Jessica Goudeau > Quotes

“Too often we focus on the opportunities the US provides immigrants in the land of the “American Dream,” and not on how our mercurial national moods lead to small and large policy shifts that radically affect real people.”
― Jessica Goudeau, After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America

“I have come to believe that refugee resettlement is a bellwether of our country’s moral center—how we respond to the greatest humanitarian crises of our time reveals our nation’s soul.”
― Jessica Goudeau, After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America

“As I honed my research and found that my family had been in one of those feuds, I saw eerie parallels between what happened in Colorado County from 1871 to 1911 and the rise in vigilantism in Texas and around the US that began in the 2010s. I am not the only one to notice. During our first interview, I asked the historian James Kearney, whose story I will tell more of later, whether he saw parallels between that time and where we are now.

His reply was immediate: "Absolutely. Are you kidding me? You have all these unreconstructed Confederates, and they set out to dismantle all the Reconstruction programs one by one. It took them 40 years to do it. They won the Second Civil War. It's all a legacy of slavery, that certain human beings can control others."

And then a sentence I can't stop thinking about: "Slavery has disappeared, but the attitudes are still there. it's not a parallel—it's a continuation. It's just a new manifestation of the same old attitudes.”
― Jessica Goudeau, We Were Illegal: Uncovering a Texas Family's Mythmaking and Migration

“What kind of people built into their laws and culture an infrastructure to care for refugees from all over the world? Good people.”
― Jessica Goudeau, After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America