Second-Generation Self-Realization

If "Everything Everywhere All at Once" hit a little too hard for you, this one is for you. (Spoiler free, I promise.)

Note: Although I briefly speak on Everything Everywhere All at Once in this article, there are no spoilers in this article.

After watching Everything Everywhere All at Once with my friends in the movie theater, none of us moved from our seats. We sat staring into nothing as the credits rolled and the previously full theater slowly emptied. I remember breaking out of my thoughts to become aware enough to read the big “SPECIAL THANKS” at the very end of the credits, right before the sponsors. The A24 logo showed up again and amongst my pondering of generational trauma and the beauty of the complexity in this movie, I thought to myself, “Wow. This redeemed A24 for me. Lady Bird was so white and boring.” (So sorry to the Lady Bird lovers.)

Growing up a Brazilian-Canadian-American from all over New Jersey has its complications, so I can summarize a quick idea for you: I grew up obsessed with QuikChek breakfast sandwiches. I could never not romanticize the subway despite living next to it for five years and riding it consistently to New York City in my childhood, and now every summer. Our car was stolen every Tuesday night and found by the cops within a week, like clockwork (it was used for racing because it had a good engine, from what I’ve heard). I desperately wanted to be a normal Caucasian girl from second to ninth grade and stopped speaking Portuguese entirely. I only picked it up again my senior year of high school and luckily practiced enough to now be fluent. However, when my mom switched from our Brazilian home church to an all-white church in the middle of nowhere, I hated it immediately and begged her every week for two years to take us back to Newark. 

When someone asks me for my last name, I always pronounce the way non-Latinos have pronounced it: “Muh-see-nah”. I do this because I know that if I say Macena (correctly pronounced “Mah-seh-nah”), they’ll never know how to spell it. I feel too Brazilian around white people and too white around Brazilians. My high school friends and boyfriend saw me as more American than Brazilian so I grudgingly let them. My college friends see me as more Brazilian than anything else so I happily let them. On some other end of this spectrum, the Latin American Club at my university has no representation for my culture, nor do they show any effort or desire to do so. I grew up feeling like Brazilian isn’t Latino enough in multicultural Latino atmospheres, which is an entirely different struggle of its own, but also not. My identity is a thin line that I’ve spent my life jumping over, indecisive as to which side I want to portray around who.

Thanks to many conversations with my mom and my friends, and after lots of years pondering the question of who I am, I’ve come to the simplest way to define myself: Canadian by citizenship, Brazilian by blood and culture, and American by lifestyle. Still, when someone asks me where I’m from, I find myself stumped. My answer is either New Jersey (where I grew up), Tennessee (where I attend University), Maryland (where my parents currently live), or Brazil (the cultural identity I most identify with). I know that my answer is more complicated than most, but my struggle with identity is the same for most second-generation immigrants. 

We don’t know who we are; we know who our parents are, and we think we should be something like that, but we always find that we’re not. Our favorite foods are always those from our country, besides that one that just never grows on us despite our parents’ and grandparents’ adoration for it. We either grow up engulfed in a gigantic family, or our  cousins are strangers to us. My personal experience has been with the latter. I’ve lost family members without knowing who they were, leaving me unsure as to whether or not I’m allowed to grieve them. 

The question and journey of finding ourselves is much more complex than it could ever be for white people. A big chunk of our self-realization journeys involves confronting the deep-rooted xenophobia in and against ourselves. In summer 2020, my dad shyly came into my bedroom and asked me if he was brown, unsure what the term meant and whether or not it applied to him. Although I never asked him directly why he asked me this, judging by our conversation, my understanding was that his question was him pondering how closely the current events correlated to his own life and own experiences. My father has his own journey with culture and race that I’m unaware of, and maybe he doesn’t even think about it as much as I do—in fact, he might not even remember that conversation—but I know that that moment was another stepping stone on his journey, and it was a push in mine as well. This is all to say that we never stop finding ourselves, even and especially culturally. 

My friends and I held hands after exiting the movie theaters. We walked in stunned silence. I used the bathroom before we left, and immediately upon exiting the stall, my friend was leaning on her side against the sink, staring blankly at a wall. Everything Everywhere All at Once absolutely addresses generational trauma better than I ever could, better than I’ve ever seen anyone do in general, and it’s hard to put into words the belonging that I felt while watching that film. All I can say is that it was another stepping stone. It opened a door, a conversation, while simultaneously closing a clasp in my chest that I hadn’t previously known was there. 

Sharing that experience with two individuals who understood this film, and me, on a personal level was the best way for me to watch it. We laughed hysterically. We cried harder than ever. I wanted to hug the daughter in this film and ask her how she is so brave. How do you forgive. How do you connect. How do you put the pieces back together. Life will never be able to condense into the moments a movie holds, regardless if simple or complicated, but how can I do it, I want to ask her. Tell me. Tell me again.