On a bitter cold morning in early 2016, I was standing next to my 6-year-old daughter in front of the bathroom mirror. We were playing with face paint: yellow stripes, green dots, a blue spot here and there. At one point, my daughter dug her index finger into the little bucket of white paint, and, as she spread it across her cheeks, she said: “Look, Mamma, now I’m getting ready for when Trump is president. So they won’t know we’re Mexicans.”
She doesn’t watch much news and doesn’t seem to pay very close attention to the radio, but perhaps somehow she knew about how Donald Trump had announced his candidacy for the presidency, saying, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” but instead sending “rapists.”
One night at the dinner table, shortly after the election, my daughter told my husband and me, “Maybe we shouldn’t speak Spanish in the street anymore, just in case.”
She had started looking at herself, and at us as a family, in a different, bleaker light. I saw the shame in her eyes, the embarrassment she felt about her cultural and linguistic heritage.
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From then onward, I decided, I just had to protect my tribe more fiercely from the spectacle of hatred that the Hispanic community, among others, was enduring. But I had no idea of what was actually coming. I failed to see what that look in my daughter’s eyes actually foreshadowed: a new America, under Mr. Trump, where Hispanic children would be in serious danger.
Not even halfway into the Trump administration, we have witnessed a hate campaign against the Dreamer generation, usually articulated as an aggressive law-and-order discourse that criminalizes young undocumented Americans.
We have also witnessed the brutal campaign against Central American unaccompanied minors, who were first targeted by the Obama administration, when a “priority juvenile docket” was created to ensure swifter deportation proceedings. These young people are now systematically being denied asylum and Special Immigrant Juvenile Status visas, a form of immigration relief for which many of them were eligible.
And finally, more recently, we are witnessing very worrisome changes in immigration policy, such as information sharing between the Office of Refugee Resettlement and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the zero-tolerance policy, which, for a few weeks, separated children from their families when they attempted to cross the border.
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The president has now said children won’t be separated from their parents any longer — no more babies taken from mothers’ arms. But that just means families will sit in detention centers. And more than 2,000 children have already been torn from their loved ones.
No matter their story and immigration status, shame and guilt are what Hispanic children are taught to feel in America. The depth of psychological and emotional abuse perpetrated against them by institutions and people is unfathomable.
When children are undocumented, and are either seeking asylum or deferred action status, they have to go about their daily lives trying to demonstrate that they are not “criminals,” not “rapists,” and in fact not even “illegals” — a term as violent as it is imprecise, as only acts can be considered illegal, not people. But even when Hispanic children are American citizens, they have to live their lives demonstrating that they are not second-class citizens.
Hispanic children seem to pose a threat to America and its self-serving narrative as a nation of white-only, speak-English-only immigrants.
Two winters after the evening when my daughter told us we should perhaps stop speaking Spanish in public, we moved from our Harlem apartment to a 19th-century house in the Bronx.
In January, while our house was still full of boxes and half-finished floors, we were visited by a group of 12 children who study at Still Waters in a Storm, a one-room schoolhouse in Brooklyn, led by the teacher and activist Stephen Haff, where Hispanic immigrant children ages 5 to 17 learn Latin and musical notation and read serious literature. They have studied John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” in detail and even the youngest members of the group can recite passages from the poem, and can give an opinion on their favorite scenes, metaphors and characters.
In 2016, the children started reading and translating “Don Quixote” from Spanish into English. They decided to reimagine Don Quixote, an old man in 16th-century Spain, as a group of Spanish-speaking immigrant children living in contemporary New York.
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They also turned the project into a musical, “The Traveling Serialized Adventures of Kid Quixote,” which they perform in homes, offices and college classrooms. We hosted an early performance. The troupe arrived with props, a keyboard, a ukulele, a disarmingly humorous script and a handful of deeply moving songs the children had written.
Since then, I have continued to observe the students at work on this project. In my years of experience as a writer and as a college professor, I have never seen anything like this: the love for language, the passion for discussion. During one session, the children were collectively writing a song about the sense of belonging and not belonging, of being themselves and having to live up to expectations.
We all sat around a large table full of etymological dictionaries and thesauruses, and the children were discussing a line about being born in Mexico. Suddenly, a girl of about 5 or 6 raised her hand and, very seriously, told all the others: I wasn’t born in Mexico, I was born on the moon. We all giggled at the candid eloquence of her remark. But she was in fact right. One theory about the origin of the word “Mexico” is that it is Nahuatl for “navel of the moon.”
Few people know that the United States is the second-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world. Smaller than Mexico’s 124 million, but larger than Spain’s 47 million, the Spanish-speaking population in the United States is estimated to be more than 50 million.
Perhaps America — not the real America, but that white-only, English-only America — does indeed have a reason to fear the new generation of Hispanic children, these new Quixotes. They are beautiful, brilliant, well-educated and multilingual. And they have had enough.
Valeria Luiselli is the author, most recently, of “Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions” and the forthcoming novel “Lost Children Archive.”
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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SR5 of the New York edition with the headline: The Littlest Don Quixotes Versus the World. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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