Exoticized, Formalized, and Legalized
Before I moved to Germany in August 2022, visiting felt like a romance, a spectacle of happiness and togetherness.
When you’re a tourist, being a Mexican-American woman in a small village in the Eifel region outside of the city of Prüm makes you feel like a unique outsider. In a rural district where the foreign-born population sits at under 14 percent — and where Latin American diaspora numbers barely register on federal statistical charts — people simply weren’t accustomed to seeing someone with my background. The German gaze stares almost felt like star treatment. People were curious. I was optimistic.
What no one tells you about the challenges of moving abroad is that the novelty wears off fast the moment you trade your tourist visa for a residence permit. You go from being an exotic guest to a permanent outsider navigating a country where nearly 15 percent of the population holds foreign citizenship, yet administrative culture remains deeply rigid,insular, and unforgiving.
Take a September afternoon in 2023. My German husband and I were at a museum in Berlin. While looking through a gallery, an elderly German woman and her companion were struggling to locate a specific piece listed in their program.
Hoping to be helpful, I stepped in. “It’s upstairs on the second floor,” I offered in English, as my German was still developing. She smiled, thanked me, and we struck up a warm, pleasant exchange.
Then came the turn.
“Your English is so good,” she said.
“Thank you,” I smiled.
“Where are you from?”
“The U.S.,” I replied.
She paused, narrowing her eyes slightly. “Where are you actually from?”
I knew what she meant. It’s the universal code for you don’t look like my idea of an American. I felt myself stiffen. “My background is Mexican,” I said evenly. “Born in the States, but my parents are from Mexico.”
A visible wave of satisfaction washed over her face, as if a puzzle piece had finally clicked into place. Then, without missing a beat, she turned to my German significant other and asked him in German if I was his wife. When he said yes, she smiled warmly and offered her final verdict:
“Gut, dass du sie legal im Land gemacht hast.” Good thing you made her legal in the country.”
I stood there frozen. In a matter of seconds, a friendly conversation in an art museum had been reduced to a comment about my legal status.
I couldn’t help but wonder: Why is an immigrant’s right to exist in the West always framed as a favor granted by a local, rather than a right earned on our own terms?
It wasn’t the loud, cruel hostility you sometimes face in the States — the overt “Go back to your country.” It was something subtler and uniquely European: an institutional mindset delivered with a polite smile, assuming that a brown woman in Europe must have been saved by a marriage certificate.
As a Mexican-American raised with warmth, expressive conversation, and high-energy community bonds, living in Germany often felt like existing in an emotional freezer. It is a specific kind of climate — not just the endless gray overcast of winter, but the social distance engineered into daily life. It’s in the quiet, transactional exchanges at the local bakeries in Cologne where eye contact is brief, smile-less, and efficient. In California or Mexico, public life is relational; emotion is passionate, loud, and uncontained. In Germany, public emotion feels like a private luxury reserved strictly for behind closed doors.
And yet, in my desire to bridge that distance, I developed my own quiet ritual. During my first months, when the loneliness felt unbearable, I would sit alone in local neighborhood cafés and bakeries for hours, letting the murmur of German conversation wash over me like background music. I couldn’t understand the complex grammar yet, but I would watch the subtle theater of human warmth: an older woman leaning across a small wooden table, laughing at something her companion said. I was desperate to know what made her laugh.
In those soft, unscripted moments, the coldness evaporated. It showed me a gentler, more humane side of German society that exists beneath the rigid surface — a reminder that people here love, joke, and connect just as deeply, even if they guard those moments behind a higher wall. Sitting in those coffee shops, surrounded by voices I couldn’t decode, I felt a strange kind of sanctuary. It erased the heavy weight of isolation, if only for the length of an espresso.
This emotional freezing reaches its peak inside the administrative machinery. The Ausländerbehörde (Foreigners’ Registration Office) and the Jobcenter do not see your humanity, your stories, or your art; they see a stack of A4 paper,stamped in blue ink, organized in rigid folders. Your right to love, live, and breathe in the country is audited by an official sitting behind a desk who treats human dignity as a technical formality.
Isolated in a rural area, craving familiar ground, I sought out other women online. I wanted to build a community, to share a laugh with people who understood the specific weight of navigating this culture.
