Lisa Deaderick: No two immigrant stories are the same. San Diego authors share journeys from Nigeria and Venezuela.
Their journeys to the United States, their experiences since arriving here, and their relationships to their home countries are very different, which is part of the point. Lola Adeyemo and Leonora Simonovis have each written books that share their own experiences immigrating to America, illustrating how broad and varied that path can be.
Adeyemo came to the U.S. as a graduate student from Nigeria. Once she entered the workforce, she realized that people projected one idea of her based on the way they defined immigrants — as people who were escaping their home countries, had finally “made it” to America, and were working to bring their families with them. None of that was true for her. Simonovis grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, and first came to the U.S. as a middle-schooler when her father got a postdoctoral opportunity at Yale. They returned to Venezuela a few years later (although she’d wanted to stay), and she came back to the U.S. when she was 25, during the upheaval happening in her home country. Both women are featured in the San Diego Public Library’s “Author of the Month” series at 6 p.m. Monday at the Central Library in downtown San Diego.
Adeyemo is the author of “Thriving in Intersectionality: Immigrants, Belonging, and Corporate America,” works with organizations to build inclusive workplaces, and started the nonprofit Immigrants in Corporate to build community and support for other immigrants navigating the corporate workplace. Simonovis is the author of “Study of the Raft” (which won the 2021 Colorado Prize for Poetry) and a professor of Latin American literature and creative writing in Spanish at the University of San Diego. Both women took some time to talk about their books, their experiences, and their perspectives on the impact of anti-immigration legislation and the push against affirmative action on immigrant communities. (These interviews have been edited for length and clarity. )
Q: On Monday, you’ll discuss your books, “Study of the Raft,” which explores colonization, politics, language and culture in your home country of Venezuela; and “Thriving in Intersectionality,” about the intersections of immigrating with other marginalized identities while navigating work culture in corporate America. In the event description, it says that you’ll be talking about the “immigrant experience.” What comes to mind for you when you hear “the immigrant experience”? What does that mean to you?
Adeyemo: Broad [laughs]. I think that’s part of why my conversation is not just the immigrant experience, it’s the immigrant experience in corporate America, the immigrant experience in the workplace. That can look different from the immigrant experience as an entrepreneur, that can look different from the immigrant experience as an asylee trying to get legal status. So, there’s different things that come when we talk about immigrants and immigration. For me, I have a large family back in Nigeria. I have a biotech background, so I wanted to come to where the best schools were, that was my main attraction to the U.S. I didn’t necessarily dream of coming to the U.S. to live, I wasn’t trying to run away from anything. For me, Nigeria will always be home. I had to learn that the way people saw me was different and the way I saw myself and my background was very different.
In the introduction chapter, I talk about a scene that happened in the workplace where somebody was asking me how did I get here and if I was trying to bring my family. It took me a while to really get what he was asking, but it really just struck me that, ‘Oh my gosh, this person is looking at me like, “You’ve made it out. You made it here, you’ve done great, are you trying to bring your family here?”’ And I was like, “Well, my family’s not trying to be brought here. My parents come here for vacation, if they want to come. They don’t want to move to the U.S.” I think that people see immigrants as people who are always trying to escape, running away. When you hear the word “immigrant” it’s like, ‘Oh, they feel grateful to be here. Whatever crumbs we hand you, you should be grateful for us helping you survive,’ as opposed to how I’m looking at myself. I’m thinking about how my parents paid for school, I’m coming here being supported by my family, whom I love very much, so how can I make them proud? What’s driving me is making my family proud so that I can go back home. I’m not blocked from going back home, home is still home. So, I’m driven by making my family proud, but I’m being looked at as somebody to be pitied. Like somebody who needs to be grateful, so it was kind of like an identity crisis where I, personally, set out to use the word “immigrant” for myself because I wanted to change the narrative around who people think an immigrant is and help people to see that immigrant is very broad. Everybody’s story is different.
