GONZALEZ: Hey everybody, I’m Ana.

NUNES: And I’m Alex. You’re listening to Mosaic.

GONZALEZ: Alex, have you ever seen roller derby live?

NUNES: No, it’s like people skate around a track and crash into each other, right?

GONZALEZ: It’s like a combination of greco-roman wrestling, sumo wrestling and a mosh pit on wheels.

GONZALEZ: I’m in a warehouse with linoleum floors, watching the Providence Roller Derby skaters warm up for a scrimmage. It’s a Sunday night in Coventry, Rhode Island.

GONZALEZ: There are about 40 people on roller skates, wearing helmets, knee pads, mouthguards, and a wide array of tattoos and hair colors. And while the skating is mesmerizingly, elegantly brutal, I’m more focused on someone who’s not in the throngs of elbows and wheels.

SAM: They’re incredibly supportive and that’s something you don’t see in every sport. Because there’s always this competitiveness that takes over you. But even when we are competitive, we are nice...I guess. Hahaha.

GONZALEZ: Their name is Sam. They are a nonbinary trans person who uses they/them pronouns. They’re not skating because they just had surgery. Top surgery. But normally, Sam’s a member of the Sakonnet River Roller Rats.

GONZALEZ: Can you just say your roller derby name?

SAM: Brazilian Whacks, but “Whacks” like a whack.

GONZALEZ: Sam is from Brazil. And in this episode of Mosaic, we hear their story: what it’s like to immigrate to the United States as a queer person and figure out who you really are.

NUNES: That’s an immigration story we don’t normally hear about.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. And I think that’s partly because a lot of people don’t tell queer and trans stories.

NUNES: There are so many gender and sexuality identities and terms that people who aren’t familiar with them don’t even have the language to talk about it.

GONZALEZ: Absolutely. For me, working this story, I would find myself messing up and using the wrong pronouns and feeling really guilty. From talking with Sam and other trans people, I’ve learned just to correct and move on. Dwelling on it makes everything awkward.

NUNES: Right. And even for people who are trans or nonbinary, figuring out their identities and then how to use language to express those identities takes time.

GONZALEZ: And when you’re doing that as an immigrant, you have to do it in two languages and two cultures.

GONZALEZ: Sam grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. They didn’t have the language or knowledge to understand why they felt different. They just knew they weren’t quite fitting in.

SAM: So in soccer, playing with the boys in my neighborhood, I would always fight for my place in playing soccer with them. They didn't like a quote-unquote “girl” playing with them. So I just beat the shit out of them until they respect me.

GONZALEZ: But after puberty hits, Sam says, that respect doesn’t matter. They become so uncomfortable in their own body that they can’t stand the physical aspect of the game.

SAM: I hated playing with sweaty guys. If that makes sense. So after middle school, I stopped playing soccer. I started feeling very awkward, so I turned into being a huge nerd.

NUNES: That feeling affects every part of Sam’s life. The way they interact with people, the way they dress.

GONZALEZ: Sam would wear the same hoodie all day every day in the tropical heat of Rio de Janeiro.

SAM: That drove my mom crazy, but it was because puberty was hitting, and I was not comfortable with what's going on with my body. 

GONZALEZ: So, the physical world is a challenge. But, luckily for Sam, there’s the Internet.

NUNES: Yeah, it’s the early 2000s: instant messenger is new. Forums are taking over the internet.

GONZALEZ: Do you remember what it was like to come home from school and be able to talk to all of your friends all at once in different chat windows?

NUNES: Oh yeah, I’d up my parents dial-up line for hours. Plus, if you had internet in your home; you didn’t have to leave. Perfect for those awkward teenage years.

GONZALEZ: Exactly. And for Sam, it becomes their life. One site, called Orkut, is like an early Facebook mixed with reddit run by Google. And it’s really popular in Brazil.

NUNES: Sam is on it all the time, talking with people about anime.

SAM: I was a huge-ass weeb. And if you don't know what "weeb" is it is those kids or adults that are fascinated, obsessed about Japanese culture.

