Recently, I heard an interview with Zohran Mamdani’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, who said, very simply, “Human beings are migrants.

…

Every people have a story of not just origins, but migration. Since the modern colonial system, we have been made to believe that each of us has a homeland and that we have been a product of that homeland. [There is a] tension between the migratory nature of human beings and the fiction that we all belong to a homeland.”

When I heard this, I felt a profound understanding, because it mirrors what I believe: that all human beings are equal, that we have an innate sense of wonder and curiosity about the world, and that every place should be welcoming –– a home for all who live there.

I think about my own mom’s stories of Sunday drives with her family and how she would beg her dad to keep going! She wanted to see what was around the next corner, on the other side of the mountain, on the other side of the world.

I think about when I went to Portland, Oregon for the first time and saw a city that prioritized taking care of the environment. I was in a new place, but I felt like I was home.

I think about seeing a monarch butterfly when I felt so far from home in Madison, Wisconsin, and feeling less alone. Paisana, I thought, and smiled.

I think about my first time in Puebla, confronting colonialism and mestizaje and all the centuries of pain and dispossession and creativity and resilience Mexico has endured since the Spanish colonizers arrived so long ago. “I am from all of this,” I thought, and the grief I felt confronting this history and the way it continues to repeat itself, was its own homecoming.

Finally, I think about the ways that my birthplace and U.S. citizenship have allowed me to be at home in places that are hostile to so many people, and the way that marginalized people make homes despite exclusion.

I have to believe that someday we will all recognize the truth in Mahmood Mamdani’s words: that there is no wrong place for someone to live. That human migration is as natural as the migration of other species, whose travels awe and delight children who point at the sky and yell, “¡Mira, Mami! ¡Gansos!”