined with my experience of work and professional growth, dreams fulfilled and unfulfilled, what people in my country think living and working in New York is, what real life dictates it is, and what other professionals say it is and should be.

I tried so hard to become what I thought I should be here. And I failed so much trying.

But now, nearing a decade in New York, I feel I have mostly succeeded in becoming an authentic version of myself that is as accomplished, empathetic, and real as can be at the intersection of my Argentinian and American identities.

Every day I try to embrace my limitations, celebrate my learnings and Eureka moments, and continue walking down a path that is never going to be that clear.

There are still situations where I feel in free fall, but now I know I will touch the ground eventually, stand up, and continue walking. Like the iconic writer and poet Maya Angelou states, “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.”

I practiced falling a lot. And now I do not fall so much, nor does it hurt as much when it happens.

Practice doesn’t make perfect, which is not necessarily a source of well-being. I like to say practice makes better, wiser, and happier. Practice trains you to not fear the unknown that much anymore, even when you feel there is no net below you.

The other main foundation to survive the migration experience is eventually finding your people, your chosen family whom you can trust. No one can truly accomplish anything alone. For every breakthrough one achieves, there is always a bit of an angel intervening. In a place of anonymity, it might be someone who smiled, someone who listened, or someone who decided to give you a chance, even when you might not have given one yourself.