I was taught to keep my legs shut and my head down, to focus on getting an education and a good job with benefits. I was told that girls with too many ideas are asking for trouble. I was discouraged from hanging out with friends, especially Puerto Ricans who were more like “them” (Americans) than “us” (immigrants). So my squad hung out often in secret, on rooftops, in alleyways, in each other’s houses while our parents were at work. We pooled our money to get snacks, shared our clothes, intel on boys, on how to navigate the school system and score dollars. We were Puerto Rican, Lebanese, African American, Chinese, Cuban, Dominicans.

We were inseparable until we went to high school all over the city. That’s when our tween squad fell apart. We no longer had a block to protect. We had to fend for ourselves. My mother was relieved. In her mind, my posse was holding me back from succeeding. In her country, a squad of women would mysteriously disappear and get killed.

For a long while, I wasn’t able to create the same kind of community I had in my youth, with that sense of solidarity. But then I went to study in upstate New York. My first semester there, I took an African American literature class and read slave narratives and books by Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Nella Larsen. It was my first time reading black writers, and through their books I understood how I, as a Dominican American, was part of the black diaspora. Then I studied Latinx literature and discovered writers who code-switched like me, who straddled two worlds and languages like me, writers like Ana Castillo, Cristina Garcia, and Gloria Anzaldua. I didn’t have my girls on the block, but I found a new squad in these writers, across these vast intersecting identities. I found my squad in my growing collection of books.

How had I gone through twelve years of school and never read a book by a writer of color? I was so angry about it. I felt robbed. And to make up for this lack, I read voraciously, and through reading, my consciousness started to shift in ways that made me very unpopular at my family’s dinner table. I could no longer stand by and allow for family members or friends make racist, sexist, and homophobic remarks, even when they were just joking. Back then and maybe even now, to stand up to my family for what I believed in was the most terrifying thing I could do. They had made so many sacrifices for me to be able to get an education and pursue my dreams, and calling them out on racist remarks inevitably widened the canyon already forming between us.

But this is when I distinctly realized the potential and power of books. One day, when I returned home for the holidays from college, I heard my mother correct someone at the dinner table who was saying something derogatory about the Haitian community. My mother, who is very shy and usually doesn’t get involved in political talk, spoke up. She said she had just finished reading a book by a Haitian writer that I had left lying around the apartment. She shared how the story reminded her of her life back home. She hadn’t realized that the Haitian experience could be so similar to her own. Even if Haiti and Dominican Republic share an island, the Trujillo dictatorship that went on for thirty-one years fueled strong and violent anti-Haitian sentiments that still persist. Many Dominicans continue to support the aggressive deportation of Haitians. Many Dominicans want to build walls, when they should be building bridges. Sound familiar? After years of estrangement between my mother and me, it was a book by Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, that helped close the distance between us. For once, my mother was on my side. A similar realization came to her when she read Esmerelda Santiago’s When I was Puerto Rican. Who knew I would have so much in common with a Puerto Rican? she said. It was striking to see how these books that had dramatically shifted my consciousness and made me more woke, were also shifting something in my mother.

Since then, I’ve believed or hoped that reading books outside of what we know, or outside of what we relate to, can be the key in building true solidarity between us in our commitment to “build a more equitable and just world,” as Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley said after Trump’s attacks. “Our squad is big,” she said. I believe this is true. Many of us are ready to band together. But what about those who are not ready, who are sitting by the sidelines afraid or unaware? Maybe within our spheres of influence, our families, our friends, our neighborhoods, maybe if we share, gift, leave some great literature on someone’s coffee table, literature that we love, that inspires compassion, imagination, and possibility for transformation, maybe our squad can be enormous. Just maybe.

Angie Cruz is the editor of Aster(ix) and the author of the forthcoming novel, Dominicana (Flatiron Books).