Simonovis: There are two things that come to mind. First of all, my own experience because I’m not just an immigrant, I’m in exile, so I don’t get to return or visit my homeland [in an interview with the magazine 5280, she talks about a distant relative who became a political prisoner, which led to the government detaining and questioning her and her other family members]. So, I think about loss, I think about grief. I think about how, with time, things become a little blurry. There’s always this adjustment that we’re doing to be able to cope with that. For example, there are words that I have forgotten and then I talk to a friend, or I talk to a family member and I remember when we’re talking, ‘Oh, yeah, that word. That’s what it means.’ Then, living in San Diego, on the border, I’ve met so many immigrants. I’ve been to Friendship Park and I’ve been to the other side in Tijuana, and just talking to people and hearing about their different experiences. I have many students who are in situations like that, or whose parents came and had to work so hard and now they’re the first generation to go to college. I love being able to be in that environment, to listen to those stories and there’s kinship, we’re connected. It’s not that, ‘Oh, I’m not alone’; I think it goes beyond that. It’s this idea that every single human being, and more than a human being, we’re all connected. I’m always thinking about how can we collaborate more? How can we just make the world a better place?
Q: When you spoke with Colorado State University’s Center for Literary Publishing in 2021, you mention San Diego’s role in your own transformation, saying, “Part of being grateful for [Study of the Raft] is that it helped me come to accept that this is my home now. But also that I am home. It’s not just about the place where I live. Right now, I feel like I could move anywhere and feel at home.” Can you talk a bit about what you mean when you say that you, yourself, are home? What that means for you, and also what it means when thinking about firsthand experiences of immigration?
Simonovis: I’ve been, for a while, thinking about this idea that is out in the media and other places that we’re, sort of, incomplete. Like, you always have to have something else to feel whole. I read a lot of Buddhist texts and listen to podcasts and all that; I’m not religious, but I find that some of those teachings are so beautiful because they start from the premise that we are whole. We’re complete, we don’t need anything else. That’s very difficult to accept because we’re humans, we’re always wanting more, we always crave what we don’t have, whatever. I always think about that — how, yes, I miss my home, but I’m basically talking about a physical place that I can’t access. But I can access my memory, I can talk to family members, I can talk to friends, I can listen to a song that brings me back to my childhood or to my grandmother’s home. All of that is accessible to me, it’s within me, so I’ve learned that it is a way of coping. It is a mechanism that I’ve created for myself where writing is also a way of dealing with it. I don’t have to go there, I can close my eyes and see it. It’s not real because it’s in my imagination and things have changed a lot and they don’t look the same. The country that I left is not the country that exists right now, so it’s also not realistic to think that that’s still my home because it’s not, in a way.
Q: It’s kind of trapped in a certain time, for you.
Simonovis: Exactly. Yeah, so that’s what I mean. I’m home just because I have all of these resources that I can tap into, to be able to feel at home, if that makes sense.
Q: You started the nonprofit Immigrants in Corporate to address the needs of support and building community among immigrant professionals. What were some of the specific things that you needed, in terms of support and community, when you were starting out?
Adeyemo: I think my biggest thing was, even just the application process was very foreign to me. For me, I had experience back home and then I had a lot of support getting into grad school from the school I attended, so I felt very welcome. I know that not all international students feel that, but when I was coming to school, it was a very different experience. When I was moving into the workplace — from the application to the interview, to what it even means to work in the corporate workplace — everything just felt like an uphill battle. A lot of things that I should know, I didn’t know. There’s not a support system like when trying to get you through school, apart from interviews and resumes, background checks and how to pass a credit check or all the tests being done for workplace employment. In my country, back in Nigeria, it’s a very respect-based culture and in the workplace, you kind of defer to somebody who is above you because they are usually older. Getting into the workplace in America was like, ‘Oh, now I have somebody who is older than me, reporting to me.’ The dynamics are very different. In Nigeria, we don’t call people older than us by their first name. Learning that being in a meeting with people who are older than me doesn’t mean I have to keep quiet. Even things like negotiating your salary. When you apply for jobs back home, you’re thinking that they offer you what you’re worth and you’re grateful for that. It’s just very different from how corporate America works. You are free to transition in your career, find mentors. It’s still very new, but my goal [with the nonprofit] is to bring immigrant professionals together to find the jobs, grow into their role, to advance, to transition careers.
