Michael MJ Fischer to Alan, a little boy observed in McAllen detention center

I once wrote that ethnicity is “something dynamic...something that emerges in full - often liberating - flower only through struggle.” My own words - once wrote with such uncomplicated conviction - fade behind the image of you. You are at the age made for frolicking down streets with your friends and being sung to as you fall asleep. You should still be caught up in your own dream world, not the reality of coldness and emptiness that awaits you under your ratty Mylar blanket with no one to cradle you. It is thinking of all the kids like you that makes me shudder at the idea that any liberation could come from this inhumane struggle. I can only feebly hope that I was right. But while I hope, you are a generation whose collective experience as Mexican immigrants will be shaped by stolen rosaries and childhoods robbed of innocence. You will know what it is to be treated like animals in a country meant to be a place of hope. You will wonder how you can ever embrace the term Mexican American when you are an immigrant caught in the middle of both terms, in the gray existence of neither fully Mexican or fully American, uncertain of whether this in-between place can ever feel like home or belonging. Your ethnicity, then, is born of this painful dissonance. 

For now, though, you are still a little boy, far away from these matters of identity. Nevertheless, I believe your striving will define the future more than the apathy of millions of comfortable Americans. I believe that you as you are - a union of cultures, a being of contradiction that someday will be seen as beautiful and whole, not fragmented and other - are inevitably American.