November 26, 2025 • 46 mins
Jessica Hoppe is an addiction activist and the author of the memoir First of the Family. She joins us this Thanksgiving to talk about addiction, its presence in our families and how it can spread through generations.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
I'm Danielle Alracon, executive producer of The Moment in Ryan
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(00:22):
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Speaker 3 (00:47):
Thank you so much well, and this is the moment
El Momento. I want to talk about Americano.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
Yes, so, I feel like the American dream as a
concept is something that you and I talk a lot about.
It's part of our reporting. It's part of our story.
But I feel like this idea, no, the American dream
is very romanticized now. We spend so much time talking
about what the dream looks like, talking about what migration
north looks like, talking about the economic opportunities, talking about
(01:30):
what you tell me all the time, like how lucky
we are to be in this country.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
It sort of worked for me, it worked for you.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
But I think today, for me, is really about talking
about the darker side of that American dream.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
You know what the cost is.
Speaker 4 (01:43):
But before we get there, I do want to talk
about the first time you came to this country, like
do you do you remember what that felt like.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
I remember it was in nineteen eighty three. I remember
the moment in which I arrived in Los Angeles. But
the fact I mean talking about the painful thing is
I just didn't want to be an immigrant. I was
forced to be an immigrant. So something pushed me out
of Mexico and something brought me in here in the
United States. But now now that you ask me, I mean,
I can tell you that I did well forty years later,
(02:13):
but it was very painful. I was so alone. It
was whatd you never talk about? No, no, I was.
I was so completely alone, and not only that I
couldn't even ask for help. I had no money, and
back then nobody was talking about mental health. So I
(02:34):
think at the end I did well, but I sort
of closed myself to the to the world and said, Okay,
I just gotta gotta move on and that's it. But
it was it was never easy.
Speaker 4 (02:44):
I mean, that's that's interesting, right, because I think when
when people think about you, including myself, you think of
sort of the ramos that that made the American dream. No,
we see you on TV, we see you here. We
never hear about the loneliness and the heart part. And
I feel like I've spent a lot of time, yes,
(03:06):
covering sort of the positive aspects of immigration, as you have,
but I spent so much time covering so many stories
of immigrants.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
That have felt a lot of pain trying to achieve
that dream. I mean, my mind takes me to.
Speaker 4 (03:21):
One of the first stories I did was in the
Central Valley, California, and something that I'll never forget ever
was spending time with a migrant farm worker that used
meth in order to work because he was so tired.
Star super Ganzelle and so he kind of grew into
this addiction because he had to work because he needed
(03:44):
the money. I'll take you to then a Milwaukee and
I'll never forget there. This is during the first Trumpet administration,
and I remember spending time with a family. One of
the girls, she's sixteen years old, and she was suicidal
because the thought of her father being deported and the
PTSD that she felt every time she heard or a
(04:07):
police car like that. That drove her into deep, deep depression.
So I think the question that we'll explore today is
is is a very hard one, which is how do
you how do you cope with the pain and.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
The link between mental health and the American dream?
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Well, I think that's the thing. Now, how do you cope?
Speaker 4 (04:26):
Some people cope with drugs, some people cope with alcohol,
some people cope through complete loneliness. But I think the
north star is if you're able to choose healing and
recovery and talk about mental health, talk about your loneliness now,
to talk about these things we.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
Never talk about that. It's like how the issues? Whose
fault is that?
Speaker 1 (04:50):
I mean, who's the adele?
Speaker 5 (04:53):
Now?
Speaker 3 (04:55):
That that's why we're talking now, Okay, So let's continue
talking about the American Dream. It's not easy. No, that's
why we're doing this show. Okay, our guests, Jessica hope
he is going to help us answer those questions.
Speaker 4 (05:12):
Jessica's a Honduran Ecuadorian American author and activist who is
redefining how we think about addiction, a topic that is
at times hard for some Latino families to talk about.
But she's also redefining the way that we think about
the American Dream.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
Jessica's memor titled First in the Family, A Story of Survival, Recovery,
and the American Dream. She challenges the idea that addiction
is a personal failure, arguing instead that it's a systemic story.
Speaker 4 (05:37):
So today, on the moment, how do we cope? Welcome
to the moment, Jessica, Thank you so mu much.
Speaker 5 (05:42):
Thanks for having me. This is iconic.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
Oh, thank you so much, truly you No.
Speaker 4 (05:48):
I think for us it's important to have this conversation
because we are talking about something that we barely talk
about now, breaking down stigmas, stereotypes, and just humanizing. I
think a lot of these issues that have been criminalized
and that we just shy away from and That's where
I want to start, right, How do you define what
it means to be an addict?
Speaker 5 (06:10):
The clinical definition, or the one that most people in
the field agree with, is a cycle of behavior you
feel powerless to stop despite negative consequences. So I am
hard pressed to find someone who cannot relate to that
kind of behavior. And so this for me happens to
be drugs. It can be anything, can be your phone, sex, shopping, power, money.
(06:36):
Is actually pretty straightforward and it's extremely common, and it's
a very human behavior. It's a response to pain. So
whether you respond to that pain that you're in chemically
or behaviorally, all human beings experience it and it's not
something we should be ashamed of. We've just stored it
in a way where we have some things that are
acceptable and we have others that are on the rest.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
It's also a completely stigmatized.
Speaker 5 (06:59):
Words, particularly one it relates to drugs.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
You are someone that unapologetically identifies themselves as an addict.
If you're hearing this for the first time, people would
be like, wait, what when was the moment when you
took ownership of that identity. You said, yes, I am
an addict.
Speaker 5 (07:21):
I was having a conversation with my mother. I was
a few months. I was like a weeksIn to my sobriety,
and the way I actually came to terms with it
was through an accident. I had a very bad night
and I was going through a lot. I had begun
blacking out pretty quickly, and I was losing hours, evenings, days,
(07:46):
half days of my life without any recollection of what
was happening. One night, I was in a very dangerous
position trying to cross the West Side Highway, and a
woman saved my life. She was in touch with me
weeks later and she asked me a very important question.
I had nights like this before, and my parents were
(08:08):
not aware. My sister was aware, and she would ask
me questions. In fact, we got in a pretty serious
fight about my behavior. But our understanding of alcoholism, substance
you disorder was something that is a choice, something that
is a reflection of bad behavior to selfish, selfishness, and
it's a moral failure. And so I had internalized that
(08:32):
deeply from everything that I've observed, everything that I've absorbed culturally, politically,
and so I felt very ashamed of myself the way
this woman, I suppose from her perspective as a stranger,
you know, was to ask me if I knew what
was happening to me, And it just completely reframed everything.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Was that the first time anyone had asked you that question.
Speaker 5 (08:56):
You know. What people were asking me was like do
you know what you did last night? Or like do
you remember what you said?
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Like how would you do that? Yeah?
Speaker 5 (09:03):
How'd you even get home? It was very shameful.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
What happened? How did she save you?
Speaker 5 (09:08):
Well? I was on so if you know the Westside Highway,
it's like a multiple lane highway, and there was some
construction in front of the Whitney Museum that was going
under renovation at that time, and so there were a
few barriers to entry, like off the highway, and I
was on the other side. And so as she saw
me kind of spill out of a taxi and sort
(09:29):
of stumble in these very high heels, I kept running
into the cement barriers, and she says, at one point
I tried to sort of climb up on it and
you know, tiptoe across like a balance beam, and then
I was going to fall, and now comes oncoming traffic.
So she got up from the stairs of the Whitney,
and she sort of grabbed me because I wasn't finding
(09:49):
my way across. I kept running into the barrier and
then it had a fence above it, and so she
guided me to safety, and she tried to get me
a taxi. And I don't really remember any of that.
I woke up in my bed, half dressed, with all
my possessions save my phone, so anything could have happened
to me. I tremble to think what happened to me
(10:12):
that night, but I am here. I took that story
to my therapist and I said, I'm going to read
you these messages that I received as conversations I had.
I'm not going to interject, I'm not going to offer
I think. I'm not going to make any excuses. At
the end of this, I just want you to tell me, like,
(10:33):
is it true? And she said yes. She said the
idea is, or sort of the test, the barometer is,
is your life unmanageable? And she said, I think near
death is unmanageable. Near death, near death is unmanageable. So
I was so frightened by this reality. But I could
(10:56):
feel with like all certainty that this was true, and
this is what I must do. How I was going
to explain that to my family was the first barrier
for me. Like, the first people I saw in my
mind's eye were my mom and dad. They're just like,
how am I going to tell them? I'm this thing?
Speaker 3 (11:13):
You didn't want to tell them?
