It’s hard to say if Daisy Hernández has the best timing in the world or the worst.
She thought about the question one morning, in her office at Northwestern University, where she is an associate professor of creative writing. It was a few weeks before the publication of her fascinating, urgently-needed new book, “Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth,” which will be released Feb. 17. It’s partly a family memoir and partly a world history, an argument on the meaning of citizenship and a provocative case for why we don’t know what a citizen is anymore.
The frozen January campus brooded in the window behind her.
Bare branches shivered in the wind.
She laughed at first, then turned grim: “I don’t know if I have good timing. I was working on final edits after the 2024 election and the ending depended on the results. I had to take into consideration people might think differently about citizenship after this book came out. So yes, the conversation on citizenship will change again, as always, but the heart of this book will not — that what we think of as citizenship is a very American fiction, a story that itself has changed several times over the course of the country’s existence.”
A story that, as narratives go, is often hard to follow, contradictory and incoherent.
Consider: Her father was a political refugee from Cuba and her mother moved to New Jersey from Colombia on the promise of making more money (not because she feverishly wanted American citizenship). Yet before her father died last year, a few months before the election, he asked her mother to donate $1,000 to reelect Donald Trump. As Hernández once wrote in an essay: “People who think immigrants are necessarily pro-immigrant have not met my family.” The result of the election means “Citizenship,” coming 16 months after that election, delivers a wallop, and yet, events have been churning so quickly, “Citizenship” might need a revision 16 months from now.
Lately, a day doesn’t pass without a widely-circulating video of another American citizen getting wrestled out of a doorway or pushed into a SUV as they simultaneously scream, “I AM A CITIZEN! I AM A U.S. CITIZEN!” While Hernández was finishing “Citizenship,” she watched those same videos of people being stopped at ports of entry because a husband or wife held a green card: “I remember a woman in Texas, whose partner was European, being detained. She screams, ‘I AM A CITIZEN! IS THIS EVEN LEGAL?’ Our awareness of our citizenship, our basic understanding of it, was fixed for so long, and faulty, that the understanding is now at the front of a lot of minds.”
She spread her hands on her desk, smoothing out an invisible watermark.
The story we tell ourselves, she said, “is that we’re all on this same level, that all citizens were created equal. We insist on that — even though we’ve known it’s not true.”
Contemporary America, after all, didn’t invent hypocrisy, arbitrariness and cruelty.
Some of the more poignant passages of “Citizenship” deal in the history of how different societies, states and countries think about citizenship. Consider: After Paul, the apostle of Jesus and founder of Christianity, was captured by Romans, he appealed to a Roman soldier for less brutal treatment. The soldier — who admitted that he himself had purchased his Roman citizenship — knew if Paul was a Roman citizen, he would get a quick beheading, instead of the crucifixion that Rome typically reserved for non-citizens.
Consider: The Dominican Republic — which Hernández fears could be a model for the future of United States citizenship — eliminated birthright citizenship in 2010 and made the law retroactive to 1929, removing the citizenship of several generations of its residents. Consider: Stephen Miller, the 40-year old Homeland Security Advisor and main architect of the White House’s immigration policies, grew up in 1990s California, during the protracted fight over the Proposition 187 ballot initiative that sought to strip many social services from undocumented immigrants (but also resulted in 2 million newly registered voters in the state, 90% of them Latinx and Asian American). Consider: Aristotle, whose teachings on citizenship provided the U.S. Founding Fathers with their understanding of citizenship, held immigrant status himself in Athens.
She considers the ways gender and sexual identity play a role in citizenship status, and how even towns in Colonial America would deport their citizens to other Colonial towns — sometimes because a citizen was poor, sometimes because they were sick, sometimes because they were pregnant, usually if they were considered a drain on local resources.
Other parts of the book delve into provocative schools of thought occasionally floated about the meaning of citizenship: Being a citizen is often defined by legal status and geographic borders, but perhaps in the case of an empire like the U.S., it should encompass anyone impacted politically. (Think of the citizens of Venezuela right now, or the decades of refugees fleeing Central American wars that the U.S. government had a sizable hand in fueling.) What if the census of American citizens didn’t just ask you for your race, but what other Americans think your race is?
