‘My dream is my Son’: an (Auto)Ethnographic Account of the American Dream

This paper is an exploration of Salomé’s construction of the American Dream. Salomé is a sixty-seven-year-old immigrant from Guatemala. During eight hours of in-depth interview, Salomé talks about the embodied experience of migration, motherhood and her view of the American Dream. In writing this paper, I explore issues of representation, voice and positionality when conducting qualitative research. Salomé’s story is not generalizable to all Latinx immigrants but nonetheless it is illustrative of the ways in which the American Dream is contextualized by individuals. At a time when Latinx migration and experience in the US and the nature and content of the American Dream have taken center stage in national dialogue, Salomé’s experiences serve to illustrate the profoundly personal and individual lived experiences of the American Dream.