Speaker 1 (11:14):
No, no, because he felt ashame.
Speaker 5 (11:18):
Yes, I was so afraid. You know, there are people
in my family and people who have suffered, and they're
very bad actors. You know, they'd cause quite a bit
of harm in our family, especially directly to my mother.
My uncle was deported for his you know, the symptoms
of disorder. Another died and her when her father died
(11:41):
was when we had the conversation. And when her father
died is when I understood how important it would be
for me to really taake on and step into this
world so that we could have a conversation and interrogate it,
break it down, and sort of take the charge out
of it by getting to the root of the story,
because it wasn't what I was going through that she
(12:04):
felt fearful love or that she judged. It was the
story that we'd all internalized. And then the idea of
putting me shoulder to shoulder with the people who had,
you know, been most harmful in her life, being her father,
her brother's knowing how you know, she just could not
(12:25):
make sense.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
Of that, yabobamos. So the hardest thing was just to
to have a conversation with your own family.
Speaker 5 (12:36):
Yes, I told them the story of that night. They
were devastated. They were the only people in the world
that I told, because I wasn't prepared to tell anyone either.
And luckily I went into a program that is based
on anonymity, so I got an hour a reprieve for
a while. And soon after my grandfather died, we got
the word from Hondoa's that he had passed. And that
(12:57):
was the first time my mother spoke to me about
his alcohol and that the reason for his death was
alcohol related. And I said to her, Mommy, how does
it feel to have had a father who's an alcoholic
and now you have a daughter who's an alcoholic. And
she was like, no, say so, like, don't talk about
(13:18):
yourself like that, Like I don't see you that way.
You know, my father she was just like her perception.
Her idea was Mesilla, always working, always well dressed.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
No.
Speaker 5 (13:37):
Nakaye like my uncle. Even though she was the only
person who would look after her uncle that was on
the street and get him home and get him dressed
and get him food. She didn't want me to be
she couldn't give me put me shoulder shoulder with that.
And I just took that opportunity as hard as it was,
because normally I'd be like, you're right, I'm not that
(13:58):
you know, But I was like, this is too important.
This is going to break through something for us as
a family, and I think it's a conversation that other
families need to have. So I just said, I am mommy,
I'm an alcoholic.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
You were doing something harder.
Speaker 4 (14:11):
No, it's not just talking to your family that is
very hard, right, You were getting to the root of
that addiction, and in many ways, that required you to
understand your full family history.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
So in doing that, what did you learn.
Speaker 4 (14:26):
About your family history that then sort of helped you
clarify your own journey.
Speaker 5 (14:32):
My memories of my grandfather are so few because he
was a strange from my mother, therefore from us. But
the story of him was so large because my relationship
with my mother is so close, and she suffered so
much as a result of that estrangement and the abuse,
and so I really resented my grandparents for their role
(14:55):
in what I felt ailed my mother, and so perspective
that mattered to me was my mother's. You know, I
believe for one hundred percent, and I do. I just
think that in our families, and you know, I'll speak
for myself, but I think it's something that I find
a lot of letting know family struggle with is that
we are very much unwilling to step into the dark
(15:19):
parts of our humanity because we're so often not allowed
to narrate or we're not even entitled to the full
spectrum of our humanity, meaning the story of us, like
you're from twenty sixty to now, it's like we're criminals, rapists,
we're drug addicts, we're derelics. You know, we're like we're
(15:39):
sending warships off the coast of Venezuela. We have disappeared
thousands and thousands of people. I won't say we, the government,
the federal government, the administration, on the basis of a
story about who we are as a people. The response
to that has for so long as long as I
(16:00):
can remember, would be to correct that narrative by offering
our exceptions, our good deeds, how much we contribute to
the GDP, how hard we work, all the fruit we pick,
like and you know, all our supposed good deeds, all
of our hard work and labor, and that that should
mean something to people who dehumanize us. I was part
(16:25):
of that for so long. You know, That's what first
in the Family is all about.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
So can I'm trying to understand. Yeah, so, at what
point is your responsibility and at what point is history
is responsibility?
Speaker 5 (16:40):
I feel that it's my responsibility. And this has been
the gift of sobriety for me and recovery for me,
was to interrogate the stories that I've internalized that are untrue,
which is that if I suffer from symptoms that are
a direct response to the system that I've been forced
to live in, which is dehumanizing to me, and I
(17:02):
respond as a human being, that I should be discarded
and I should be considered a disposable person because I
am not operating in a way that the system deems
valuable or that they can take a transaction from.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
Some people might think that's an excuse.
Speaker 5 (17:22):
That's a very common response.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
Yeah, of course, it don't blame the system, it's you don't.
Speaker 5 (17:28):
Blame this system. That's hilarious. What I what I say
to that is that understanding the system properly helps me
bring context to my life and myself so that it
can be freed from the narratives in my mind that
limit me from being my full self. Right, So, if
(17:50):
I were to believe that it was okay for my
uncle to be discarded, from my grandfather, to you know,
be discarded and die painfully, from my cousin to die
in a hospital bed with his last breaths being about
how he needs to get up and get back to
work because he felt so ashamed on his deathbed, dying
(18:12):
of cirrhosis at thirty nine years old, that he be
laid out, that he need rest, that he need to
pass from this world peacefully because he's ashamed. That it's
his fault that he's there in that bed because he
drank too much to deal with the pain of being
in this world, which is unfair to so many of us.
(18:34):
I have never experienced a truer indictment of this system,
the power, the trauma that it inflicts on people who
have to toil just to be considered human beings. I
do not fault any of us for succumbing to those symptoms.
(18:56):
And when I was able to understand that about myself,
I was under I was able to understand it about
my family, about my grandfather. So yes, and so the
specifics of that history were so liberating because drugs and
alcohol have been used throughout history to enable this forced labor,
(19:17):
this exploitation of labor, particularly in Hunduras. So what I
did was go on a journey with my grandfather. Yes,
my family's from Honduras, from Las Eba, and many of
us know the story of you know, the United Fruit Company,
and my grandfather worked there. He was sort of recruited.
There was a time that was a decade of dictatorships
(19:39):
in Hoduras, and he grew up under very oppressive circumstances.
And so when US businessmen who were manipulating the government
right like stamping down any kind of peasant or workers'
rights and putting in their puppet, you know, leadership, just
like they do now, just like we're about see in Venezuela,
(20:01):
just like we've seen in Honduras. Bad things happen in
a place that's being exploited and decimated in that way.
And drugs are normally a part of that. The interesting
story about those The interesting thing about those stories is
that those drugs are always traveling north, but the bad
(20:21):
actors are always south somehow.
Speaker 4 (20:25):
And so that's the key of your book, Know that
that you are literally attempting to trace back this addiction.
You trace it back to these systems, to immigration, to colonization,
to to political trauma.
Speaker 5 (20:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (20:41):
Yeah, I mean people get it when when like, like
when you talk to them, like, like are.
Speaker 5 (20:45):
They because I know it's been a year, and I'd say, you.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Know, And that's why I think it's it's like it is.
It is such a.
Speaker 4 (20:54):
It is a hard thing to grasp. It's a very
profound one, and I think it is. And so if
you draw, if you're trying to draw a simple map
for someone that says, Jessica, help me understand that direct
lineage between Latin American colonization MM and this history that
of so many Latinos carry with them into the United States.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
What does that picture look like?
Speaker 5 (21:18):
Okay? For me, it sort of starts. So I was
about six seven when George Senior was president, right, I
remember sitting on the floor Bush, Yes, you remember him,
I remember, of course you do. I remember sitting on
the floor of our living room. There was the first
(21:40):
national address by Bush and he was going to give
an imperative, you know, important address to talk about the
biggest threat to our national security. And on that day
it was the rogas and thes were coming from the
Indian region. The Indian region is a part of where
my father is from. And it was killing us, and
(22:00):
the drugs were killing us, and the drugs were connected
to violence. That's the most important thing to always correlate
drugs and violence, drugs and depravity, and then again correlate
that to minoritized people. So when I heard Trump calm down,
(22:21):
you know that staircase, that escalator in twenty sixteen and
he kicked off his race by saying all Mexicans are
are rapists, and yes, I was like it was a
dog whistle. It literally went back to.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
That Mexican immigrant and we're not criminals and we're not rapist.