In fact, though politicians portray our understanding of citizenship as an evolution, as a steady fine-tuning of the mistakes and holes in the definition, the reality is more like a conspiracy-minded evidence board, a crisscrossing of overlapping strings and hunches.
“I mean, even these whole ideas of ‘get in line’ to be a citizen, and ‘doing everything right,’” Hernández said, “that’s a myth too — it always depended on the political context.”
That’s true, of course, for would-be citizens and citizens.
Hernández’s book, in many ways, plays like a refresher, laying out the citizenship we assumed self-evident: “It’s a story of writing and rewriting,” she said. “In 1790, Congress passes legislation deciding you can be naturalized if you’re a free white immigrant, then a century later creates the Chinese Exclusion Act, while in between we fight a war over the citizenship of Black Americans, except Black Americans have a different relationship to education, to the police, etcetera, than other American citizens. So citizenship is no guarantee of the rights of citizenship — nor has it ever been, right? It’s a fact and fiction.
“Still, I want to also remind people it’s also a story — think of the civil rights movement, the gay liberation movement, women’s rights — not entirely written by those in power.”
Daisy Hernández, an associate professor of creative writing at Northwestern University, at home in Chicago on Jan. 23, 2026. (Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune)
Hernández, who is 50, came of age in New Jersey in the 1970s and 1980s, “silently recording my mother’s stories about citizenship,” she writes. She told me: “I grew up hyper aware of citizenship, always hearing whispers about documents, papeles. My friends and family were from Peru, Mexico, Argentina, Guatemala — basically, the United Nations of Latinos in Jersey — and the adults were afraid to talk openly about this.” As a child, she thought every American mother sat down their children and explained they were citizens. Her acclaimed 2014 memoir “A Cup of Water Under My Bed” is partly about recognizing she is bisexual, and partly about the hopes and fears of an immigrant family, serving as a “child translator” for her parents, eventually realizing: “Nothing is more vulnerable than the words in our mouths, because nothing has more power.”
Her parents were allowed into the country in the ‘60s and ‘70s, periods when doors to citizenship felt relatively wider. In “Citizenship,” she remembers turning 11 in 1986, the year President Ronald Regan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, giving legal status and new paths to citizenship to 3 million immigrants. Gracefully, without leaning into some flatfooted metaphor for the famous promise etched into the Statue of Liberty, Hernández writes of how her family spoke often of “invitations,” to visit a friend in New Jersey, to have a cup of coffee, to meet a man (which leads to her parents’ marriage). The rest of the book, in a sense, is an act of wondering 40 years later:
How did we get here?
“My parents were very much part of a generation that had a lot of faith in the country,” she said, “that once you were a citizen it was yours for life and that’s it. My cousins were very much ‘Get at the back of the line’ if you were a new immigrant. My father was very upset that I protested Trump. He always voted Republican. He was also profoundly mired in his own racism and made his attachment to white supremacy clear from when I was young. He spent the eight years of Obama listening intensely to radio shows in Spanish full of racial hatred. He was incredibly grateful for his citizenship, albeit aspiring to a whiteness that was always going to be elusive. He was very much like everyone in my family. It would have never, never, never occurred to them that none of this would matter — I think he would have been surprised, confused and disappointed now.”
Hogarth
“Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth” by Daisy Hernández, publishing Feb. 17. (Hogarth)
As for her mother, she never did donate that $1,000.
“I don’t think she was against sending money because it was Trump — she was against sending money to any politician. She voted for Trump last year. She has a lot of regrets. She would generally follow the political impulses of my father, so it’s been a process watching her come to her own conclusions. She asked me: ‘But why are they so cruel?’”
Last month, using her mother’s background, Hernández received dual citizenship with Colombia. “I went to the Chicago consulate. I’m not worried for myself. I spent years thinking about citizenship before this book and was fascinated with the experience of (dual citizenship). But I’m also a political writer and Latina. I believe in fighting the good fight. I want to stay. That said, I see the possibility of a fascist government here for more than four years and would like to choose between imprisonment and going elsewhere.
“The truth is, it’s a shock to my system, having grown up with immigrants who believed U.S. citizenship was the only citizenship you’d ever want. But it’s just not true anymore.”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
