Bill of goods / Feline fame
Today: Felipe De La Hoz, journalism lecturer at NYU and member of the New York Daily News Editorial Board; and American screenwriter, author, and voice actor Jack Pendarvis.
Issue No. 448
“I shouldn’t have done this.”
Felipe De La Hoz
Ace Goes to Hollywood: Episode 13
Jack Pendarvis
HYDRANYM No. 25: Vote!
The Editors
“I shouldn’t have done this.”
by Felipe De La Hoz
The arc of my career in immigration journalism just about tracks the arc of Donald Trump’s prominence in political life, beginning right around mid-2017, as he—or more accurately his viziers, like Stephen Miller—were trying to figure out how to shape the government around the totalizing anti-immigrant agenda that formed the crux of his first presidential campaign.
In the years since, having traveled from farms to jails to boardrooms and everything in between while speaking to immigrants all over the country, I’ve noticed a phenomenon that is seldom discussed publicly, even as it’s grown more common in my conversations: a deep-seated regret, among immigrants, for having come to the United States at all.
There are, in my view, two main drivers of this regret. The first is the continuing cultural dominance of the U.S. in recent decades, a sort of default, ambient cultural presence coexisting globally with local output of music, TV, and so on.
Conspiracy-minded types might argue that the type and tenor of U.S. cultural exports have been uniformly shaped by shadowy hands, the CIA or what have you, but I don’t really think that’s necessary for a certain consistency of message. American exceptionalism has been a persistent foundational mythology that reached a fever pitch in the post-Cold War order, and our movie and TV studios hardly needed an outside force to advance that understanding, both internally and abroad.
The problem is, while many here inside the U.S. understood cultural messages of peace and prosperity to be at least partly aspirational, people living farther away often took the message a bit more literally. I’ve had numerous conversations with people from around the world who have told me, often with a tinge of frustration and/or embarrassment, that they had assumed that there really weren’t people in dire poverty in the United States. They had seen or read story after story depicting people who had problems, yes, but had been able to overcome those problems through grit and resourcefulness and heart.
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