Speaker 5 (22:40):
I mean, I mean such a the time. The actual
numbers on like criminality amongst immigrants is laughable. So the
fact that this story persists and that polls like continuously
find that most people believe this. You always can find
drugs at the forefront, at the front line of creating
(23:04):
that narrative. So as a writer, I focus on those
narratives so that we can understand the truth. And I
think that if you can understand that in yourself and
your family, then you can make sense of it, you know,
for your community. So I focus on Latino families because
especially now we are you know, public enemy number one,
(23:27):
and I connected to other movements, you know, the indigenous movements,
the Black Liberation movement, which have always talked about addiction
and drugs as a tool of oppression, as a tool
of enslavement and sobriety more as a recovery of self,
of pride to self. You know, there is an indigenous
(23:47):
study of it as a soul wound, right the Black
Liberation movement. Even Frederick Douglass spoke about it during the
Temperance movement and during the time of abolition. So this
is just like you know, there have always been this
other rising and criminalizing and stigmatizing of other in order
to oppress and maintain control. There have always been the response,
(24:12):
you know, a movement of understanding, Hey, this is by
design and the first way that we understand how to
you know, deconstruct or liberate ourselves from the system. Is
to understand that A it's false, that it's not our fault,
and then we're entitled to the full spectrum of our humanity.
That could mean not using drugs.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
I was just gonna say.
Speaker 4 (24:35):
That leads me to then one of the things that
always sticks with me when I think of you, which
is that at the end, the underlying drug is the
American dream. Yes, no, that the underlying perhaps most powerful
drug is this idea that the American Dream, as you've
put it, is the ultimate gateway.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
A totally you said. You said yes because American dream
is the ultimate gateway it did?
Speaker 5 (24:56):
I know people don't like that one?
Speaker 3 (24:58):
Well, no, no, no, I think it's complicated. It's complicated
because I thank you. Well, I think I live the
American Dream. I mean I came as an everyone with
nothing and then my life change and yours. Two.
Speaker 4 (25:12):
Look, I think we are staring at a at a
current socio political environment where people are questioning, like what
is the cost of the American Dream?
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Can it cost your life? Does it cost your mental health?
Speaker 5 (25:23):
My question is is it a myth? Is it true?
Can you have your own definition? Can you understand what
that dream is for yourself.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
You were following the American dream, absolutely got into fashion.
You want it to be successful?
Speaker 5 (25:43):
Oh my god, with all my might cont me at
first I was like, I wouldn't do it.
Speaker 3 (25:47):
So is that almost kill you?
Speaker 5 (25:49):
Yes? So my point is like when I was a
little girl sitting on the floor and I heard, you know,
the whole picture of this criminal drug user, drug trafficking,
breaking into houses, raping women, stealing children, right, the whole
caricature came to life. I understood in that moment that
(26:10):
I was being related to this, and people in my
family were being identified this way, no matter what we were,
no matter who you are, no matter what good you did. Hey,
you know what I mean. So I was part of that.
I was going to be placed in that bucket no
matter what what I could do. Which is what America,
an American dream and American exceptions and tells you, is
(26:31):
that through your works, through your acts, you can separate
yourself from those stereotypes. From that experience, you can protect yourself. Right,
what we experience moving into these rooms, which you've experienced,
which we all watched on TV. How Trump spoke to you, right,
is that there is it doesn't matter, So the question always,
(26:58):
no matter what.
Speaker 3 (26:59):
Let me about the Latino community and the American dream
that if you see the numbers, how we're growing, Are
we're getting better salaries, better homes, better education, Are we
doing better? Or are we sacrificing something in the process.
Speaker 5 (27:16):
I think that when we respond to systemic, powerful, you know,
targeted attack like we are right now, there is like
public like public opinion comes out and it immediately says,
(27:36):
if we get rid of all these immigrants, who's going
to pick our fruit? Do you think that that sounds
like the understanding of who we are as human beings? Exactly?
So we have a capitalist system, and I understand the
inclination to want that to amount to something, because that's
the story we were told about how we will amount
(27:58):
to something. We create did the category of Latino, Latina, Latine,
LATINX to collect political power? Right to have a group
together who could united say hey, we need funds for this,
we need funds for our school, we need funds for healthcare,
and that we could you know, push against our politicians.
(28:21):
We cannot. We are not not in any kind of
like meaningful way, like look at this attack, I mean,
this present moment could not more painfully display the myth
of American exceptionalism and the American dream for people who
are stereotyped and otherwise, doesn't.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
Matter how much you tried, you're still not being accept I.
Speaker 5 (28:49):
I don't think it's like I'm not being accepted. I
don't want to feel like sorry for myself or like ooh,
I'm not being accepted. I'm just as we talked about here.
I think it's just it's an idea that is difficult
to metabolize and understand. But I think that just like
in my life experience, when we go to something that
(29:10):
has been stigmatized so far, so we're going to the
outer reaches of the spectrum. Right. So if our community
has started to talk about mental health issues beyond like
whatever we say exactly all that kind of and then
you were not looking for help because you were just
(29:33):
like that person's crazy, get out of here, that person,
this person.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
Yes.
Speaker 5 (29:39):
When I arrived at my cousin's step bed, I said,
lu he said, I know. He said that was a cycle,
a cycle of life. He said to me. There is
(30:00):
nothing natural about a thirty nine year old, young, beautiful
man dying of cirrhosis. The way my cousin did. That
death was absolutely one hundred percent, a million times preventable.
It wasn't because of these awful stereotypes, because of these
(30:22):
terrible stories, and the way we are forced as immigrants
and immigrant families to hide those aspects of ourselves and
only present our labor, our intelligence, our works, the money
that we spend in this economy, which we are not
entitled to. And so I just, of course I have
(30:44):
the respect for my family and we're all going to
process this differently. But the way that we continue to
misunderstand and not offer ourselves and not say I won't
abandon you. You know, one of the hardest things about
this moment was to see it coming from so far away,
which you both must have experienced, and to hear so
(31:05):
many immigrant families people you can identify with. You know,
the whole Latino identity is very fraught. We know this,
but like to hear people say, like I criminalists, They're
just going to take criminals. So it's fine.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
The images that we're seeing nowadays, I mean those those raids,
for instance, I'm seeing family separated, I'm seeing the children
I just remember wanting, which there was a boy maybe
ten years old, and then the reporter asked what happened,
and he said to Mama, I know, so, just imagine
(31:42):
the mental health issue that we're dealing with in the community.
Speaker 5 (31:45):
Can you imagine what will happen to that child.
Speaker 3 (31:49):
And many of them.
Speaker 5 (31:50):
What's going to happen to that child? What is she
going to understand about her safety in this place? And
many of them ever going in the fields, I mean
so many others.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
Just imagine going to going to school and thinking that
maybe they're gonna take to take away your parents.
Speaker 5 (32:06):
Yes, they're gonna come home to no parents, or they're
gonna start going in to schools. They have no problem
taking children. We saw children sip tide. I watched a
man just walk, a man that looked exactly the way
my father looked every day of his life when he
went to work, a neon T shirt, green khaki pants,
(32:28):
work gear, and all of a sudden, they just chok them.
And he said, damn it, madamean Hohood, damn it, m
mean hood. He's like, like Juan is that Marisada, And
like I was just like, he's never coming he's never
coming home, He's never So I am so afraid for
(32:48):
what is happening happening to us psychically, spiritually, emotionally, psychologically. Obviously,
the most concerned goes to the people who have been abducted,
who are concentration camps, who are like the immediate collateral
of the system. I think that the way we help
(33:10):
people understand that that is not a distant thing is
to help people understand that you're exceptionalism and the belief
that it cannot come for you, that you've done the
right thing, that it's okay. Now everyone's like, I get oh,
but oh, and they just took her for no reason,
and this isn't that what I hope people understand that
(33:36):
in immigration law or under these standards, which are lawless,
by the way, I'm completely unconstitutional, being a quote criminal
is driving without a license a duy. We're seeing so
many people. I saw a family. It was like militarized
police outside a small home of four people. Drones swat
(33:58):
machine guns, smashing everything to collect a man who was
completely willing and compliant because he got a DUI in
like the eighties, do you know what I mean? Like,
how many celebrities do you know have DUIs? You've actually
committed vehicular homicide. How many politicians do you know?
Speaker 3 (34:21):
And most arrested have no criminal.
Speaker 5 (34:23):
Or no criminal work exactly. So it's a moot points,
which is how which proves that it's a story, approves
that it's a story that collects our public support, so
that we're complicit.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
I'm connecting everything that you're saying from the Cogini.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Yeah, I'm so glad.
Speaker 4 (34:43):
Clear, I do want to go back to your story.
Just give us a sense of how many people in
your family were in our addicts.
Speaker 5 (34:53):
That I know of, Yeah, that would admit it. None
would admit it. Accept me. Which is why I say
that I'm not the first person in my family to
suffer from this. I'm not the first person to even
attempt recovery. I learned that one of my uncles attempted.
