Jean Guerrero Quotes

I felt like exploring Mexico was a way of exploring my father, myself, and my roots.

when I was a kid. I grew up in San Diego, on the border with Tijuana, with a Mexican dad and a Puerto Rican mom. Spanish was my first language. But I went to a private Episcopalian elementary school, where it was against the rules to speak Spanish. You know, the teachers referred to me as Jean Guerrero. And if we were caught speaking Spanish, we had to stay in detention and we had to write, I will not speak Spanish, I will not speak Spanish a hundred times. This was during a period of intense anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant hate in California. And, you know, I wanted to please the teachers. I knew how much my mom was sacrificing for me to go to that school. She - at that point, my parents had split up. And she was a single mom. There was a struggle for her. And I just - I wanted to do well in school. And so I internalized, you know, the teacher's disdain for Spanish. I internalized this idea of my language, my parents' language as being delinquent. And I mostly renounced Spanish. And I adopted that identity as Jean Guerrero.

The stories that always interested me were about people and how people were being affected by industry. So like human rights violations at the hands of U.S. and Canadian mining companies, things like that I found myself not being able to explore as much as I wanted to.

I’ve been following one family that, a father had his one year-old baby taken away from him months ago and just [a week ago] he was reunited finally, after eight months in detention. So I followed that story. We put out the story of their reunification but it’s like the struggle for the family is nowhere near over. The little boy is severely traumatized because he was kept in a tender age facility that has since closed for more than a thousand abuses ranging from inappropriate sexual contact between staff and the children to harsh punishment. It’s incredible, so I’ve been following the reunification of families, in particular this one family that has been so traumatized. I don’t know if you saw the question about “where are the girls,” because the government was conducting tours of child migrant shelters but nowhere were the girls visible. So I found one the girls’ shelter in San Diego and I put out a story on that and now I’m finding another one and it’s just never ending. It’s just crazy.

I always knew that I wanted to be a writer but to me when I was a child and as a teenager as well, the idea of aspiring to be an author of books, always seemed kind of unobtainable. And I thought that a more practical and realistic way of going about eventually writing books was to start out in journalism, in large part because I knew it was going to give me real-world experience and so I was able to see what was happening in the world in our current age. It would give me valuable perspective to inform my writing of books in the future.

I think that what needs to change is just this idea that we have of someone, you know, when somebody teaches us how to say their name, we shouldn't see it as a burden. And I think we often do see it as a burden, but we should see it as a gift. I think it's a beautiful gift to learn how to say somebody's name.

I had received some hatred before, but it was nothing compared to what came after my book was - my book about Stephen Miller was published, where people were sending me racial slurs, telling me that I should be deported to Mexico, you know, very much attacking my family and, like, who - where I come from. And so that is what made me all of a sudden want to say my name correctly here in the United States.

there is a very strong feeling that's attached to saying my name the way that it's meant to be said. You know, like, I feel embodied. I feel, like, deeply rooted in my ancestors and my mother's sacrifices for me, my abuelita. My grandmother, you know I feel them inside of me. Like, I feel different when I say my name.

So, for example, if a family comes to the border and ask for asylum, often the women and children will be released on parole, and the father will be locked up in detention. And, to me, as someone who experienced personally the trauma of having an absent father, it's very bizarre and ironic to me that we are sort of as a society painting men and fathers as irrelevant to families because I've really found that to not be true.

I feel like like this whole notion of crossing borders appeals to me because curiosity is basically, no one is curious unless they admit that they don’t know something. You will not explore beyond your world unless your recognize that there lies more beyond your world worth exploring.

One thing that hasn't really been discussed in this whole debate on family separations, which I've been following, is there's a family separation practice that predates the Trump administration. It's been going on for years, and it continues to go on. And it's basically this tendency for Homeland Security to prioritize women and children for release on parole while locking up the fathers in detention.

she came from Puerto Rico, where they also have, you know, this English language supremacy, like, decades of U.S. colonial policies that cast English as a superior language. You know, this was a school where a majority of the kids were Mexican American or children of immigrants. And they, you know, the mostly white teachers, they wanted us to learn English as quickly as possible. So the parents at the time thought that this was a good thing, that it would result in us, you know, being bilingual and knowing English faster. But what happened is, like, this ended up in many cases supplanting our native language.

This internalized English language supremacy, like, what it did was like it created, like, a real - I don't know - like, this almost, like, self-hatred, where I didn't understand what had happened until many years later, when I was reading the Mexican author Reyna Granda, who writes about subtractive bilingualism and how, you know, this practice of forcing children to stop speaking their native language and to see it as something bad also causes children to internalize this disdain, you know, the dominant white culture's disdain for their own culture and their own selves. And for me, what that did is it created a lot of self-destructive behavior where I was, you know, cutting my wrists as a teenager. I was, you know, binge drinking, drug abuse, a lot of self-destructive behavior. And then also, my mother, when she would make mistakes in English, you know, I would correct her. And I would say really, you know, monstrous things like learn English. And this is something that, you know, I look back on with, like, an immense amount of pain. And it wasn't something that I was able to fully confront until I saw Reyna Grande talking about this - internalizing this disdain for her mother.

To be able to cover immigration and really focus on the human stories because of the fact that [KPBS] is an NPR and PBS affiliate, we’re public radio so I’m able to cover really whatever I want. The stories that speak the most to me are the human stories.

There's many valid and powerful ways to show pride in our cultures and where we come from.