That’s how I met my first real friend in the region — a woman from the Dominican Republic who had come to Germany for university and later met her partner online. When we talked about life in Europe, she looked at Germany with pure wonder, declaring she was never going back. Listening to her made me check my own privilege coming from California. For immigrants fleeing severe economic crises or political displacement, Germany represents a sanctuary of stability. I couldn’t fault her awe; her baseline for comparison was entirely different from mine.
Over time, my circle of sanctuary expanded to women from every corner of the world — a friend who is half-German and half-Thai, a friend from Iran, another Mexican woman, and a close English friend of Afghan-Pakistani heritage married to a German man. Together, we built an unspoken survival network.
We would gather in living rooms over coffee to vent, exchange survival strategies, and navigate the daily hustle of living in a country built on bureaucracy. We quickly learned the unwritten rules of German institutionality: that entering the Jobcenter, the Bürgeramt, or the Ausländerbehörde accompanied by a German significant other who speaks flawless, accentless German instantly changes how you are treated. Suddenly, doors open faster, tone softens, and respect is granted.
We became each other’s unofficial guides, recommending doctors who were empathetic and spoke English, holding space for each other’s administrative fatigue. Simply going to a doctor’s appointment alone or executing a solo errand across town felt like a major mission. But when you finally stepped back onto the street, having navigated the system and advocated for yourself in broken German, you felt a surge of quiet triumph — a mental pat on the back for surviving the day. Within our multicultural inner circle, we hustled and protected each other. One thing was certain: living in Germany was never, ever boring.
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In 2024, while running an information stand for a Palestinian solidarity group in Trier, I met a woman who mirrored my own existence in reverse. She was born and raised in Germany, but both of her parents were from Palestine.
Standing beside her was like looking through an inverted glass. In California, I am an American citizen born on U.S.soil, yet because I am an Indigenous Mexican-American with brown skin, I am endlessly subjected to the default assumption that I must be an immigrant — confronted with the cliché of “Go back to your country” simply because I do not fit the dominant, white archetype of what an “American” looks like.
In Germany, my friend faced the exact same reality. She spoke German flawlessly, barely knew Arabic, and held a German passport, yet because of her tan skin and SWANA (South Asian and West Asian) features, she was continuously interrogated about her identity. Whenever we walked down the street together, people would ask where we were from. While my American identity was treated as a novel curiosity, her German identity was met with suspicion. She was forced into a perpetual state of having to prove her belonging in the only home she had ever known.
Her struggle introduced me to a concept rarely discussed in global discourse: the hidden existence of post-migrant identity in Europe. People back home often view Western Europe as either a homogenous white monolith or a pristine refuge, completely unaware that there are Afro-Germans, German-Arabs, and German-Latinos fighting the exact same battles of visibility and hyphenated identity that we fight in the United States. We are polar opposites in geography, yet profoundly identical in our displacement.
When I moved to the city of Trier in 2024, I also met Sofia, a native German artist and art therapist. Her work was abstract and deeply personal, blending old family photographs with vivid, unexpected splashes of color.
We bonded instantly over a shared love for rhythm and expression. We would take weekend drives across the border into Luxembourg, attending vibrant Afro-dance events where live African percussion filled the air and crowds danced in radiant, colorful patterns.
One afternoon, Sofia surprised me with a gift that brought me to tears. She had taken a delicate, black-and-white photograph of her mother’s First Communion and hand-painted a traditional Mexican calavera — a Day of the Dead sugar skull — onto her mother’s face. She dedicated the piece entirely to me. It wasn’t appropriation or caricature; it was pure, unprompted adoration for my heritage. In a country where I often felt flattened by institutional distance, she used her art to embrace who I was, seeing me beyond stereotypes. That single act reminded me that beneath the systemic walls, genuine human kindness exists here. You just have to find the people who are willing to reach across the divide.
At the same time, the rural landscape held a strange, striking comfort. Waking up in the German countryside — smelling the damp morning fields, listening to the roosters call across the misty hills — didn’t feel entirely alien. In an unexpected twist of geography, it mirrored the quiet morning rhythms of my parents’ home village in Michoacán, Mexico. Through my camera lens, the land offered a grounding warmth, even when the social climate felt icy.
Nothing highlighted this cultural chasm quite like Karneval in early 2024.