He tried as because his wife told him it's that
(35:16):
or that, and when he got to the US, he relapsed.
He relapsed with my working in a kitchen at a
hotel with my grandfather because it was just like the
only thing, the only way to relate, the only way
to speak, the only way to connect.
Speaker 4 (35:31):
And that's why I asked, because what you did is
that to get out of that you liberated yourself mentally, yes,
but also physically. So what was the sort of healing
and recovery process?
Speaker 5 (35:43):
Like I went into AA in Tribeca because I was
in a bad I was in a bad way. Was
ending a relationship with someone who was an act as well,
which in many ways helped me to understand what was
happening to myself. I was staying with another ex in
like the addict of is Loft. It was terrible, very
(36:07):
sad time in my life. And the nearest meeting was
in Tribeca, in a very white, affluent part of town,
at this very sterile you know, like sober living house,
and those people became my family. You know. I had
the whole miraculous experience, which was that you hear a
(36:29):
person tell your story, a stranger tell your story, and
you relate not in the particulars of the story, but
in the feeling and the cycle of behavior, the cycle
of thinking. And so I stayed. I loved it. I
was like, oh my God. But what really stood out
to me was like, the way these people talk about
substance use disorder has nothing to do with the way
(36:50):
my family talks about it or understands it. Like why
are we always like kept so far from the reality.
There's not even like the clinical, the therapeutic, which we
know we're not entitled to at all, but just the facts,
the simple facts. That's why I always say I am
not interested in getting my my parents' sympathy or acceptance.
(37:13):
I believe that when they become acquainted with the facts,
they will understand for themselves which they have.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
Are the false narratives that shape recovery.
Speaker 5 (37:21):
And this is a moral failure.
Speaker 3 (37:23):
That is beautifult that it's your fault, see kiss.
Speaker 5 (37:29):
That I just want to cause trouble that soy seeing bedwinsa.
You know, like I heard that word all the time
in my home about wins Winsa. It was like the thing,
and now it's like the thing I most want to be,
because shame has so crippled me, Like it's hurt me
(37:50):
in so many ways, like systemically, yes, through people, through
the place where I grew up, through the schools you
know I've experienced, you know, the homogenized places where I
was always otherized. It's a painful experience, you know, in
especially coming of age and then loving my family as
(38:12):
much as I did, so it was like all of
a sort of having a similar experience, but the focus
was on my father because he was part of some
very severe discrimination, physical abuse, and discrimination at his place
of work that became a public case.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
So this is so helpful. We never talk about mental health.
Speaker 5 (38:30):
Issues yet, I'm shocked.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
No we didn't. No, we didn't. I mean I grew
up in Mexico. We were not supposed to feel anything. No,
I mean, if there was a problem, you just had
to face it alone. Then I came to the United
States as many immigrants, and then that was what about crying?
Speaker 4 (38:48):
Oh no, no, I heard no yoda.
Speaker 3 (38:54):
So much.
Speaker 4 (39:00):
Idea growing up was always that a we were always lucky,
you know, so no matter what, keep going. If there
was something bad happening around, like you're lucky, keep going.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
When we did talk about.
Speaker 4 (39:11):
Drugs or sex and drugs was don't do that?
Speaker 5 (39:17):
Is it harder to talk about drugs or sex or equal.
Speaker 3 (39:21):
Sex?
Speaker 5 (39:22):
Sex?
Speaker 3 (39:22):
Right?
Speaker 5 (39:26):
I got my parents a drugs?
Speaker 3 (39:30):
So can we finish with something? So absolutely please watching
us here going through this anti immigrant rhetoric everywhere. If
they need help, what do they do?
Speaker 5 (39:47):
As it relates, where would you start, like substance use
disorder or like just as a human being. As a
human being, what what I related about Trump? And hearing
Trump's you know, open messages to us, I was very triggered.
I was very triggered in a way that you know,
I understood the feelings that I was feeling were historic
(40:10):
because the things that he said were literally what my
bullies would say to me, you know, like dirty Mexican
and just all kinds of like disgusting things. And I
experienced some pretty blunt force trauma in high school. It
stayed with me for my whole life. And this it
was always racialized and more than more than bullying. Yes,
(40:34):
I was assaulted. I was raped in high school by
multiple people, and I was blamed for that act, and
the truth was hidden from me for fifteen years, and
I lived with that shame for so many years. And
the first miracle of my sobriety was hearing from people
who are eyewitnesses that night who could tell me the
truth about what happened, and my God, that liberated me.
(41:00):
But a lot of the reason why they were able
to get away with what they did was because we
were the poor brown family and we were up against
families that were very wealthy, all white and very powerful,
but also that sexual soul and everything to do with
it was very much still victim blamed, even in my
own family. My mother's a survivor. My I mean, I
(41:23):
don't know a woman who has an experience has been
touched by violence in that way. So it was my
mom's mission in life that we never suffer that, and
I just couldn't. I couldn't take that away from her.
So I think that the most important thing, and I'm lucky.
(41:49):
I felt like it was a curse at first, recovery
right or you know, the stigma of being an addict,
of being an alcoholic, what that meant as a woman.
You know, my father always told me it lo maas
Aescuiroso it is borachia that those stories aren't true. That
(42:10):
I'm entitled to the facts, to my truth. So when
I hear now the rhetoric and the continued rhetoric and
that that is not just rhetoric anymore, it's painful as
a story, but to see it in action causing such
chaos and violence, I think my first point of you know,
(42:33):
protection is to remember that none of these stories are
true and that I'm a human being and I don't
have to hide any aspect of myself to exist or
to step into any room. You know, I was recently,
I was applying for a fellowship last night and I wrote,
you know, I have experienced substances or you know, actually
celebrated nine years. And I was gonna erase it because
(42:55):
I was like, does this make does this take away
my credibility? Does this make me unreliable? Is someone going
to judge me for this? But I kept it because
I know that that informs my life and the way
I move through it and what I want to give
to my community so much. And so what I've done
with my family and what I continue to do is
(43:15):
just kind of uh. When I hear things, you know,
I step into that difficult work of continuing the conversation.
I don't write people off as being ignorant or harmful
or like, you know, no one should be discarded in
our families. And the more we learn to not abandon
and discard ourselves for what might be difficult or what
(43:35):
we may need to work on, we won't do it
to our loved ones. And therefore we will we will
hear things like oh, they're gonna just take criminals, and
will think about it for five more minutes and understand
if that true, what can I do? How can I
care about someone else? How can I understand the facts
of this story so that I am not complicit in
(43:58):
any way that I can't can be? You know, that's
that's my mission now. You know. I don't take on
any of that shame, any of that stereotypes. And I
don't delude myself into thinking that my good works or
my graduate degree or my book publication is going to
change the way that I'm perceived in Trump's America and
(44:20):
through that lens. But that is not my lens, and
that that has nothing to do with reality or the
people that I care about or myself. But the saddest
part is that it doesn't save my family. You know,
I've lost three cousins in five years. They're very young.
(44:40):
Kenny was Kenny died of a drug overdose, a sentanel
overdose last October, in the middle of my the publication
of my book, in the middle of my book tour.
And so I live with that guilt. You know, I
constantly struggle with like why me, not them? But that
guilt doesn't it doesn't solve anything. It doesn't bring my
(45:01):
cousins back. It doesn't, but I do want to talk
about them, not them as drug adicts, but as people
and as lives that could have been saved and deaths
that could have been prevented if we could get over
you know this, these misguided stories about drugs and people
who use them. You know, thanks ver much, thank you,
(45:25):
thank you true this mental world to me, Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (45:31):
The Moment is a production of Ramulates Studios in partnership
with Iheart's Michael Tura podcast Network. Our staff includes Laura
Rojasa Ponte, Miguel Santiao Colonne, and Lisa Serda, with help
from Paula a Lean, Digo Corso, Natalia Ramirez and Elsa Lano.
Yoa Sabanta Suaso was our intern for this episode. The
CEO of Raulante Studios is Carina Guerrero. Executive producers that
(45:51):
I Heart are Arlene Santana and Leo Gomes, Pablo Cabrera,
del and Hunger and Mark Canton. Also service producers, sound design,
final mix and themes so by a Lis Gonzalez. Our
hosts are Orge Ramos and Paula Ramos. If you liked
this episode, please share the word recommend The Moment to
anyone who might enjoy unpacking these complicated times with us.
If you like the Moment, Pedro tambien te Gustendgo's podcast
(46:13):
in Espanol, check out raum Bulante Studios. Our shows rum Bulante,
Elilo and Central are really worth a listen. And Daniel
Alarcon Epi of the Moment, thanks for listening.
