If you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

Independence Day Eve 1878, at the age of four, Hungarian-born Erik Weisz immigrates to the United States with his pregnant mother and four brothers. The Weisz-turned-Weiss family settles in Appleton, Wisconsin, and later, in a boarding house in New York City, where they live in dire poverty. At nine, to support his family, Erik-turned-Ehrich becomes “Ehrich, the Prince of the Air” in a traveling circus trapeze act. When he’s not soaring between bars, he’s making a run for it as a competitive cross-country star. In 1891, Ehrich-turned-Ehri-turned-Harry begins a dime-museum magic career, calling himself everything from The Wild Man to King of Cards, but he makes a real name for himself in the art of escape. On stage, he struggles his way out of cuffs, chains, and cages; nothing can hold him back. Ehrich-turned-Ehri-turned-Harry calls himself Houdini, after the successful French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin. During his lifetime he becomes the highest-paid entertainer in the world, the most famous vaudeville performer to date, and remains the best escape artist who has ever lived.

All immigrant stories involve some element of escape, from war, poverty, or other injustices; but they also have a hand in magic, in those near-total and astonishing feats of change—of patria, identity, and destiny—magical self-reinventions that facilitate and coincide with those escapes. Houdini’s nineteenth-century America saw an influx of immigrants claiming to be dukes and counts in the absence of Old Country aristocracy. Vanished were the limiting frameworks of their former social stratifications, and appeared before them, newer and more promising models. Many others took up anglicized names or chose professions not predestined theirs, to the same effect. The hearsay Dream was true: In America, you could be any version of yourself you wanted to be. Nothing, not even ideological cuffs or cages, could hold you back. The sight of Hungarian-Weisz-turned-American-Houdini locked in his tiny prisons, struggling yet succeeding in every escape, despite all odds and in spectacular fashion, perhaps embodies the greatest of those American immigrant freedoms. 

It’s clear that for the great escape artist, magic was not a supernatural force but a function of the real and solid—an act equally mental and muscular. Influenced by the fervid Dream It Do It zeitgeist, Houdini not only believed his way through every physical barrier set before him, in every public demonstration; like his pseudo-aristocratic contemporaries, he also believed himself into being, performing a more personal, more private kind of magic, one that involved a tireless process of self-reinvention.

A now-iconic photo of the illusionist as a teenage cross-country star shows him wearing a few real-earned medals alongside a number of pretend ones. In a scrapbook, he once cut and paste his place in a theatre bill from the worst time slot to the headlining act. Not only did he change his name, he embraced his new persona to the point of brandishing his new initials on nearly anything he owned. When Houdini was a child, his father lost his job as a Rabbi due to his inability to embrace New World customs; and, perhaps in grievance, Houdini later revised his own passport to list his birthplace as Appleton, Wisconsin rather than Budapest, Hungary. Having nearly drowned in a river as a child, it’s possible many of his daring underwater escapes were intended to retell that personal history. His first successful illusion was named, coincidentally, the Metamorphosis. And once, feeling he’d been treated unfairly by a member of Robert-Houdin’s family, his former idol and namesake, Houdini published several works carefully rewriting the history of magic in order to attack his late predecessor and even the score. To this day, there is no definitive biography of Harry Houdini, and the clues he’s given us lead historians far off the mark. Magical thinking: the belief that belief itself could make something true, or that disbelief could make something false, despite the facts.

A century after the height of Houdini’s fame, consequent to President Trump’s aggressive immigration raids, news outlets give us our first glimpses of immigrants detained in cages from which they cannot escape. When ICE detains my mother’s sister, my mother will deny she has a sister, and I wonder if this magical belief is the only key to escape from her own immigrant past. 

It’s during the Trump administration that the country, once built on the strong convictions of immigrant people, experiences a great reckoning with immigration in tandem with a great reckoning with belief. Following Trump’s 2017 inauguration, White House Press Secretary Kellyanne Conway introduces the nation to an ethos of “alternative facts”; Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani confirms on NBC that, “Truth isn’t truth”; Trump tirades about a FAKE NEWS epidemic and thereby creates fake news about fake news, and behind a thick smoke of uncertainty, Trump’s xenophobic fear-mongering proves successful—Who, really, can we trust? On television and social media, the president calls Mexicans rapists and murderers, foreign countries “shitholes,” and immigration an “infestation.” Do we suspend disbelief?