In Germany, Karneval is treated as the ultimate democratic equalizer — a centuries-old season of foolishness (Narrenfreiheit) where normal societal rules are suspended, authority is mocked, and everyone comes together to celebrate in costume. But as I stood in the crowd with my camera, capturing the festivities, my lens caught a scene that stopped me cold: a group of men wearing brightly patterned ponchos, oversized sombreros, fake painted-on mustaches,and brownface.
They laughed and drank beer freely in broad daylight. Nobody blinked. Nobody looked away. In fact, the crowd around them cheered along.
Coming from California, where “my culture is not a costume” is a baseline societal boundary, the sight made my stomach drop. Back home, an act like that would trigger an immediate uproar, a public reckoning, or at the very least a crowd of people in your corner saying, No, this isn’t right.
In Germany, I looked around for solidarity and found only an eerie, comfortable silence. Scanning the sea of revelers, I realized how few minorities were even present in the crowd.
When I brought it up later to my German significant other, his reaction was a study in European deflection. He didn’t outright defend brownface — he admitted he wouldn’t do it himself — but he quickly tried to contextualize it: “You have to understand, it’s Karneval tradition. It’s about stepping outside yourself for a day.”
It was a staggering realization. In the U.S., racial caricature is recognized as a direct assertion of power and historical harm. In Germany, it gets rationalized under the shield of folklore, subverted beneath historical precedent, and brushed off as innocent harmless fun.
Yet beneath that quiet surface, political tides were shifting rapidly across the country. The rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) — founded in 2013 as an anti-euro party before transforming into a powerful far-right force — has reshaped German social, cultural, and political life. Seeing their rise firsthand, watching the crowds gather at demonstrations, reminded me of the polarization back in California. But protesting in Germany carries a completely different weight and set of rules.
Under German assembly law (Versammlungsgesetz), street demonstrations are strictly regulated, requiring formal registration and strict compliance with police directives — a far cry from the broad First Amendment protections in the U.S. where vulgarity or symbolic gestures are routinely protected.
I learned this reality the hard way in Frankfurt in late 2023.
During a pro-Palestinian demonstration, I stood carrying a handmade poster that read, “This Mexican supports Palestine,” featuring a raised fist — a symbol deeply rooted in global liberation movements and power to the people.Within minutes, I was surrounded and detained by over six-foot-tall German police officers. Standing at 5'1", cornered and terrified, I broke down crying as they processed me.
Seeing my distress, one officer casually chuckled and said, “Why are you so upset? It’s not like in the United States — we’re not going to shoot you for what you are.”
The comment landed like a slap. He knew exactly what he was doing, weaponizing American police brutality to minimize my fear in that moment, hiding behind European smugness while detaining a woman of color for holding a sign.
Whenever the weight of living abroad feels too heavy, I think of my mother. In 1997, following the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA) under the Clinton administration that sought to strengthen U.S. immigration laws, adding penalties for undocumented immigrants who commit crimes while in the United States or who stay in the U.S., my mother faced deportation.
She had to navigate a foreign, hostile country with two children under two years old while my father worked full-time.She didn’t know the language, she didn’t have a map, and yet she survived with quiet, unbroken dignity.
As an Indigenous Mexican-American woman navigating Europe, I carry her strength with me.
People often ask me now — especially Black and brown folks, or members of my own community back home — ”Should I move to Europe? Should I live in Germany?”
I never have a simple answer. My relationship with this country is an unresolvable dialectic of affection and grief, a way of discovering what is true and authentic in my life in Germany. Never in my life had I lived in a place so layered with deep, visible history — a landscape that challenges, isolates, and educates you all at once. It is an experience I could never replicate in any other lifetime.
Even now, sitting under the familiar California sun, an unexpected ache pulls at my chest. I long for Germany. I miss the quiet mornings, the misty fields, the bakeries, and even the difficult silence. The thought that I might never go back fills me with a strange, lingering dread, because despite the cold bureaucracy and the painful encounters, Germany ingrained itself permanently into my heart.
Displacement is an unpredictable soil. We are like seeds carried by the wind — planted in unfamiliar earth, uncertain if we will take hold or wither in the frost. Most seeds fail in harsh climates, but every so often, a wild batch takes root. Against all odds, its roots push deeper and deeper into the quiet ground, drinking in the rain and the cold until the earth yields. When spring finally arrives, those roots don’t just survive — they bloom, raw and undeniable, flourishing in the very soil that once tried to freeze them.