Hi.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
I'm Danielle Alracon, executive producer of The Moment in Ryan
Bulentez Studios. By now, we've all seen the videos masked
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(00:22):
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slash donate.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Thank you so much well, and this is the moment
El Momento. I want to talk about Americano.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
Yes, so, I feel like the American dream as a
concept is something that you and I talk a lot about.
It's part of our reporting. It's part of our story.
But I feel like this idea, no, the American dream
is very romanticized now. We spend so much time talking
about what the dream looks like, talking about what migration
north looks like, talking about the economic opportunities, talking about
(01:30):
what you tell me all the time, like how lucky
we are to be in this country.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
It sort of worked for me, it worked for you.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
But I think today, for me, is really about talking
about the darker side of that American dream.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
You know what the cost is.
Speaker 4 (01:43):
But before we get there, I do want to talk
about the first time you came to this country, like
do you do you remember what that felt like.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
I remember it was in nineteen eighty three. I remember
the moment in which I arrived in Los Angeles. But
the fact I mean talking about the painful thing is
I just didn't want to be an immigrant. I was
forced to be an immigrant. So something pushed me out
of Mexico and something brought me in here in the
United States. But now now that you ask me, I mean,
I can tell you that I did well forty years later,
(02:13):
but it was very painful. I was so alone. It
was whatd you never talk about? No, no, I was.
I was so completely alone, and not only that I
couldn't even ask for help. I had no money, and
back then nobody was talking about mental health. So I
(02:34):
think at the end I did well, but I sort
of closed myself to the to the world and said, Okay,
I just gotta gotta move on and that's it. But
it was it was never easy.
Speaker 4 (02:44):
I mean, that's that's interesting, right, because I think when
when people think about you, including myself, you think of
sort of the ramos that that made the American dream. No,
we see you on TV, we see you here. We
never hear about the loneliness and the heart part. And
I feel like I've spent a lot of time, yes,
(03:06):
covering sort of the positive aspects of immigration, as you have,
but I spent so much time covering so many stories
of immigrants.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
That have felt a lot of pain trying to achieve
that dream. I mean, my mind takes me to.
Speaker 4 (03:21):
One of the first stories I did was in the
Central Valley, California, and something that I'll never forget ever
was spending time with a migrant farm worker that used
meth in order to work because he was so tired.
Star super Ganzelle and so he kind of grew into
this addiction because he had to work because he needed
(03:44):
the money. I'll take you to then a Milwaukee and
I'll never forget there. This is during the first Trumpet administration,
and I remember spending time with a family. One of
the girls, she's sixteen years old, and she was suicidal
because the thought of her father being deported and the
PTSD that she felt every time she heard or a
(04:07):
police car like that. That drove her into deep, deep depression.
So I think the question that we'll explore today is
is is a very hard one, which is how do
you how do you cope with the pain and.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
The link between mental health and the American dream?
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Well, I think that's the thing. Now, how do you cope?
Speaker 4 (04:26):
Some people cope with drugs, some people cope with alcohol,
some people cope through complete loneliness. But I think the
north star is if you're able to choose healing and
recovery and talk about mental health, talk about your loneliness now,
to talk about these things we.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
Never talk about that. It's like how the issues? Whose
fault is that?
Speaker 1 (04:50):
I mean, who's the adele?
Speaker 5 (04:53):
Now?
Speaker 3 (04:55):
That that's why we're talking now, Okay, So let's continue
talking about the American Dream. It's not easy. No, that's
why we're doing this show. Okay, our guests, Jessica hope
he is going to help us answer those questions.
Speaker 4 (05:12):
Jessica's a Honduran Ecuadorian American author and activist who is
redefining how we think about addiction, a topic that is
at times hard for some Latino families to talk about.
But she's also redefining the way that we think about
the American Dream.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
Jessica's memor titled First in the Family, A Story of Survival, Recovery,
and the American Dream. She challenges the idea that addiction
is a personal failure, arguing instead that it's a systemic story.
Speaker 4 (05:37):
So today, on the moment, how do we cope? Welcome
to the moment, Jessica, Thank you so mu much.
Speaker 5 (05:42):
Thanks for having me. This is iconic.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
Oh, thank you so much, truly you No.
Speaker 4 (05:48):
I think for us it's important to have this conversation
because we are talking about something that we barely talk
about now, breaking down stigmas, stereotypes, and just humanizing. I
think a lot of these issues that have been criminalized
and that we just shy away from and That's where
I want to start, right, How do you define what
it means to be an addict?
Speaker 5 (06:10):
The clinical definition, or the one that most people in
the field agree with, is a cycle of behavior you
feel powerless to stop despite negative consequences. So I am
hard pressed to find someone who cannot relate to that
kind of behavior. And so this for me happens to
be drugs. It can be anything, can be your phone, sex, shopping, power, money.
(06:36):
Is actually pretty straightforward and it's extremely common, and it's
a very human behavior. It's a response to pain. So
whether you respond to that pain that you're in chemically
or behaviorally, all human beings experience it and it's not
something we should be ashamed of. We've just stored it
in a way where we have some things that are
acceptable and we have others that are on the rest.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
It's also a completely stigmatized.
Speaker 5 (06:59):
Words, particularly one it relates to drugs.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
You are someone that unapologetically identifies themselves as an addict.
If you're hearing this for the first time, people would
be like, wait, what when was the moment when you
took ownership of that identity. You said, yes, I am
an addict.
Speaker 5 (07:21):
I was having a conversation with my mother. I was
a few months. I was like a weeksIn to my sobriety,
and the way I actually came to terms with it
was through an accident. I had a very bad night
and I was going through a lot. I had begun
blacking out pretty quickly, and I was losing hours, evenings, days,
(07:46):
half days of my life without any recollection of what
was happening. One night, I was in a very dangerous
position trying to cross the West Side Highway, and a
woman saved my life. She was in touch with me
weeks later and she asked me a very important question.
I had nights like this before, and my parents were
(08:08):
not aware. My sister was aware, and she would ask
me questions. In fact, we got in a pretty serious
fight about my behavior. But our understanding of alcoholism, substance
you disorder was something that is a choice, something that
is a reflection of bad behavior to selfish, selfishness, and
it's a moral failure. And so I had internalized that
(08:32):
deeply from everything that I've observed, everything that I've absorbed culturally, politically,
and so I felt very ashamed of myself the way
this woman, I suppose from her perspective as a stranger,
you know, was to ask me if I knew what
was happening to me, And it just completely reframed everything.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Was that the first time anyone had asked you that question.
Speaker 5 (08:56):
You know. What people were asking me was like do
you know what you did last night? Or like do
you remember what you said?
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Like how would you do that? Yeah?
Speaker 5 (09:03):
How'd you even get home? It was very shameful.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
What happened? How did she save you?
Speaker 5 (09:08):
Well? I was on so if you know the Westside Highway,
it's like a multiple lane highway, and there was some
construction in front of the Whitney Museum that was going
under renovation at that time, and so there were a
few barriers to entry, like off the highway, and I
was on the other side. And so as she saw
me kind of spill out of a taxi and sort
(09:29):
of stumble in these very high heels, I kept running
into the cement barriers, and she says, at one point
I tried to sort of climb up on it and
you know, tiptoe across like a balance beam, and then
I was going to fall, and now comes oncoming traffic.
So she got up from the stairs of the Whitney,
and she sort of grabbed me because I wasn't finding
(09:49):
my way across. I kept running into the barrier and
then it had a fence above it, and so she
guided me to safety, and she tried to get me
a taxi. And I don't really remember any of that.
I woke up in my bed, half dressed, with all
my possessions save my phone, so anything could have happened
to me. I tremble to think what happened to me
(10:12):
that night, but I am here. I took that story
to my therapist and I said, I'm going to read
you these messages that I received as conversations I had.
I'm not going to interject, I'm not going to offer
I think. I'm not going to make any excuses. At
the end of this, I just want you to tell me, like,
(10:33):
is it true? And she said yes. She said the
idea is, or sort of the test, the barometer is,
is your life unmanageable? And she said, I think near
death is unmanageable. Near death, near death is unmanageable. So
I was so frightened by this reality. But I could
(10:56):
feel with like all certainty that this was true, and
this is what I must do. How I was going
to explain that to my family was the first barrier
for me. Like, the first people I saw in my
mind's eye were my mom and dad. They're just like,
how am I going to tell them? I'm this thing?
Speaker 3 (11:13):
You didn't want to tell them?
Speaker 1 (11:14):
No, no, because he felt ashame.
