21 Years Ago in TIME

The wrenching issues facing IMMIGRANTS, including the sense of living a secret life, emerged into the public eye two decades ago.

Every immigrant has a double identity and a double vision, being suspended between an old and a new home, an old and a new self. The very notion of a new home, of course, is in a sense as impossible as the notion of new parents. Parents are who they are; home is what it is. Home is the wallpaper above the bed, the family dinner table, the church bells in the morning, the small fears that come with dusk, the streets and squares and monuments and shops that constitute one's first universe. Home is one's birthplace, ratified by memory. Yet home, like parentage, must be legitimized through love; otherwise, it is only a fact of geography or biology. Most immigrants to America found their love of their old homes betrayed ... They did not really abandon their countries; their countries abandoned them. In America, they found the possibility of a new love, the chance to nurture new selves. --TIME, July 8, 1985

Read the entire article at time.com/years