“My Dream Is My Son”: An Autoethnographic Account of the American Dream

This article is an exploration of Salomé’s construction of the U.S. 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 this article, I explore issues of representation, voice, and positionality when conducting qualitative research. Salomé’s story is not generalizable to all Latinx immigrants but is nonetheless illustrative of the ways in which the American Dream is contextualized by individuals. At a time when Latinx migration and experience in the United States 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.