What's good y'all? I'm Gene Debbie and this is Code Switch from MPR.

So for as long as Code Switch has been a thing,

our team has been made up at no small part of the kids of immigrants.

So when we're all chopping it up on the Code Switch stoop,

which is the joky name for the little area in the MPR office,

where all of our cubicles are situated,

we sometimes get to complain about our families and our parents,

you know, as you do, and all the typical generational frictions and frustrations come up.

But also, so does a lot of commiserating about this experiential stuff, right?

This giant gap in outlooks when you are born and raised in the United States and your mother

or your father, or the people who raised you grew up somewhere, you know, halfway around the world.

People on the team have talked about what it was like to go back to their parents' home country

and to see their parents transform into these unfamiliar beings once they were back in this

different element, their own element, a normally taciturn father who was suddenly really mischievous

and quick-witted, the life of the party even, the anxious mother who was just more assured,

who was just moving lighter. Sometimes it was a function of people's parents slipping back into

some role they plead in the family order back in the old country, back in the day.

And sometimes it was just about their parents being able to step back into a life they had

before they had the life they have now, before any number of potential lives,

and careers, and lovers came off the table. On this episode we're going to hear a very personal

story from someone who was stuck between these two different versions of himself, these two different

modes of being. Miguel Masias was an executive producer with our play cousins over at Latino USA.

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