In the spring of 2025, I flew back to the United States after living abroad for nearly two years to a country entirely changed, and all-too-familiar. On landing in Hartsfield-Jackson International in Atlanta, I made it through the invisible but occasionally impermeable line we call a border in no time. “Wow, that was easy!” Relishing the chance to get a coffee between flights, I trundled off, only to have the prospect of a leisurely leg stretch and an overpriced breakfast spoiled when I heard, “Sir? Sir?” I turned to see a uniformed man beckoning me. I prepared my best folksy self, readied my self-deprecating humor, and got ready to finish every sentence with sir. I answered his questions — what I do for work, how I paid for my ticket, how much money I was carrying with me, what I study, what my husband studies, if I travel often — but not to his satisfaction. I got pulled out and set aside in a waiting area along with a Middle Eastern man on his way to a business trip in Dearborn, Michigan. (He was the one who broke the silence. I had been too busy telling myself to breathe.) After twenty minutes, I went through the whole song-and-dance again with the same officer — this time, as he unpacked the contents of my bag. At a certain point, one of his colleagues (I assume, I was too nervous to look) said something to him in Spanish and he responded — in Spanish, as well. I looked down at his name tag. Martinez. He was light-skinned. I wouldn’t have realized that he was Hispanic if his Spanish hadn’t startled me into looking at the badge of his chest. His Spanish was proficient, but not perfect. I’ve been married to two Spanish-speaking men; I recognize a second-generation American accent when I hear it. I couldn’t help but appreciate the absurdity the situation, as I struggled to convince the son of an immigrant that I, too, had the right to be there. That I was safe to enter the country. 

We are in a moment of racial reconfiguration and political realignment, and — for a moment — I found myself on the frontlines when a Spanish-speaking man by the name Martinez needed convincing that I didn’t constitute a threat — that I was admissible. The lines are messy. Despite Donald Trump’s consistently anti-Muslim policies — be it the “Muslim travel bans” or his indifference to the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians — Amer Ghalib, the mayor of America’s first Muslim-majority community in Hamtramck, Michigan, who earlier in 2024 helped to rename a street in his city Palestine Avenue, endorsed Trump for president. In November of that same year, Hispanic voters split nearly 50–50 between Harris and Trump in the 2024 election — a high watermark for a GOP presidential candidate. In El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele, the descendant of Palestinian Christians who emigrated to Central America, is helping to run the United States’ anti-immigration machinery through the detainment of Venezuelans in the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo. And yet, despite the United States’ targeted expulsion of Venezuelans and extra-judicial killings of Venezuelan fishermen, Venezuelans around the world welcomed their liberation when the United States kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro in January 2026. 

Just this morning, the names of the two men who allegedly killed Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse and participant in anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, were released: Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez. We are living in an era of renewed “flexible definitions,” when everything old is new again —  “a moment in which cultural race and racisms, and religious race, jostle alongside race-understood-as-somatic/biological determinations — uncannily renews key medieval instrumentalizations in the ordering of human relations.” The Welsh weren’t the first cornered into renouncing their identity to prove their admissibility, and today’s generation of Hispanic, Muslim, and other racialized Americans won’t be the last. Heng argues that “Scholars who are invested in the archeology of a past in which alternative voices, lives, and histories are heard, beyond those canonically established as central by foundationalist studies, are thus not well served by evading the category of race and its trenchant vocabularies and tools of analysis.” There is, of course, a danger in projecting our present experiences and expectations onto an incongruous past. And yet, as I believe that Heng convincingly argues, there is an equal danger in arbitrarily dividing our experience from our medieval past — in projecting a sort of innocence onto the pre-modern era. This era may look new, and in some of its specificities (e.g., the supposed technological advances that enable scrutiny of lived experience in its near entirety, the international reach of a globally interconnected economy, etc.), but we have been here before.