I have admired Julisa Natsale Arse Raya since she first began sharing her story of rising through

Wall Street's ranks while being undocumented. Her newest book

has the most double-take, Stop Scrolling, Walk Backwards in the Bookshop title. You sound like a

white girl, the case for rejecting assimilation. It weaves Julisa's personal experience of pursuing

the American dream, what was gained and lost in that pursuit.

With the undervalued history of Latinos in this country,

Jolisa makes a powerful case that belonging, true belonging,

does not come from chasing a white ideal or a moving finish line,

but rather from embracing our culture, our history, and reclaiming it all for ourselves.

Julia, that perhaps an obvious question, but I think a necessary question to get us started.

Can you tell me about the first time that someone said to you, you sound like a white girl? I don't know that I remember

the first time someone said that to me, but I do remember the most impactful time someone said that to me. And that was when I was in high school

and this boy I had a crush on. We were on the phone and he said to me, you sound like a white girl.

And he didn't mean it as a compliment, but I took it as a compliment. You know, I distinctly

remember feeling happy that he said that

because I had spent such a long time practicing how I enunciated words so that my accent

wouldn't be so obvious that when he said that, I thought all those times of standing in front of the mirror

have paid off because I finally sound like a white girl and I was excited about it.

Talk me through your family's story of coming to the United States and talk me through

what the lessons they were sharing with

you were around assimilation. My parents came to the U.S. when I was three, and then I joined

them when I was 11 from Mexico. Of course, my parents' view of America definitely impacted the way that I saw the

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