Speaker 5 (11:18):
Yes, I was so afraid. You know, there are people
in my family and people who have suffered, and they're
very bad actors. You know, they'd cause quite a bit
of harm in our family, especially directly to my mother.
My uncle was deported for his you know, the symptoms
of disorder. Another died and her when her father died
(11:41):
was when we had the conversation. And when her father
died is when I understood how important it would be
for me to really taake on and step into this
world so that we could have a conversation and interrogate it,
break it down, and sort of take the charge out
of it by getting to the root of the story,
because it wasn't what I was going through that she
(12:04):
felt fearful love or that she judged. It was the
story that we'd all internalized. And then the idea of
putting me shoulder to shoulder with the people who had,
you know, been most harmful in her life, being her father,
her brother's knowing how you know, she just could not
(12:25):
make sense.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
Of that, yabobamos. So the hardest thing was just to
to have a conversation with your own family.
Speaker 5 (12:36):
Yes, I told them the story of that night. They
were devastated. They were the only people in the world
that I told, because I wasn't prepared to tell anyone either.
And luckily I went into a program that is based
on anonymity, so I got an hour a reprieve for
a while. And soon after my grandfather died, we got
the word from Hondoa's that he had passed. And that
(12:57):
was the first time my mother spoke to me about
his alcohol and that the reason for his death was
alcohol related. And I said to her, Mommy, how does
it feel to have had a father who's an alcoholic
and now you have a daughter who's an alcoholic. And
she was like, no, say so, like, don't talk about
(13:18):
yourself like that, Like I don't see you that way.
You know, my father she was just like her perception.
Her idea was Mesilla, always working, always well dressed.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
No.
Speaker 5 (13:37):
Nakaye like my uncle. Even though she was the only
person who would look after her uncle that was on
the street and get him home and get him dressed
and get him food. She didn't want me to be
she couldn't give me put me shoulder shoulder with that.
And I just took that opportunity as hard as it was,
because normally I'd be like, you're right, I'm not that
(13:58):
you know, But I was like, this is too important.
This is going to break through something for us as
a family, and I think it's a conversation that other
families need to have. So I just said, I am mommy,
I'm an alcoholic.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
You were doing something harder.
Speaker 4 (14:11):
No, it's not just talking to your family that is
very hard, right, You were getting to the root of
that addiction, and in many ways, that required you to
understand your full family history.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
So in doing that, what did you learn.
Speaker 4 (14:26):
About your family history that then sort of helped you
clarify your own journey.
Speaker 5 (14:32):
My memories of my grandfather are so few because he
was a strange from my mother, therefore from us. But
the story of him was so large because my relationship
with my mother is so close, and she suffered so
much as a result of that estrangement and the abuse,
and so I really resented my grandparents for their role
(14:55):
in what I felt ailed my mother, and so perspective
that mattered to me was my mother's. You know, I
believe for one hundred percent, and I do. I just
think that in our families, and you know, I'll speak
for myself, but I think it's something that I find
a lot of letting know family struggle with is that
we are very much unwilling to step into the dark
(15:19):
parts of our humanity because we're so often not allowed
to narrate or we're not even entitled to the full
spectrum of our humanity, meaning the story of us, like
you're from twenty sixty to now, it's like we're criminals, rapists,
we're drug addicts, we're derelics. You know, we're like we're
(15:39):
sending warships off the coast of Venezuela. We have disappeared
thousands and thousands of people. I won't say we, the government,
the federal government, the administration, on the basis of a
story about who we are as a people. The response
to that has for so long as long as I
(16:00):
can remember, would be to correct that narrative by offering
our exceptions, our good deeds, how much we contribute to
the GDP, how hard we work, all the fruit we pick,
like and you know, all our supposed good deeds, all
of our hard work and labor, and that that should
mean something to people who dehumanize us. I was part
(16:25):
of that for so long. You know, That's what first
in the Family is all about.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
So can I'm trying to understand. Yeah, so, at what
point is your responsibility and at what point is history
is responsibility?
Speaker 5 (16:40):
I feel that it's my responsibility. And this has been
the gift of sobriety for me and recovery for me,
was to interrogate the stories that I've internalized that are untrue,
which is that if I suffer from symptoms that are
a direct response to the system that I've been forced
to live in, which is dehumanizing to me, and I
(17:02):
respond as a human being, that I should be discarded
and I should be considered a disposable person because I
am not operating in a way that the system deems
valuable or that they can take a transaction from.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
Some people might think that's an excuse.
Speaker 5 (17:22):
That's a very common response.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
Yeah, of course, it don't blame the system, it's you don't.
Speaker 5 (17:28):
Blame this system. That's hilarious. What I what I say
to that is that understanding the system properly helps me
bring context to my life and myself so that it
can be freed from the narratives in my mind that
limit me from being my full self. Right, So, if
(17:50):
I were to believe that it was okay for my
uncle to be discarded, from my grandfather, to you know,
be discarded and die painfully, from my cousin to die
in a hospital bed with his last breaths being about
how he needs to get up and get back to
work because he felt so ashamed on his deathbed, dying
(18:12):
of cirrhosis at thirty nine years old, that he be
laid out, that he need rest, that he need to
pass from this world peacefully because he's ashamed. That it's
his fault that he's there in that bed because he
drank too much to deal with the pain of being
in this world, which is unfair to so many of us.
(18:34):
I have never experienced a truer indictment of this system,
the power, the trauma that it inflicts on people who
have to toil just to be considered human beings. I
do not fault any of us for succumbing to those symptoms.
(18:56):
And when I was able to understand that about myself,
I was under I was able to understand it about
my family, about my grandfather. So yes, and so the
specifics of that history were so liberating because drugs and
alcohol have been used throughout history to enable this forced labor,
(19:17):
this exploitation of labor, particularly in Hunduras. So what I
did was go on a journey with my grandfather. Yes,
my family's from Honduras, from Las Eba, and many of
us know the story of you know, the United Fruit Company,
and my grandfather worked there. He was sort of recruited.
There was a time that was a decade of dictatorships
(19:39):
in Hoduras, and he grew up under very oppressive circumstances.
And so when US businessmen who were manipulating the government
right like stamping down any kind of peasant or workers'
rights and putting in their puppet, you know, leadership, just
like they do now, just like we're about see in Venezuela,
(20:01):
just like we've seen in Honduras. Bad things happen in
a place that's being exploited and decimated in that way.
And drugs are normally a part of that. The interesting
story about those The interesting thing about those stories is
that those drugs are always traveling north, but the bad
(20:21):
actors are always south somehow.
Speaker 4 (20:25):
And so that's the key of your book, Know that
that you are literally attempting to trace back this addiction.
You trace it back to these systems, to immigration, to colonization,
to to political trauma.
Speaker 5 (20:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (20:41):
Yeah, I mean people get it when when like, like
when you talk to them, like, like are.
Speaker 5 (20:45):
They because I know it's been a year, and I'd say, you.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Know, And that's why I think it's it's like it is.
It is such a.
Speaker 4 (20:54):
It is a hard thing to grasp. It's a very
profound one, and I think it is. And so if
you draw, if you're trying to draw a simple map
for someone that says, Jessica, help me understand that direct
lineage between Latin American colonization MM and this history that
of so many Latinos carry with them into the United States.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
What does that picture look like?
Speaker 5 (21:18):
Okay? For me, it sort of starts. So I was
about six seven when George Senior was president, right, I
remember sitting on the floor Bush, Yes, you remember him,
I remember, of course you do. I remember sitting on
the floor of our living room. There was the first
(21:40):
national address by Bush and he was going to give
an imperative, you know, important address to talk about the
biggest threat to our national security. And on that day
it was the rogas and thes were coming from the
Indian region. The Indian region is a part of where
my father is from. And it was killing us, and
(22:00):
the drugs were killing us, and the drugs were connected
to violence. That's the most important thing to always correlate
drugs and violence, drugs and depravity, and then again correlate
that to minoritized people. So when I heard Trump calm down,
(22:21):
you know that staircase, that escalator in twenty sixteen and
he kicked off his race by saying all Mexicans are
are rapists, and yes, I was like it was a
dog whistle. It literally went back to.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
That Mexican immigrant and we're not criminals and we're not rapist.
