The American Dream knows no ethnicity: Editor’s Note

I spent part of an afternoon this week having lunch with State Sen. Margarita Prentice.

We hadn’t planned to have lunch – but by happy circumstance we found ourselves seated next to each other at a welcoming party in Kent for the new Consulate General for Mexico, Alejandro Garcia Moreno.

It was my first time meeting Prentice, who has been a state legislator for 22 years now. And while our paths seem vastly different – she was raised in a Hispanic household in California, I was raised an Irish kid in New York – there are some definite similarities.

Prentice had a life before she became a politician – actually more four decades of a life, working as a nurse in nearly every capacity in her health-care career. She is a mom and a wife. She is hispanic, and embraces her culture. Her family has been in this country since the 1800s.

I’ve never been elected to anything, but I have had a life, spending more than two decades as a journalist. I’m a mom and I have been a wife. I am Irish and Spanish, and I also have been taught to embrace the cultures in which I was raised. My family consists of relatively recent transplants: grandparents who came over “on the boat” from Ireland and Spain.

Neither of us had what you might call stereotypical paths, on our way to adulthood in this melting-pot country.

Prentice was never a migrant worker, nor was she brought up in East L.A. I was never groomed to be an Irish cop, or (God forbid) the other job equated with Irish heritage, a nun. I’ve never set foot in Boston.

“There go the stereotypes,” Prentice quipped, when she told me about her relatively staid upbringing in San Bernardino.

But here we were, sitting at a table in Mexico Lindo restaurant, talking about being an American. And talking about the experience of wanting to be an American. Come hell or high water. Legal papers or not.

The experience of wanting to be in this country, regardless of the consequences, knows no single ethnicity.

I shared with Prentice the story of my grandfather, who smuggled himself into the U.S. through Canada at least two times.

He was from Ireland.

Lord knows how he finally pulled it off, but the day came when my hotheaded grandfather arrived the “legal” way, no doubt arguing all the way through customs. Then in New York he met my grandmother (an Irish immigrant who’d done it right the first time), married her and eventually made my existence possible.

So as we were sitting at our table Monday, listening to speakers elaborating on the growing number of Hispanic newcomers to this country, I was struck by the sense of sameness. Just as my European relations came teeming to these shores decades ago, so now does this new wave of American Dream pursuers.

Prentice and I are both daughters, living testaments, of those pioneering ethnic groups.

And because each of our families had so believed in that dream, both of us were able, in our capacities as career women, to sit down and share a meal and a common vision.

El que la sigue, la consigue.

(He who follows it, attains it.)