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“It was a future they couldn’t quite see, where the richness of all they had brought to the great land of promise would one day be zapped into nothing, the glorious tapestry of their history boiled down to a series of ten-second TV commercials, empty holidays, and sports games filled with the patriotic fluff of red, white, and blue, the celebrants cheering the accompanying dazzle without any idea of the horrible struggles and proud pasts of their forebears who had made their lives so easy.”

This quote appears in Chapter 18, while a group of Jewish and Black community members gather outside Chona's hospital room as she lies on her deathbed. The passage describes the loss of cultural identity and heritage that comes with assimilation into a dominant culture. As immigrant and minority communities assimilate, they are reduced to stereotypes or shallow representations in media that claim to honor them while diminishing the true significance of their identities. The quote also serves as a critique of nationalism, specifically as it relates to a country’s tendency to ignore and minimize the culture and histories of the very people who built it. Participation in this kind of nationalism demonstrates the ways in which ignorance ties into complicity; people blindly celebrate America without stopping to consider the sacrifices made by minority communities.

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