Speaker 5 (22:40):
I mean, I mean such a the time. The actual
numbers on like criminality amongst immigrants is laughable. So the
fact that this story persists and that polls like continuously
find that most people believe this. You always can find
drugs at the forefront, at the front line of creating
(23:04):
that narrative. So as a writer, I focus on those
narratives so that we can understand the truth. And I
think that if you can understand that in yourself and
your family, then you can make sense of it, you know,
for your community. So I focus on Latino families because
especially now we are you know, public enemy number one,
(23:27):
and I connected to other movements, you know, the indigenous movements,
the Black Liberation movement, which have always talked about addiction
and drugs as a tool of oppression, as a tool
of enslavement and sobriety more as a recovery of self,
of pride to self. You know, there is an indigenous
(23:47):
study of it as a soul wound, right the Black
Liberation movement. Even Frederick Douglass spoke about it during the
Temperance movement and during the time of abolition. So this
is just like you know, there have always been this
other rising and criminalizing and stigmatizing of other in order
to oppress and maintain control. There have always been the response,
(24:12):
you know, a movement of understanding, Hey, this is by
design and the first way that we understand how to
you know, deconstruct or liberate ourselves from the system. Is
to understand that A it's false, that it's not our fault,
and then we're entitled to the full spectrum of our humanity.
That could mean not using drugs.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
I was just gonna say.
Speaker 4 (24:35):
That leads me to then one of the things that
always sticks with me when I think of you, which
is that at the end, the underlying drug is the
American dream. Yes, no, that the underlying perhaps most powerful
drug is this idea that the American Dream, as you've
put it, is the ultimate gateway.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
A totally you said. You said yes because American dream
is the ultimate gateway it did?
Speaker 5 (24:56):
I know people don't like that one?
Speaker 3 (24:58):
Well, no, no, no, I think it's complicated. It's complicated
because I thank you. Well, I think I live the
American Dream. I mean I came as an everyone with
nothing and then my life change and yours. Two.
Speaker 4 (25:12):
Look, I think we are staring at a at a
current socio political environment where people are questioning, like what
is the cost of the American Dream?
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Can it cost your life? Does it cost your mental health?
Speaker 5 (25:23):
My question is is it a myth? Is it true?
Can you have your own definition? Can you understand what
that dream is for yourself.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
You were following the American dream, absolutely got into fashion.
You want it to be successful?
Speaker 5 (25:43):
Oh my god, with all my might cont me at
first I was like, I wouldn't do it.
Speaker 3 (25:47):
So is that almost kill you?
Speaker 5 (25:49):
Yes? So my point is like when I was a
little girl sitting on the floor and I heard, you know,
the whole picture of this criminal drug user, drug trafficking,
breaking into houses, raping women, stealing children, right, the whole
caricature came to life. I understood in that moment that
(26:10):
I was being related to this, and people in my
family were being identified this way, no matter what we were,
no matter who you are, no matter what good you did. Hey,
you know what I mean. So I was part of that.
I was going to be placed in that bucket no
matter what what I could do. Which is what America,
an American dream and American exceptions and tells you, is
(26:31):
that through your works, through your acts, you can separate
yourself from those stereotypes. From that experience, you can protect yourself. Right,
what we experience moving into these rooms, which you've experienced,
which we all watched on TV. How Trump spoke to you, right,
is that there is it doesn't matter, So the question always,
(26:58):
no matter what.
Speaker 3 (26:59):
Let me about the Latino community and the American dream
that if you see the numbers, how we're growing, Are
we're getting better salaries, better homes, better education, Are we
doing better? Or are we sacrificing something in the process.
Speaker 5 (27:16):
I think that when we respond to systemic, powerful, you know,
targeted attack like we are right now, there is like
public like public opinion comes out and it immediately says,
(27:36):
if we get rid of all these immigrants, who's going
to pick our fruit? Do you think that that sounds
like the understanding of who we are as human beings? Exactly?
So we have a capitalist system, and I understand the
inclination to want that to amount to something, because that's
the story we were told about how we will amount
(27:58):
to something. We create did the category of Latino, Latina, Latine,
LATINX to collect political power? Right to have a group
together who could united say hey, we need funds for this,
we need funds for our school, we need funds for healthcare,
and that we could you know, push against our politicians.
(28:21):
We cannot. We are not not in any kind of
like meaningful way, like look at this attack, I mean,
this present moment could not more painfully display the myth
of American exceptionalism and the American dream for people who
are stereotyped and otherwise, doesn't.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
Matter how much you tried, you're still not being accept I.
Speaker 5 (28:49):
I don't think it's like I'm not being accepted. I
don't want to feel like sorry for myself or like ooh,
I'm not being accepted. I'm just as we talked about here.
I think it's just it's an idea that is difficult
to metabolize and understand. But I think that just like
in my life experience, when we go to something that
(29:10):
has been stigmatized so far, so we're going to the
outer reaches of the spectrum. Right. So if our community
has started to talk about mental health issues beyond like
whatever we say exactly all that kind of and then
you were not looking for help because you were just
(29:33):
like that person's crazy, get out of here, that person,
this person.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
Yes.
Speaker 5 (29:39):
When I arrived at my cousin's step bed, I said,
lu he said, I know. He said that was a cycle,
a cycle of life. He said to me. There is
(30:00):
nothing natural about a thirty nine year old, young, beautiful
man dying of cirrhosis. The way my cousin did. That
death was absolutely one hundred percent, a million times preventable.
It wasn't because of these awful stereotypes, because of these
(30:22):
terrible stories, and the way we are forced as immigrants
and immigrant families to hide those aspects of ourselves and
only present our labor, our intelligence, our works, the money
that we spend in this economy, which we are not
entitled to. And so I just, of course I have
(30:44):
the respect for my family and we're all going to
process this differently. But the way that we continue to
misunderstand and not offer ourselves and not say I won't
abandon you. You know, one of the hardest things about
this moment was to see it coming from so far away,
which you both must have experienced, and to hear so
(31:05):
many immigrant families people you can identify with. You know,
the whole Latino identity is very fraught. We know this,
but like to hear people say, like I criminalists, They're
just going to take criminals. So it's fine.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
The images that we're seeing nowadays, I mean those those raids,
for instance, I'm seeing family separated, I'm seeing the children
I just remember wanting, which there was a boy maybe
ten years old, and then the reporter asked what happened,
and he said to Mama, I know, so, just imagine
(31:42):
the mental health issue that we're dealing with in the community.
Speaker 5 (31:45):
Can you imagine what will happen to that child.
Speaker 3 (31:49):
And many of them.
Speaker 5 (31:50):
What's going to happen to that child? What is she
going to understand about her safety in this place? And
many of them ever going in the fields, I mean
so many others.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
Just imagine going to going to school and thinking that
maybe they're gonna take to take away your parents.
Speaker 5 (32:06):
Yes, they're gonna come home to no parents, or they're
gonna start going in to schools. They have no problem
taking children. We saw children sip tide. I watched a
man just walk, a man that looked exactly the way
my father looked every day of his life when he
went to work, a neon T shirt, green khaki pants,
(32:28):
work gear, and all of a sudden, they just chok them.
And he said, damn it, madamean Hohood, damn it, m
mean hood. He's like, like Juan is that Marisada, And
like I was just like, he's never coming he's never
coming home, He's never So I am so afraid for
(32:48):
what is happening happening to us psychically, spiritually, emotionally, psychologically. Obviously,
the most concerned goes to the people who have been abducted,
who are concentration camps, who are like the immediate collateral
of the system. I think that the way we help
(33:10):
people understand that that is not a distant thing is
to help people understand that you're exceptionalism and the belief
that it cannot come for you, that you've done the
right thing, that it's okay. Now everyone's like, I get oh,
but oh, and they just took her for no reason,
and this isn't that what I hope people understand that
(33:36):
in immigration law or under these standards, which are lawless,
by the way, I'm completely unconstitutional, being a quote criminal
is driving without a license a duy. We're seeing so
many people. I saw a family. It was like militarized
police outside a small home of four people. Drones swat
(33:58):
machine guns, smashing everything to collect a man who was
completely willing and compliant because he got a DUI in
like the eighties, do you know what I mean? Like,
how many celebrities do you know have DUIs? You've actually
committed vehicular homicide. How many politicians do you know?
Speaker 3 (34:21):
And most arrested have no criminal.
Speaker 5 (34:23):
Or no criminal work exactly. So it's a moot points,
which is how which proves that it's a story, approves
that it's a story that collects our public support, so
that we're complicit.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
I'm connecting everything that you're saying from the Cogini.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Yeah, I'm so glad.
Speaker 4 (34:43):
Clear, I do want to go back to your story.
Just give us a sense of how many people in
your family were in our addicts.
Speaker 5 (34:53):
That I know of, Yeah, that would admit it. None
would admit it. Accept me. Which is why I say
that I'm not the first person in my family to
suffer from this. I'm not the first person to even
attempt recovery. I learned that one of my uncles attempted.
