Cristina Jiménez was brought to the U.S. in 1998 as an undocumented teenager and just over a decade later was meeting with White House officials to help craft policies for immigrants in the same situation. Her leadership as cofounder of the immigrant advocacy network United We Dream earned her a 2017 MacArthur fellowship.
When she eventually sat down to write a book, it wasn’t her policy expertise that she wanted to share, even though it’s what many publishers expected from her, she says. “I wanted to engage with people’s hearts and emotions about who we are as a country, who we want to be, and who belongs.”
With polls consistently showing immigration topping voter concerns and the topic about which they are most polarized, PW spoke with Jiménez and other immigrant authors of fiction and nonfiction about how their experience informs their work and cuts to the heart of what it means to be an American.
Paper chase
Like many immigrant narratives, Jiménez’s was born of her family’s determination to create opportunity for the next generation, leading them to Queens to escape a growing economic crisis in Ecuador.
“My parents believed in opportunity and justice for all but I pretty quickly realized that because of our immigration status that was not going to be the case for people like us,” says Jiménez, who arrived in the U.S. at age 13. As she explains in her forthcoming memoir, Dreaming of Home (St. Martin’s, Feb. 2025), even though she was an honors student, she was almost deprived of a college education because of her legal status.
The organization she cofounded would eventually be hailed for pushing the Obama administration to enact Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), providing a temporary reprieve from deportation for certain unauthorized immigrants who arrived as children. While she hopes her book inspires readers to believe in the potential for collective action, she highlights the centrality of another theme: “finding home even when that place you consider home tells you it doesn’t want you.”
Komail Aijazuddin grapples with disappointment and a longing for acceptance in his forthcoming memoir, Manboobs (Abrams, Aug.), which PW’s starred review called “a stirring account of coming of age and coming out.” As a closeted teenager in Lahore, Pakistan, Aijazuddin adored divas and Disney princesses and dreamed of going to North America, which he saw as a “gay promised land.”
Yet when he arrived in Montreal soon after 9/11, a period of rampant Islamophobia, he was quickly made to feel unwelcome. Eventually he made his way to the U.S., where he faced further challenges. Aijazuddin writes about coming to terms with his body and sexuality while confronting prejudice not only among immigration officials but also queer hipsters in Brooklyn who couldn’t empathize with the racism he faced as an immigrant from Pakistan. “I was a brown, Muslim male before anything else,” he says.
After nearly 20 years in the U.S., three of them as a citizen, Aijazuddin says the notion of national identity still troubles him. “One of the questions I wanted to pose with this book was, ‘When does one go from an immigrant to an American?’ If you look and sound a certain way, such as I do, you may never be seen as an American.”
Anne Anlin Cheng, an English professor at Princeton who was born in Taiwan, wrestles with the same question. “I’ve been here more than 50 years,” Cheng says. “I don’t even dream in Chinese anymore. I dream in English, and yet I still feel like an immigrant.”
In the essay collection Ordinary Disasters (Pantheon, Sept.), Cheng writes about undergoing cancer treatment during the pandemic amid the terrifying outbreak of hate crimes against Asians, a combination of circumstances that forced her to drop the academic veneer with which she often observed her adopted country and contend with her experience as a hyphenated American. She discusses her marriage to a white man and parenting biracial children, struggling to find her footing in both Chinese and American notions of femininity, and, after a spate of suicides among Princeton students, confronts the unacknowledged emotional toll faced by Asian American students pressured to succeed.
“What I thought were all these skills I had were in fact an emotional job that I’d been laboring under for years in order to assimilate, and it wore me down,” Cheng says. “This book was about realizing how profound this immigration experience has been.”
