Elisa Gonzalez
The Wife
Elisa Gonzalez
Marie recognized his wife the way she used to recognize her mother in a crowd of other mothers. Absolute certainty based on the scantest evidence: how she toyed with her hair, or untwisted a skirt. Marie had never met his wife, but fame, it seemed, could stand in for intimacy. She’d seen her in Vogue, arms akimbo, collarbones vamped, and in The New Yorker, staring down the lens with an...
Brutality and Opacity | Birthright Citizenship Under Attack
Elisa Gonzalez
Among the barrage of edicts issued by Trump in the early days of his second term was Executive Order 14160, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” which seeks to redefine the citizenship clause in the Fourteenth Amendment by revoking birthright citizenship for the children of all undocumented, and some authorized, immigrants. Judge John Coughenour, the Reagan appointee who first stayed the order, called it “blatantly unconstitutional.” So far,...
Fraud Everywhere
Elisa Gonzalez
On July 18, 2019, I dialed the National Visa Center 53 times. If the queue was full — it often was — the automated system played a short message, then ended the call. If it wasn’t, the system played a short message and placed me on hold. After two and a half hours, the person I eventually reached couldn’t solve my problem. Afterwards, I wept as hard as a despairing...
No Returns | On Family Functions and Dysfunctions
Elisa Gonzalez
In December, The New Yorker asked, “How Did Polyamory Become So Popular?” in a piece that tracked the rise of the open relationship, from the obscure “province of utopian free-love communities” to its status as a mainstay of “Park Slope marriages and prestige television.” In January, New York magazine took on the same topic in a cover story, which explored the “increasingly mainstream world of ethical non-monogamy” and included “a...
The Air We Move Through | Rhetoric, Bureaucracy, and the Immigration Debate
Elisa Gonzalez
In September 2020, Dawn Wooten, a nurse at a privately operated immigration detention center in Irwin County, Georgia, filed a whistleblower complaint that alleged “jarring medical neglect” at the facility. The brief was 27 pages long, but it was only the contents of a page-and-a-half (section 4, subsection D) that caught the public’s imagination: hysterectomies conducted without the consent or knowledge of migrant women. Wooten’s account of a “uterus collector”...