He tried as because his wife told him it's that
(35:16):
or that, and when he got to the US, he relapsed.
He relapsed with my working in a kitchen at a
hotel with my grandfather because it was just like the
only thing, the only way to relate, the only way
to speak, the only way to connect.
Speaker 4 (35:31):
And that's why I asked, because what you did is
that to get out of that you liberated yourself mentally, yes,
but also physically. So what was the sort of healing
and recovery process?
Speaker 5 (35:43):
Like I went into AA in Tribeca because I was
in a bad I was in a bad way. Was
ending a relationship with someone who was an act as well,
which in many ways helped me to understand what was
happening to myself. I was staying with another ex in
like the addict of is Loft. It was terrible, very
(36:07):
sad time in my life. And the nearest meeting was
in Tribeca, in a very white, affluent part of town,
at this very sterile you know, like sober living house,
and those people became my family. You know. I had
the whole miraculous experience, which was that you hear a
(36:29):
person tell your story, a stranger tell your story, and
you relate not in the particulars of the story, but
in the feeling and the cycle of behavior, the cycle
of thinking. And so I stayed. I loved it. I
was like, oh my God. But what really stood out
to me was like, the way these people talk about
substance use disorder has nothing to do with the way
(36:50):
my family talks about it or understands it. Like why
are we always like kept so far from the reality.
There's not even like the clinical, the therapeutic, which we
know we're not entitled to at all, but just the facts,
the simple facts. That's why I always say I am
not interested in getting my my parents' sympathy or acceptance.
(37:13):
I believe that when they become acquainted with the facts,
they will understand for themselves which they have.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
Are the false narratives that shape recovery.
Speaker 5 (37:21):
And this is a moral failure.
Speaker 3 (37:23):
That is beautifult that it's your fault, see kiss.
Speaker 5 (37:29):
That I just want to cause trouble that soy seeing bedwinsa.
You know, like I heard that word all the time
in my home about wins Winsa. It was like the thing,
and now it's like the thing I most want to be,
because shame has so crippled me, Like it's hurt me
(37:50):
in so many ways, like systemically, yes, through people, through
the place where I grew up, through the schools you
know I've experienced, you know, the homogenized places where I
was always otherized. It's a painful experience, you know, in
especially coming of age and then loving my family as
(38:12):
much as I did, so it was like all of
a sort of having a similar experience, but the focus
was on my father because he was part of some
very severe discrimination, physical abuse, and discrimination at his place
of work that became a public case.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
So this is so helpful. We never talk about mental health.
Speaker 5 (38:30):
Issues yet, I'm shocked.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
No we didn't. No, we didn't. I mean I grew
up in Mexico. We were not supposed to feel anything. No,
I mean, if there was a problem, you just had
to face it alone. Then I came to the United
States as many immigrants, and then that was what about crying?
Speaker 4 (38:48):
Oh no, no, I heard no yoda.
Speaker 3 (38:54):
So much.
Speaker 4 (39:00):
Idea growing up was always that a we were always lucky,
you know, so no matter what, keep going. If there
was something bad happening around, like you're lucky, keep going.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
When we did talk about.
Speaker 4 (39:11):
Drugs or sex and drugs was don't do that?
Speaker 5 (39:17):
Is it harder to talk about drugs or sex or equal.
Speaker 3 (39:21):
Sex?
Speaker 5 (39:22):
Sex?
Speaker 3 (39:22):
Right?
Speaker 5 (39:26):
I got my parents a drugs?
Speaker 3 (39:30):
So can we finish with something? So absolutely please watching
us here going through this anti immigrant rhetoric everywhere. If
they need help, what do they do?
Speaker 5 (39:47):
As it relates, where would you start, like substance use
disorder or like just as a human being. As a
human being, what what I related about Trump? And hearing
Trump's you know, open messages to us, I was very triggered.
I was very triggered in a way that you know,
I understood the feelings that I was feeling were historic
(40:10):
because the things that he said were literally what my
bullies would say to me, you know, like dirty Mexican
and just all kinds of like disgusting things. And I
experienced some pretty blunt force trauma in high school. It
stayed with me for my whole life. And this it
was always racialized and more than more than bullying. Yes,
(40:34):
I was assaulted. I was raped in high school by
multiple people, and I was blamed for that act, and
the truth was hidden from me for fifteen years, and
I lived with that shame for so many years. And
the first miracle of my sobriety was hearing from people
who are eyewitnesses that night who could tell me the
truth about what happened, and my God, that liberated me.
(41:00):
But a lot of the reason why they were able
to get away with what they did was because we
were the poor brown family and we were up against
families that were very wealthy, all white and very powerful,
but also that sexual soul and everything to do with
it was very much still victim blamed, even in my
own family. My mother's a survivor. My I mean, I
(41:23):
don't know a woman who has an experience has been
touched by violence in that way. So it was my
mom's mission in life that we never suffer that, and
I just couldn't. I couldn't take that away from her.
So I think that the most important thing, and I'm lucky.
(41:49):
I felt like it was a curse at first, recovery
right or you know, the stigma of being an addict,
of being an alcoholic, what that meant as a woman.
You know, my father always told me it lo maas
Aescuiroso it is borachia that those stories aren't true. That
(42:10):
I'm entitled to the facts, to my truth. So when
I hear now the rhetoric and the continued rhetoric and
that that is not just rhetoric anymore, it's painful as
a story, but to see it in action causing such
chaos and violence, I think my first point of you know,
(42:33):
protection is to remember that none of these stories are
true and that I'm a human being and I don't
have to hide any aspect of myself to exist or
to step into any room. You know, I was recently,
I was applying for a fellowship last night and I wrote,
you know, I have experienced substances or you know, actually
celebrated nine years. And I was gonna erase it because
(42:55):
I was like, does this make does this take away
my credibility? Does this make me unreliable? Is someone going
to judge me for this? But I kept it because
I know that that informs my life and the way
I move through it and what I want to give
to my community so much. And so what I've done
with my family and what I continue to do is
(43:15):
just kind of uh. When I hear things, you know,
I step into that difficult work of continuing the conversation.
I don't write people off as being ignorant or harmful
or like, you know, no one should be discarded in
our families. And the more we learn to not abandon
and discard ourselves for what might be difficult or what
(43:35):
we may need to work on, we won't do it
to our loved ones. And therefore we will we will
hear things like oh, they're gonna just take criminals, and
will think about it for five more minutes and understand
if that true, what can I do? How can I
care about someone else? How can I understand the facts
of this story so that I am not complicit in
(43:58):
any way that I can't can be? You know, that's
that's my mission now. You know. I don't take on
any of that shame, any of that stereotypes. And I
don't delude myself into thinking that my good works or
my graduate degree or my book publication is going to
change the way that I'm perceived in Trump's America and
(44:20):
through that lens. But that is not my lens, and
that that has nothing to do with reality or the
people that I care about or myself. But the saddest
part is that it doesn't save my family. You know,
I've lost three cousins in five years. They're very young.
(44:40):
Kenny was Kenny died of a drug overdose, a sentanel
overdose last October, in the middle of my the publication
of my book, in the middle of my book tour.
And so I live with that guilt. You know, I
constantly struggle with like why me, not them? But that
guilt doesn't it doesn't solve anything. It doesn't bring my
(45:01):
cousins back. It doesn't, but I do want to talk
about them, not them as drug adicts, but as people
and as lives that could have been saved and deaths
that could have been prevented if we could get over
you know this, these misguided stories about drugs and people
who use them. You know, thanks ver much, thank you,
(45:25):
thank you true this mental world to me, Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (45:31):
The Moment is a production of Ramulates Studios in partnership
with Iheart's Michael Tura podcast Network. Our staff includes Laura
Rojasa Ponte, Miguel Santiao Colonne, and Lisa Serda, with help
from Paula a Lean, Digo Corso, Natalia Ramirez and Elsa Lano.
Yoa Sabanta Suaso was our intern for this episode. The
CEO of Raulante Studios is Carina Guerrero. Executive producers that
(45:51):
I Heart are Arlene Santana and Leo Gomes, Pablo Cabrera,
del and Hunger and Mark Canton. Also service producers, sound design,
final mix and themes so by a Lis Gonzalez. Our
hosts are Orge Ramos and Paula Ramos. If you liked
this episode, please share the word recommend The Moment to
anyone who might enjoy unpacking these complicated times with us.
If you like the Moment, Pedro tambien te Gustendgo's podcast
(46:13):
in Espanol, check out raum Bulante Studios. Our shows rum Bulante,
Elilo and Central are really worth a listen. And Daniel
Alarcon Epi of the Moment, thanks for listening.
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