GONZALEZ: One day, 12-year old Sam is perusing an anime forum. One of their good friends sends them a gif, one of those short, looping videos, and it’s of this Japanese person. Something about it grabs Sam’s attention.

SAM: I was like, "Oh wow what is this?" And she's like, "Oh, it's this band called Alice 9". And I searched it, and it's still my favorite band to this day.

NUNES: Alice 9 is a Japanese rock band that was hugely popular in the early 2000s. They play kind of a mix of heavy metal and emo music.

GONZALEZ: The music is only part of it. All of the members of the band are beautiful and stylishly androgneous. Like heavy metal, Japanese David Bowies. That’s the part that hooks Sam.

SAM: It was like the fact that I look at them and I'm like, “I cannot gauge your gender.” I'm like, “Oh, is this possible?”

NUNES: But Sam doesn’t necessarily know at this point that they are trans, right?

GONZALEZ; No, they’re just fascinated that this type of life is possible. They do know that they’re gay, though. And that they’re hiding it, especially from their mom.  

AX: SAM: I remember I had, like, my first girlfriend. I was very sneakily talking with her. After a year-ish of dating her I'm like, “You know what? I'm tired of this shit.” So I stopped hiding, right?

GONZALEZ: Sam comes out to their mom in high school. And even though the signs were pretty clear, it’s still sort of a shock for her.

SAM: I was clearly very gay, but my mom is very Catholic.

NUNES: Being gay and having a Catholic mom can be a recipe for some misunderstanding, right?

GONZALEZ: Big time. On top of that, Sam describes themself as a lone wolf. A kid who doesn’t want a close relationship with their parents. But something is about to happen to both Sam and their mom that would force them to become closer, despite these differences. And it’s something they’ve been wanting for almost a decade.

NUNES: Sam’s mom is from Peru, originally. She had been living in Brazil as an immigrant to be with her Brazilian husband and start a family.

GONZALEZ: But for the past 20 years, Sam’s Peruvian family had slowly and steadily been immigrating to the United States. They set up shop in Providence, Rhode Island.

SAM: It was back in a time like, I think, late 70s early 80s. Providence had a lot of factory jobs that would take anybody.

NUNES: In 2004, Sam’s aunts and uncles in Providence are able to get Sam’s grandma into the country as a legal permanent resident.

SAM: And she immediately started doing requests for all the remaining siblings. So she requested for my mom and her dependents. Back in the time, it was my sister and I.

GONZALEZ: Sam is in elementary school, and their older sister is in middle or high school. So, once their immigration paperwork is finalized, Sam, their sister, and their mom would have legal permanent resident status in the US.

NUNES: But the process ends up taking much longer than anyone thought.

GONZALEZ: Yeah, they don’t get clearance until 2013, 9 years later. Sam is a senior in high school. And their sister is in her 20s. She’s too old to be her mom’s dependent anymore.

NUNES; So, it’s just gonna be Sam and their mom immigrating from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Providence in the fall of 2013.

GONZALEZ: When you first came. You get off the plane. What happens? What was that like?

SAM: The first thing that happened was, like, I met my cousin and my aunt that I only had talked through the internet ever. So, my mom started crying because it had been 20 something years that she haven't seen her sister. And then we go directly to my aunt's house and my grandma is there and I hadn't seen my grandma for like since I was 5, 6 when she went to Brazil. And she's still the same as it remembered. It was very good.

GONZALEZ: Sam remembers more and more people coming over to their aunt’s house. All family members they had never met before, all trying to speak to them in a mixture of English and Spanish, two languages they don’t know.

NUNES: Yeah, that’s such an awkward and difficult thing: to meet a whole side of your family for the first time in a new country, and you can’t really communicate because you don’t speak the same language.

GONZALEZ: Yeah, Alex, we’ve both experienced that, to some extent, right? Like I remember going to Puerto Rico for the first time when I was like 6 and just being totally overwhelmed by all of the newness: the smells, places, family members. I don’t think I talked to anyone, even though I knew some Spanish. And my mom, who’s white and not Puerto Rican whatsoever, was with us. And it wasn’t until we were at the airport to go home that she realized one of my cousins that she had been talking to the whole time was just pretending to understand her. He would respond to everything she said in English with”yes”, “good,” or “ok”.