Through the looking glass
Other writers address similar sentiments through fiction, among them Ismet Prcic, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1996, in the wake of the Yugoslavian Wars. He debuted with 2011’s autofictional Shards; in the forthcoming Unspeakable Home (Avid Reader, Aug.), a middle-aged immigrant from Bosnia named Izzy Prcic writes confessional fan letters about the breakup of his marriage to comedian Bill Burr. Interspersed among the letters are short stories written by Izzy whose narrators represent different versions of his broken self. PW’s review called the book a “clever and moving work.”
Prcic says he sees the two novels as part of a possible trilogy that explores his ongoing struggle to overcome the trauma that informs how he writes about the American experience. “A lot of immigrant fiction likes to tell a certain story to Americans. Somebody came here from somewhere and they figured it out. I complicate the immigrant story by not writing success stories. I write about people who are broken.”
Cherry Lou Sy’s debut novel, Love Can’t Feed You (Dutton, Oct.), is also concerned with fracturing—of family, of a sense of self. A Chinese Filipina teenager named Queenie moves with her brother and father to the U.S. to join her mother, who has been working as a nurse in Brooklyn. After years of dreaming about America, the family is disappointed by the cramped apartment filled with items snagged from sidewalk junk piles. Queenie’s parents fight constantly and pressure her to forget about school and get a job. Amid the dehumanizing grind, Queenie also discovers that her hybrid identity is still a source of scorn.
Like the novel’s protagonist, Sy is of mixed Chinese Filipina heritage and says that among her most confusing experiences when she moved to the U.S. was finding her identity “flattened.” In the U.S. she wasn’t Chinese enough to be accepted by other Chinese immigrants; Americans saw her as part of a monolithic Asian group. “Moving here, I had a huge cultural identity crisis,” Sy says.
A desire to see her mixed identity represented in literature about Asian Americans is part of what led her to write the novel. There are a lot of Filipino writers, she notes, but not many have written explicitly about their Chinese heritage. “There was nothing about what happens when you’re othered already and then you move here, you’re asked to check a box, and then asked to speak for this box.”
Tara Isabel Zambrano, an electrical engineer in Dallas, moved with her husband from India to the U.S. in the mid-1990s for work. The stories in her second collection, Ruined a Little When We Are Born (Dzanc, Oct.), jump from communities in South Asia to the Indian diaspora in the U.S. South and often feature mothers straining against limits to their desires.
Zambrano hesitates to characterize her writing as representing any specific experience beyond what she invented on the page but acknowledges a common backdrop: the profound rupture caused by moving between one world and another. “I had to relearn everything when we moved here—how to interact with my children’s teachers, the nuances of a conversation; everything was different,” she says. “A sort of longing to feel at home developed, and I think you see that manifested in different ways in my stories.”
Nigerian American writer Sefi Atta, who divides her time between Lagos, London, and Meridian, Miss., avoided broaching the topic of immigration when she first began publishing more than 20 years ago, fearing she would lapse into cliché. As literary spaces have opened up for African authors, she says, she’s become more comfortable with playing with tropes about immigration.
In her forthcoming novel Good-for-Nothing Girl (Interlink, Nov.), a young woman agrees to travel to the U.S. to work as a relative’s nanny in hopes of pursuing a college education, then finds herself trapped in a modern-day form of indentured servitude. She escapes and becomes a cause célèbre but resents the way activists depict her as helpless, and resists offers to commodify her story.
While the novel connects to wider global issues, Atta, like other authors interviewed for this piece, hopes readers will appreciate her protagonist’s individual experience. “There’s a certain expectation that our stories be in some way extraordinary or calamitous,” she says. “My character may have been through an extraordinary journey, but she wants to be seen not as a case study but as a real person.”
Jasmina Kelemen, a writer in Houston, grew up Yugoslav Canadian and now calls herself an American.
Read more from our In-Focus: Immigrant Experiences feature
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The Fine Print: PW Talks with Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Janine Joseph, and Esther Lin
The anthology ‘Here to Stay’ serves as a mission statement for members of the Undocupoets and other writers who are or have been undocumented.
6 New Works of Fiction and Nonfiction About Immigrant Experiences
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