A love letter to our people--full of fury and passion.
Only in turning away from the White gaze can we truly make America beau.
In You Sound Like a White Girl, Julissa offers a bold new promise: Belonging only comes through celebrating yourself, your history, your culture, and everything that makes you uniquely you.
Julissa deftly argues that these demands leave her and those Like her in a purgatory--neither able to secure the power and belonging within whiteness nor find it in the community and cultures whiteness demands immigrants and people of color leave behind.
She talks about the Lie of Success, the Lie of Legality, the Lie of Whiteness, and the Lie of English--each promising that if you obtain these things, you will reach acceptance and won\'t be an outsider anymore.
She combs through history and her own story to break down this myth, arguing that Assimilation is a moving finish line designed to keep Black and brown Americans and immigrants chasing racist American ideals.
In this dual polemic and manifesto, Julissa dives into and tears apart the lie that Assimilation leads to belonging.
She ran the race, completing each stage, but never quite fit in, until she stopped running altogether.
As a child, she didn\'t yet understand that assimilating to American culture really meant imitating White America--that sounding Like a White girl was a racist idea meant to tame her, change her, and make her small.
She\'d spent so much time getting rid of her accent so no one could tell English was her second language that in that moment she felt those words--you Sound Like a White girl?--were a compliment.
As a brown immigrant from Mexico, Assimilation had been demanded of her since the moment she set foot in San Antonio, Texas, in 1994.
These were the words spoken to Julissa by a high school crush as she struggled to find her place in America.
You Sound Like a White girl.
Instead, she calls for a celebration of our uniqueness, our origins, our heritage, and the beauty of the differences that make us Americans. -- Joaquin Castro Bestselling author Julissa Arce brings readers a powerful polemic against the myth that Assimilation leads to happiness and belonging for immigrants in America. -- Jos�
Olivarez, award-winning poet and author of Citizen Illegal If you could take Rodolfo Gonzales epic poem \'I Am Joaquin\' and explain it through compelling, personal narrative in twenty-first century America, You Sound Like A White Girl would be it.
A love letter to our people--full of fury and passion