NUNES: Yeah, my grandparents on my dad’s side immigrated from the Portuguese island Madeira. My grandma learned English really well, but my grandpa didn’t, so it could be a little hard to communicate with him. There’s this classic story in my family where my cousin was asking him at a party if he was having a good time, and she said “are you a happy camper?” and he said, “Sure, I like hambugersh.”

GONZALEZ: And even though there are definitely some funny parts of these miscommunications, it can feel really isolating not to be able to talk to anyone, especially your family members.

NUNES: And that’s what Sam is going through when they first get to Providence. They don’t know the language, they don’t have a job, and they aren’t going to school. Plus, there’s no real community for them here like they had in Brazil.

GONZALEZ: So, they do what most of us might do when we’re feeling lonely and need some familiar faces in our lives. They start watching a ton of TV.

GONZALEZ: How did you learn English?

SAM: Breaking Bad.

GONZALEZ: Really?

SAM: I watched a lot of Breaking Bad. And TV. TV, music.

GONZALEZ: Sam has a Netflix account, but there are no Portuguese shows and no Portuguese subtitles on the English shows. So, they watch Breaking Bad with English subtitles on. Anytime they don’t understand what’s happening at all, they pause it, and copy the subtitles into Google Translate.

SAM: There I have it: an application in a sentence, the pronunciation, and the way it's spelled. By the end of, like, the last season, I was, like, feeling comfortable enough that I would watch a full episode without pausing.

NUNES: So, how long does it actually take for Sam to learn English?

GONZALEZ: A year. And in that time they’re also doing a lot of thinking. About life and leaving their whole world in Brazil. And about gender. How, even though Sam is out in terms of their sexuality, they still feel uncomfortable identifying as a woman.

NUNES: And, at this point, Sam knows what transgendered is. They have a trans man in their family. But a total transition doesn’t seem right for them, either.

SAM: And then I did what all teenagers to do back in 2013: I went to Tumblr.

GONZALEZ: For those of you who don’t know, tumblr is and was a blogging website. You can post photos and messages and reblog other people’s things and comment on them. Lots of jokes, lots of curated aesthetics. It’s another social media platform where Sam is able to find answers to the questions they didn’t know how to articulate.

SAM: Tumblr had a lot of you know good information and I found that like hey you don't need to be either. I'm like "Okay cool. Nice. What that means?"

GONZALEZ: You don’t need to be either a woman or a man. That’s a pretty abstract and scary concept to wrap your mind around. But it describes a gender identity that a lot of people experience. Some call it “nonbinary”, meaning your gender identity falls outside of the male-female binary.

NUNES: So, once Sam figures that out, what do they do?

GONZALEZ: Well, it’s not an immediate life-changing event. They start talking to other nonbinary folks online, and they start talking to real-life people in Providence. And they meet someone in Providence who’s also nonbinary. That person becomes one of their best friends.

NUNES: And Sam starts to work, too. They go through a program called Year Up Rhode Island, which helps under-served young people get training and internships.

GONZALEZ: Yeah, and they get a really good internship at Hasbro, working in--what else-- computer science, which they studied in high school back in Brazil.

NUNES: So, a year goes by, and Sam’s starting this new life in Providence: they’ve learned English, they have new job opportunities, and they’ve come to terms with their gender identity.

GONZALEZ: But, they still haven’t told their mom about their gender divergence. Sam’s about to graduate from Year Up, and their mom is coming to the ceremony.

SAM: I ordered a suit for graduation. Suit arrived. I'm trying on the suit, and my mom look at me. And she is just like, “I wish you'd gotten a dress. I wish you were more feminine. Why couldn't you be more delicate?” And I was like, "Oh no Mom. It is time." So I sat her down. And I started like having a conversation because we had a trans man in our family. I was like, “Hey mom, I am trans. [slight pause] But I don't want to be like my cousin's partner, right? I don't want to be like him. But I also am not a woman. So please don't…” Not “please don't have those expectations.” But it is like, “It hurts to me when those expectations are put upon me.” It was very difficult. It was very difficult.