Q: Recently, Florida’s new immigration law (SB 1718) went into effect, requiring businesses to verify citizenship status of employees, requiring some hospitals to collect immigration status information, and further criminalizing undocumented immigration. What do you make of this latest instance in a long history of anti-immigrant sentiment and legislation, particularly within the context of your own experience immigrating from Venezuela, and in thinking about your work?
Simonovis: I’m probably going to answer in a roundabout way, but the first thing that comes to mind is that my father is a doctor, an MD, and one of the things that I learned from him, from a very early age (and from my mother, too) is that you never turn anyone away, regardless of who they are, because you made an oath. I understand there’s a whole system trying to hold people accountable; but I find that, more and more, the lack of compassion and empathy seems to be getting stronger in this country, particularly because there are so many voices speaking up. And there’s this backlash, like the more people speak up, the more others are going to stand up and say, ‘No, this is not how it should be. We don’t want these kinds of people in our country.’ But I also think about Indigenous people in the United States and how they are also treated as immigrants even though they’ve been here first. I do think that what most immigrants experience — this idea of feeling like an outsider, of feeling rejected — it’s something that more and more people who live in this country and who don’t have that status, are feeling. Their ideas, the way they think, the things that they have believed in, their values are being put into question and kind of trampled, they’re not valid. So, I find that really interesting because, in Venezuela, we went through that. We went through this polarization that the United States has been going through for the last seven or eight years. I saw that happen and I saw families being torn apart because of politics. I lost friends because we didn’t see things the same way and that is terrifying. I feel like I’m sort of reliving that experience again and having all of these conversations with people who feel like, ‘This is my country, I’ve lived here forever, and now I want to leave,’ and that’s what I already went through. I totally understand and can relate, and it makes me very sad, you know? I don’t know what the solution is, but I do like to think about these things because we have to. I guess I’m not surprised that things are just uglier and uglier, and they will be for a while, I think, before they start turning again.
Q: The Supreme Court’s recent ruling striking down the use of affirmative action at colleges and universities has prompted concerns from some in corporate America about diversity, equity and inclusion efforts being up for similar elimination in the workplace. What’s your perspective on the kind of impact this could have on DEI initiatives, particularly for immigrant professionals?
Adeyemo: I would say, for immigrant professionals, we’re not even close to where that is helping yet. As somebody who’s worked in corporate America and who’s also done a short stint as a compliance manager — when I first moved to the people and culture platform, I served as the compliance manager of a global organization, so I was exposed to a lot of the processes and the things that happen because of affirmative action — while some of those processes are not perfect, I saw the way that having those laws in the workplace kind of pushes people to do something. Now, sometimes it may be performative, sometimes it might not be done right, but having the laws in place was a good way to get companies to do something. I think, when it comes to corporate America, part of the challenge is that a lot of things are being done piecemeal. There’s a lot of hype about simple items that should be the norm that companies are doing. I think, in the DEI space, the overwhelming feel from all of this is that we still need things to get to the point where they are systemic, where their policies are embedded, where the processes are established. Otherwise, it’s just going to be one person doing the action, and then when the person moves on, everything goes back the same way. I think it just feels very exhausting. I’m still learning about America and affirmative action, and even I know that this has been helpful. Now, with everything that has been happening in the last year with all of the freezes and just DEI coming under attack, I feel like if things like laws and policies are getting rolled back, there’s no way that is progress. Even if they’re not perfect, they were put there as a milestone, a guardrail to start progress and the goal was always not for affirmative action to be the maximum target — it was always a baseline. If we’re removing that baseline, it’s almost like we’re allowing some people not to have anything at all. It just feels exhausting. It feels like multiple steps back and makes the whole diversity and inclusion process very exhausting.