Attacks on immigrant people do not for long remain ideological but become real, physical, and deadly. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported a skyrocketing of hateful intimidation and harassment in the days following the 2016 election—800 reported incidents between November 9 and 29—some invoking Trump’s name or campaign points. In detention centers across the country, undocumented immigrants suffer indignities and horrifying humanitarian crimes. Just months ago, in the deadliest anti-Latino attack in recent history, 22 were killed and 24 more injured when a man armed with an AK-47 opened fire in an El Paso Walmart. Surely there are parts of our realities we cannot outrun, fly over, or erase by mental acrobatics alone. Surely there are dangers we cannot fight by faith. What does magic matter, what does belief matter, in the face of real-life danger?  

Our belief systems are astonishingly powerful in their ability to reconstruct our lived realities. Immigrants have demonstrated this—as has been mentioned on the individual level, wherein leaving past worlds behind, they find the opportunity to imagine new worlds; but especially on the community level, where the compounding of belief can lead to remarkable social and political change. Sí Se Puede, the 70’s Yes We Can rallying cry popularized by the United Farm Workers of America, gradually became a carry-all civil rights mantra, well-known for its prominence during U.S. immigration reform protests. It’s a phrase of belief that has worked time and again, for many disenfranchised groups, to will idea into action. One that has strength in the plural. To overcome adverse forces so strong they affect us communally, believing in togetherness is as crucial as believing together.

In a childhood photo, my brothers and I put on a magic show for our parents. The boys stand on either end of a side table in black tuxedos. I’m laying between them in a sparkly pink swimsuit and ballet slippers, eyes closed and smiling. We believed wholeheartedly in that moment, but perhaps also for many lasting golden years, that we might perform real magic. Our immigrant parents were no doubt beaming behind the camera, deeply devoted as they were to us, deeply devoted as they were to accomplishing the impossible. 

In their coming to this country, as many immigrant parents do for their children, our parents were offering my siblings and me a way out. Their edited personal histories—the veil of smoke. Their hard work and their hidden sufferings—a pained sleight of hand. Now, when they talk about the humble successes of my siblings and me, successes they never dreamed of themselves, they’re often moved to tears. What perhaps started as a trick has ended as a miracle.

Maybe the news has fatigued me. Or maybe it’s a remnant of that magical thinking I’ve inherited as the daughter of immigrants. But now more than ever, I find it less rewarding to pin down life’s absolute truths. Far more meaningful are the truths we choose to place our faith in, knowing well they are not true. Those choices are indicative of deeper truths, about our fears, hopes, and ambitions. Those choices, whatever they reveal or conceal, are also important parts of our lives’ narratives.

Early in his career Houdini performed his escapes behind a curtain, only emerging to show his audience he had wrested himself free from steel lock and latch. Later, however, he opted to remove the curtain entirely, finding spectators were equally engaged with his struggle as they were his triumphant escape. Bare before them, sometimes literally naked to prove he possessed no trick up his sleeve, no unfair advantage, he writhed; flailed; bent; bowed; fought against the manacles, the leg irons, the straightjacket, the steel carton; sometimes under the sting of cold water or suspended in midair. In his struggling, he found new shapes of being.

Great magicians have come and gone, but one hundred years later, we hold onto the cultural presence of Houdini like none other, partially because his story seems so familiar to us. In the age of alternative fact, immigrant or not, we’re more attuned to our innate inner migrations, squirming as we do between alternative selves, trying on newer and more promising realities. And on televised news, we notice a similar scene amid fluctuating dialogues, warring agendas, and unpredictable Wonderland logic. Houdini, in his struggles, examples who we are and, in his success, who we want to be.

So it’s with a mixture of shock, fascination, horror, puzzlement, hope, and wonder, that we witness the present narratives of our country unfolding. But we continue to place our trust in the act; we keep watching. We know that if we blink we might miss some tremendous effort, some narrow escape, or, what the famed magician always promised, a surprise ending. It may be some unbidden truth thrashing to the surface, or, through the smoke, a reflection of ourselves somehow truer.