The immigrant experience in ‘Dreams in Times of War’
By hola | Published | No Comments
In a time when Latine communities nationwide live under the looming threats of ICE raids and the erasure of their rights, immigrant stories are not hard to come by. Countless forms of media recount the typical tale of the hard-working immigrant who gives everything for the American dream, leaving their home for the promise of a better life. But what does it mean to be an immigrant in the United States? How do exploitation, uncertainty, and capitalism shape our survival and legacy? How do we balance cultural assimilation and preservation? Through his short story collection, “Dreams in Times of War,” author Oswaldo Estrada explores these questions and reconstructs the modern-day immigrant identity.
“Dreams in Times of War” is a series of snapshots capturing twelve strikingly different immigrant lives. When a boy born in the U.S. but raised in Peru discovers he doesn’t have Peruvian citizenship, he’s forced to leave his entire family behind to fly to Los Angeles and live with a father he hasn’t seen since he was a baby. The daughter of a seasonal farmworker tends to her sickly mother’s nicotine poisoning, which worsens every time she returns to working in the tobacco fields. A Salvadoran transgender woman struggles with the trade of one form of discrimination for another. A nanny for a wealthy white couple teaches a newcomer how best to conform to the cultural and classist rules of their workplace. Despite how compact these stories are — the shortest being three pages, the longest 10 — Oswaldo succeeds at breathing life into them through visceral depictions of reality, illuminating each narrator’s efforts and motives.
(photo by Cristina Carrasco)
The flow between narrators is a mesmerizing experience. No story starts at the beginning of the conflict, instead, it drops the reader off at random points in the narrator’s life, always ripping them away before seeing a true resolution. Context is established quickly enough, but the reader is still left feeling like an outsider, a trespassing foreigner who doesn’t quite fit in. Bordering on voyeurism, this off-kilter race to understand the world one is thrust into is what sets Estrada’s collection apart. A true ode to the immigrant experience, these stories propel the reader into the role of the alienated, boxed out of the privilege of knowledge, until the narrator allows them into the story. It is a fascinating parallel that only furthers the readers’ empathy for these characters.
Estrada also does not pull any punches when portraying the range of human morality. While some stories brim with feel-good hope, others focus on sensitive themes of gender violence, power imbalances, racism, abuse and sexual predators, with main characters sometimes the victim, sometimes the perpetrator. Estrada’s uncomfortably accurate descriptions, combined with the uncertainty of how much time one has in any given narrator’s story, create a looming sense of doom that lingers long after. Painful and haunting as they are, these open endings are also necessary reminders of what millions experience daily, whether in the U.S. or Latin America.
Fast-paced and powerful, “Dreams in Times of War” is a riveting journey from start to finish. Estrada’s brilliant care for sensitive topics and characters humanizes a community constantly targeted by outside forces. It is an important read now more than ever.
— Story by Michelle Benitez
— Copy edited by Samantha Gomez, Rebecca Louden and Kami Waller
Michelle Benitez (she/her) is a first-generation Mexican American from Naples, Florida. She graduated from Florida State University with a double major in editing, writing and media, and Spanish. During her time at Florida State, she developed a passion for text production and publications that promote Latine voices and challenge the current publishing industry’s market. Michelle aspires to become a developmental editor and enjoys bowling, reading and window shopping.
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