What Springsteen’s Music Means to This Child of Working-Class Immigrants

I relate to what Springsteen sings because he reveals much of the American Dream as an intoxicating illusion.

On a sunny afternoon in Southern California, I rock my infant daughter as I listen to Bruce Springsteen sing of rebellion and broken promises. In my mind’s eye, I can see my family: immigrants from the Philippines, dreamers and believers in the American Promise, rebels against a hostile system. A people dancing in the dark. One family photo, in particular, is forever etched in my mind: my mother, my sister, and me, all lined up in front of a red Toyota station wagon, squinting at my father behind the camera as the sun shines down on us. It’s autumn and we are clothed in sweats, a previously foreign idea to us. We are still foreigners ourselves, freshly arrived to claim our stake in the American Dream.

My family chose to make our home in a small pocket of Los Angeles called Hawthorne, but in many ways, it felt like the town chose us. Close to my father’s work, with a small collection of Filipino immigrants who, like us, found themselves here because of the promises this country makes. Property was cheap where we lived, because we bordered neighborhoods many considered impoverished—Inglewood, South Central—but we also lived mere minutes from opulent beach communities.

And I got a little job down in Darlington
But some nights I don’t go
Some nights I go to the drive-in
Some nights I stay home

I have always felt drawn to Springsteen’s music, his sung stories of struggle, because his work reflects a duality like the one my family knew—the hopes we had versus the reality of life in a country that expects your loyalty while actively legislating against your existence.

My people keep dancing, keep singing, even in times of great difficulty. I remember my father always threw himself into his hobbies with vigor—a sportsman back in the Philippines, he quickly learned the rules of American sports like baseball and football and passed them on to his children. In his enthusiasm, his ability to jump into these new interests with complete abandon, I see the makings of a one-time dreamer.

We understood that the Promise wasn’t a guarantee. That you could put in the hard work, the long hours, and still it would never be enough.

Los Angeles was fertile ground for dreams, even if you had to navigate around the ghosts of abandoned hopes to keep them shuffling. I saw this in my father’s eyes when, at the age of nineteen, I played him the first song I’d ever learned on guitar, my playing stilted and nervous and filled with moments of uncertainty. I remember looking up to see his weathered face break into a smile.

Good job, anak. Keep trying. You never know, you might just sign a record deal!

Back when I was in elementary school, my siblings and I had found a recordable cassette in our karaoke machine. When we turned it on, we were greeted by the sounds of The Eagles’ “Love Will Keep Us Alive,” but it wasn’t the vocals of Tim Schmit—it was the heavily accented and hilariously off-key voice of our father, a man with no natural singing talent. Still, he believed so deeply in my ability to harness my own.

I followed that dream
Just like those guys do up on the screen

Looking back now, I believe my father’s hobbies gave him a way to try to escape the shackles of debt he couldn’t pay, and the constant feeling that he was only one miracle from making it big; one minor mistake from utter ruin. When the paycheck we so desperately needed didn’t materialize, there was no way to slow our fall.

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I remember the early days together, five of us crammed into a one-bedroom apartment in Hawthorne. In the bedroom was a full-sized bed pushed up against a twin bed. My father worked the graveyard shift, so he would usually fall into bed just as the rest of us were getting ready to leave for the day. He was an aircraft mechanic who was not always inspired by the work, but whose work ethic was unparalleled; top attendance awards from his previous employers rested atop on our entertainment center. His skill is what took us from the Philippines to Los Angeles. But he hadn’t reckoned on how much it would cost just to get by in LA with three children.

My parents did their best to hide it; as kids, we did not fully understand why our mother’s voice was so tense, our father’s face so grim, when they discussed the rent. When you do work that doesn’t fulfill you, the thing that can counterbalance the cost to your soul is a hearty deposit into your bank account. But my father was laid off when I was twelve years old, and the shifts that followed in our family were tectonic.

All my life, I fought this fight
The fight that no man can ever win
Every day it just gets harder to live
The dream I’m believing in

A chemist by trade, our mother’s degree and qualifications were not recognized here in the US. We became latchkey kids, my father working late and my mother working odd jobs while going to school on weekends. Sometimes she’d have us tag along to classes; we’d wait for her in the quad, or just outside of her classroom. Usually we were at home alone, knowing what number to call if an emergency occurred, with the threat of deportation looming if we did call.

Eventually, my mother became the chief breadwinner while retaining her child-rearing duties. My father found a job with a small propeller company, but that period of unemployment and insecurity had loosed something in him. He was no angel before the layoff, but after it, we wondered if maybe our father of the Good Days was a mirage. Real or imagined, that father had died, replaced by a man prone to drinking and violence, whose pride would not let him cope with a reality in which his sense of control was proven illusory. He left our mother to contend alone with the stark realities of making rent on time, getting us kids to school, and ensuring that food was on the table.

Three years after his layoff, my father was rehired by his old employer, but only for jobs across the country: Orlando, then Newark, and finally Honolulu. Our family would never consistently live under the same roof again. My mother worked tirelessly, holding down multiple jobs while doing her best to be present in our lives. But the need to keep the lights on often prevented her from being at soccer games or talent shows; we kids were always without one or both parents.

When I think back on those days, my mind is filled with fraying images, the overwhelming sense that we were barely hanging on. It was a time of deep upheaval and instability. And it was also a time of awakening—all of us now understood that the Promise wasn’t a guarantee. That you could put in the hard work, the long hours at multiple jobs, and still know that it would never be enough.

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Today I relate to what Springsteen sings because he reveals much of the American Dream as an intoxicating illusion. When I listen to him now, I think about the many ways in which backbreaking stories like my family’s are used to explain the in-creep of white nationalism and nativism. Some blame us and others like us for the shortcomings of a system that has stripped away many of the hard-won advances of immigrants and labor activists. Some see the people who’ve come after us in search of their own stake in America’s promise and want to slam the door shut.

Many of us can now make choices that our parents could not, though much like them, we walk a tightrope.

But when I think of Springsteen’s music, I also think of rebellion and grit. I think of my people who grew up in or near Hawthorne—people now working for immigrant rights, for racial justice, for needed reforms—all of them motivated by the ways in which certain dreams remain out of reach for many. A high school friend is now a leader in the undocumented youth movement, helping to establish a club at his university that eventually became the epicenter of the movement in the LA area. My sister’s classmate is a speaker who was present at Standing Rock and organizes with Black Lives Matter. I now work as an immigrant rights advocate, largely inspired by the homilies of my parish priests back in Hawthorne. After thirteen years working for a municipality, I chose to switch careers in 2016, leaving behind the only full-time job at the only organization I’d ever known to do this work.

It was frightening to make such a change at the time—and my mom’s anxiety for me, born out of her experiences struggling to scratch together enough for our family, weighed heavily on me. But how could I not use my relative privilege and security to try to support others, especially knowing what my own family had gone through? The choice to live a life reflective of the values of my neighborhood, my history, my family and my friends, felt like the only path forward.

This choice represents a new kind of dream, one in which my friends and I can use our education to find work that allows us to honor our values, spend more time with our families, prioritize our mental health. The American Dream might still be a lie for many, but the lives we pursue are real. The inch we’ve gained—thanks to the sweat and toil of our families and the sacrifices of those who came before—is just enough room to jam our toes in the door. Many of us can now make choices that our parents could not, though much like them, we walk a tightrope—keenly aware of the truth that while all the hard work in the world will not always yield justice, the work of liberation is work worth doing. Our dreams, like those of our families, are what sustain us in hard times and keep us working for justice, because such work is its own reward.