In the late black of Pittsburgh nights, I dream of the Venezuelan sky. The first home I ever knew was a concrete jungle with incredible emphasis on jungle. Caracas is a city nestled in mountains with a beach past one horizon and the Amazon past the other.
I haven’t been back in Venezuela since I was twelve. When one’s home goes to the dogs at the hand of an authoritarian dictatorship, you steer clear as much as possible. Venezuela, once oil-rich and beautiful, houses a hollower, third-world version of itself.
So, now I call Pittsburgh my home. I felt safe here, for a while, and if I ignored the ache in the back of my throat, I could pretend Mount Washington was as tall as the Avila.
“America was the answer to every immigrant's wish,”
they said.
A place where you could make your own and start anew. But we all know how that ends.
The first Trump administration brought a wave of dread to my 11-year-old self that I had never experienced before. I was young, but I wasn’t stupid. I heard what our president said on the news about people like me and my family. We were criminals, a plague to be eradicated. After his loss in 2020, his win in 2024 felt like a hammer to the back of the skull, and everything since has been nuclear fallout. When ICE rolled in, it felt like the other shoe was finally dropping on the Latin population of the United States.
First, a drivers license was enough to prove rightful status. Then, it had to be a passport, and my parents urged me to get a passport card to carry around (they had just ordered their own). It became birth certificates, social security cards, anything we could keep on our persons to make us walking neon signs that said “we’re here the right way.” But there’s never been a right way to be an immigrant in this country, unless you were white—a word with an ever-fluctuating definition. And then a white American teacher was killed in Minneapolis, and there really was no hope anymore. We are all at the behest of these faceless figures in bulletproof vests, with less than a month of required on-the-job training.
Terror and trepidation eat at the body. It stops your brain from functioning well enough to think, and I’m not the only person in this boat. As members of Gen Z, there has never been a generation more tapped into what’s going on in the world. We know of atrocities in our own communities and cities, but also the ones a county over, states away, across the ocean, and on the other side of the world. Every bad thing going on right now is not only being told to us through the news, but is being documented first hand by people on our feeds. And if you don’t keep up with what’s going on, you’re socially unaware. There’s a sense of guilt and intense privilege that comes with ignoring it. People are dying and you’re not, so it’s up to you to keep them alive. The world is resting on your shoulders, and your eyes define the line between life and death.
So, how do we live with it all? Grasping at normalcy can feel like willful ignorance, and isolation hits harder than ever. The only cure that I have ever found to be worthwhile is that, despite everything, we are exceedingly not special in this, and that should be a bitter solace.
This is not a message to those fundamentally selfish enough to believe that people dying on the other side of the world or a street away have nothing to do with them, or those that choose to pay or ignore their way out of a humanitarian crisis. I’m glad all of this feels uncomfortable, but staying frozen in place with the hopelessness of it all only hinders you in the process. Fighting the fight is easier when you aren’t concurrently warring against your own guilt. The hardest thing for me to learn was how to be a person through it all, even as my people are being deteriorated. You have to sober up enough to be a realist, but pull yourself back down to know that catastrophizing isn't better than active community. Reach out to your politicians, go to marches, or just show up to fundraisers for places like Casa San Jose and be an extra body for other people to see and know they’re not alone. We all have to link arms and bear the weight of the world because if one person falls, there’s a chain that manages to keep you standing. I know what it’s like to see a home fall, but I also know what it’s like to watch a people cling to shreds of hope and somehow still find it in them to laugh and love.
We have to care for each other enough to keep going and not be buried under the weight of it. We aren’t islands; we need one another to survive. And sometimes, that means you have to learn how to live, gritted teeth and all.
