Letter From Minnesota: Finding Community (and a Little Joy) in the Club

You have your passport on you all the time now, so you take it out at the club to prove you’re of age. The bouncer stamps your hand and it’s a normal night, like any other normal night. You weren’t sure if you should go out, but you did. Like so many community rest stops spreading across Minneapolis, this night is branded as a care event, an opportunity to let off steam and gather.

Inside, the crowd roars; they needed this. We needed this. In one corner of the dance floor, an immigrant defense group collects sign-ups for trainings while Renee Rapp’s vocals bounce off of frenetic bodies. The walls are papered with Venmo codes for donations. Minneapolis, after all, is the community that shows up. The place is packed. And then the house lights wash over the sea of people and you could count the ones who look like you on one hand.

This happens often these days. You’re having a wonderful time and the food is good and the drinks are sweet and everyone agrees this is exactly what is needed in this moment, this community. The people in the room can go home without fear and the people this joy should be for are not here and you know this and you go anyway, you laugh at someone’s joke and you drive home with an ethnic last name riding shotgun on your license plate and you don’t ask which community.

You are a citizen. You drive more often at night now, thinking it’ll be okay because it’s dark out, and it’d be harder for an officer to see what race you are.

Over steaming bowls of pozole, you and your friends talk about what races you’ve been mistaken for, as if they aren’t here for people from our races, too. You say you’ve been catcalled in Spanish, and your friend who is Korean squints and says I can kindddd of see it, like maybe South American?, and you’re all joking, and it isn’t funny, because the absurdity, like everything else, belongs to racism, not you.

You don’t realize you hadn’t exhaled in a month until Saturday night, in the glow of the decked-out pink taco bar, listening to two young women belt out the lyrics to Becky G and Karol G’s Reggaeton hit “MAMIII.”

It’s girls’ night. The snowbanks by the entryway are dimpled by an assortment of kitten heels. The night is a mixture of neon and Pitbull and Dyson Airwrap curls and hijabs and lip combos and “Hot Girls Melt ICE” shirts. Everyone here has taken a risk to come sing.

When someone hands you a microphone, you remember what your lungs are for.