Tortilla Soup and Immigrant Struggles
We were in Spanish class, and because it was the end of the year, our teacher decided to show us Tortilla Soup, a movie about a widower immigrant chef Martin (PLAYED BY JOE FROM THE PRINCESS DIARIES), and his three daughters: Leticia, Carmen, and Maribel. His oldest Leticia is a school teacher; the middle child, Carmen, wanted to be a chef like Martin, but ended up going into business (because of Martin); the youngest Maribel is a rebellious eighteen-year-old who doesn’t really know what she wants for her future. Warning: the rest of this post contains spoilers.
In one scene, Maribel brings home her boyfriend. At the dinner table, she announces, “I’m not going to college next year.” She decided that instead of going to college, she would take one year off and travel the world with her boyfriend—a boyfriend who, by the way, she happened to meet only a couple of weeks prior.
Needless to say, Martin freaked out. He started yelling at the boy for corrupting his daughter, he almost threw hands and looked like he was having a heart attack and an existential crisis at the same time. Maribel, then, collects her stuff and leaves with the boyfriend.
Maribel isn’t the only one that Dad has a conflict with. In fact, each sister has a deeply complicated dynamic with their father. Martin thinks that he’s taking care of his daughters, but Carmen has been independent for far too long, and Leticia is actually taking care of him. As he watches his children grow into the adults that they’ve become, Martin struggles to connect with them. He cares for them very deeply, but as he understands that they need to grow on their own, he starts to become emotionally detached.
And then Martin almost has an actual heart attack.
When watching this, one of my friends (we’ll call her Angelica, for now)–who isn’t a child of an immigrant–said, “Good. He deserves it.”
I turned to her, and in utter shock, all of the other immigrant children and I said in unison, “WHAT?”
Defensively, she said, “He was trying to force his daughter to go to college. And college isn’t for everybody.”
This was the exact moment I realized just how different we were.
Sure, Angelica and I both like Harry Styles and Taylor Swift and rom-coms and free pretzels. Sure, we love the same fashion, and hate the same sports. But there was such a large breach between us, one that I’d never noticed before. And it wasn’t privilege, it wasn’t money or power, it wasn’t even the difference in the colors of our skin. To be frank, I don’t know what it was.
When I watched Tortilla Soup, I saw the exact dynamic that my family has, even though I’m not Mexican and I have no siblings. In many ways, my father is Martin: caring, food-loving, and hell-bent on education.
Suraj Arukil–my father–came to this country on a worker’s visa. So did my mother. And however melting-pot-like or salad-bowl-like this country may seem, from the get-go, it was a harsh reality that my parents’ worth would be directly proportionally to their level of education. In fact, even if my parents were well-educated and well-experienced, they would have to bear the guilt and stigma of “stealing Am–uhr–ican jobs.” They had to work twice as hard to get half as far, and they did. They worked and worked and climbed and climbed. They had their child, and they taught her to do the same.
“Education is everything,” my mother would tell me, “without a good education, you have nothing here.”
And so I worked, as an ode to my parents, and the sacrifices they made, the rich culture and life they left behind so that I would get farther than they ever could. I worked as an ode to this country, where I wouldn’t have belonged had my parents not worked. Every accomplishment I have ever had, therefore, belongs to my parents as much as it does to me. And every accomplishment is proof that my parents and I are worthy to be in this country.
This is the story of immigrants. And I have always believed that stories connect people and further intercultural empathy and understanding. I have always wanted to believe that everyone–people who aren’t immigrants included–would understand the bravery and heroism that my parents possessed if only their stories were told well.
To Angelica, these stories mean something different. They are merely a form of entertainment, and their characters are meant to be observed from a distance, their nuances and complexities overlooked.
I’m not mad at Angelica. To be honest, I think she has a point–college isn’t for everybody. But for us, education is everything. And whenever my mom told me this, I knew it came from a place of love and care. To Angelica, it might have looked completely totalitarian.
This experience was a rude awakening that immigrant struggles are often observed through white lenses. And in the reigning era of rampant political correctness, immigrants have it worse than ever before. We often claim that we are increasingly getting more inclusive. And we are, and I’m happy about that. But, for some reason, we overlook just how problematic it is that we always seem to have our knives at each other’s throats. When observing a person, if we find a single flaw that is remotely reminiscent of political incorrectness, we immediately dismiss them, regardless of their intentions. This makes life difficult for immigrants.
We need to get it in our brains that different doesn’t mean wrong. We’re not all of the same race, we don’t all hold the same opinions, convictions, and fears.
We are privileged to be born in a nation this diverse, replete with distinct individuals from every corner of the world. Why, why would we ever want to create uniformity by employing absolutist standards? And how is it remotely acceptable these standards are set by only one race?
For everything that they’ve done for this nation and their families, immigrants deserve a little empathy. So try seeing where Martin is coming from in Tortilla Soup, try to see his nuances, try to see the sacrifices he made that you will never have to. Trust me, the real story is much, much more beautiful.
This post was written by Shreya Arukil