GONZALEZ: Sam’s mom asks for time to process this information. She doesn’t quite understand what this means for Sam. And Portugese doesn’t help.

NUNES: What do you mean?

GONZALEZ: Well, Alex, you’re currently learning Portuguese, right?

NUNES: Sim, senhora.

GONZALEZ; Well, then you know that the whole language is really gendered. Like Spanish. Every word, basically, has a gender.

NUNES: Oh, right. Adjectives, nouns, pronouns, they’re either masculine or feminine.

GONZALEZ: But if you’re a Portuguese-speaker who lives outside of the male/female binary, like Sam, every single sentence you speak makes you decide: are you a man or a woman?

SAM: My mom doesn't speak English. So for her it's still incredibly difficult for, like, her to refer to me as, like, you know, her child. There is no word for “child,” right? It's you either a son or a daughter.

NUNES: So my son is “meu filho” and my daughter is “minha filha.” This obviously puts a strain on things.

GONZALEZ: Yeah, Sam says, they’re still navigating some strange waters in their relationship.

SAM: My mom is better about the idea of it. But, like, for example, when I told her that I was going to get top surgery she-- I think it's Catholic guilt. I would name it as Catholic guilt. She started thinking she did something wrong because I wanted to modify my body. You know she put the pain upon herself, when it was not about her. She never tried to you know criticize or deny or just, like, not accept it. She was like, “I get it. I understand. I’m just asking some time to process.”

GONZALEZ: So, they’re working on it. Their relationship isn’t perfect, but Sam loves their mom. And they’re really grateful that their mom made it possible for them to come to this country.

SAM: She came here because of me, basically. She came here to give me the opportunity to be here so I gotta do something about it, right?

NUNES: Sam has a job as a technical support specialist at big company in Providence. And whenever they’re able to save the money and vacation days, they buy tickets for both them and their mom to go back to Brazil.

GONZALEZ: Yeah, they both went back earlier this year for Sam’s sister’s wedding. And you know, Sam is conflicted about being so privileged in the United States and seeing a lot of the corruption and violence that happens in Brazil every day. They say they feel like a traitor to their friends. But, they don’t see themself ever returning.

NUNES: Because on top of being a far-right authoritarian, Brazil’s newest President, Jair Bolsonaro, is a self-declared homophobe. He encourages Brazilians to discriminate against the LGBTQ community.

SAM: I don't want to die. Right? Like, I'm too queer to be in Brazil. I'm too vocal and aggressive to be in Brazil. I wish it was a joke. but it's just dangerous. And I just feel for my friends and my family there. But I would not come back.

NUNES: Living in Providence, Sam’s not only safer than they would be in Brazil; they’re thriving.

GONZALEZ: Yeah, they work at this really great job and hang out with their huge Peruvian family. They have a sweet, 3-legged cat named Simon that they co-parent with their partner. And they get to kick ass in the lanes at roller derby.

SAM: And Derby's beautiful because, it's like -- too skinny too tall too big-- like, doesn't matter. Your body is perfect for Derby. That's why attracts a lot of gender deviants. And, you know, the moms the queers. As long as you present and you're trying to work with your team, it will be good.

GONZALEZ: As I look at Sam, skating with a ref’s whistle in their mouth in the middle of all these different bodies, it’s obvious what they mean. As the biggest of big and smallest of small smash into each other on the lanes, it’s obvious that Roller Derby celebrates this difference. And that’s something, Sam says, was never possible before they immigrated.

SAM: Moving here, it was what allowed me to be this gender divergent and, like, queer as I can. That gives me some safety, some peace of mind.

GONZALEZ: That's huge.

SAM: Yes.

GONZALEZ: A lot of people don't get that.

SAM: Exactly.

GONZALEZ: Mosaic is a production of The Public’s Radio, edited by Sally Eisele with production help from James Baumgartner and Aaron Selbig. Our original music is by Bryn Bliska. Torey Malatia is the general manager of The Public’s Radio. I’m Ana Gonzalez.

NUNES: And I’m Alex Nunes. Thanks for listening.