EXPRESSIONS OF INSPIRATION
THIS LAND IS OUR LAND
Corpus Christi native gives powerful insight into the lives of 10 first-generation immigrants. By: JACQUELINE GONZALEZ / Photos by: TWINS MEDIA
ONE OF THE MOST difficult aspects of writing is turning your thoughts into words that express the feelings you wish to convey, but Corpus Christi native, Saherish Surani, brings forth tales of woe, despair and hope in her debut novel, The Stories of U.S. The novel presents a compilation of experiences of 10 undocumented and first-generation immigrants who are living in the United States today. Surani, 20, is the daughter of Pakistani immigrants who graduated from Veteran’s Memorial High School. She is currently in her third year at Tufts University in Massachusetts, where she studies the intersections of political science, psychology and public health. What began as a passion project to understand the stories of immigrant families soon became a project to bring forth stories that may otherwise have fallen by the wayside, considering the current political climate. While the immigration crisis is political, it is more a humanitarian crisis at its core, and she knew that she was the voice from which these stories needed to be heard. She submitted a book proposal for New Degree Press in winter 2018. When it was approved, she was put in contact with several immigrants to interview, with the help of family and friends. She conducted a series of extensive interviews with 36 people over the course of a year, which included late-night FaceTime sessions and phone calls at odd times of the day and night, to accommodate their schedules and different time zones. The book opens with a note recalling the time in summer 2018, when she was in a car with her parent and got pulled over by a police officer because her headlights were off. Luckily, since she had no prior offenses, she was let go with a warning. Surani pondered the many possibilities that could have gone wrong if she were less privileged and realized that this routine traffic stop could
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have ended in someone’s deportation. “There’s a big stigma that undocumented immigrants only come from Mexico and through the southern borders,” Surani says. So, while conducting these interviews, she aimed for diversity of country of origin, socioeconomic class and age. Some of the stories captured in the novel include those of Donovan and Paola, elderly Guatemalan siblings; Emily, a middle-school-aged child; and Sahara, a South African college student. Surani’s goal for the novel is to illustrate the similarities in one another, regardless of how different we may seem. “If the stories make readers feel something,” she says, “that’s the first step to acknowledging cultural shifts in the United States.” In today’s digital age, it is easy to get caught up in the headlines and not realize that the people we hear about in the news are real. The Stories of U.S. gives an intimate look into the lives of 10 people and will hopefully remind everyone that we are all human. Surani’s impressive debut as an author isn’t her first philanthropic rodeo. In addition to writing this novel, she is also co-founder of Project iConquer, a nonprofit project geared toward raising awareness about diabetes and childhood obesity in children ages 3-7. “We figured that 7-yearold children have already developed bad eating habits, so we wanted to reach them at a younger age, so they aren’t changing their habits, but instead, creating new healthy habits.” Surani and her sisters were inspired to
Emily, a Chinese immigrant – but more importantly, a middleschooler – encountered a terrifying experience when an immigration officer came to her front door looking for her father, who is undocumented. Emily lied to protect her father by saying he was out running errands, although he was simply hiding in a closet. As Americans, we take our privileges for granted, because Emily not only had immigration to contend with, she also had normal middle school problems to worry about – like her upcoming geometry test.
