Daisy Hernández: Citizenship (NYC)
Author Daisy Hernández presents her new book on national belonging, immigration, and what it means to be a citizen in a fractured America. Free at NYPL.
Why we picked this
Hernández writes about citizenship not as a legal category but as a lived experience of belonging and exclusion — and she's doing it at the exact moment those questions have become impossible to avoid.
Daisy Hernández came to national attention with A Cup of Water Under My Bed, a memoir about growing up between Cuban and Colombian immigrant cultures in New Jersey. Her new book on citizenship arrives at a moment when the legal and emotional dimensions of belonging in America are being contested with unusual ferocity, and she brings a personal and literary intelligence to questions that most political commentary flattens into abstraction.
The talk will draw on the new work to examine what citizenship actually means — not as a bureaucratic status but as a set of daily experiences of inclusion, exclusion, visibility, and erasure. Hernández writes from and about the communities most directly affected by current immigration debates, and her lens is neither purely political nor purely personal but genuinely both at once.
Free at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building — one of the great civic spaces in New York — this is an event where the setting reinforces the subject. The public library as institution and the question of who belongs in America are not unrelated topics.