The American Dream

Editor's note: Citric Acid is pleased to share multi-form work from Cal State University Fullerton students whose engagement with a theme presented by Professor Elaine Lewinnek produced the portfolio offered below, which introduces. Congratulations, and thank you, to both professor and students!

I teach a class on the American Dream because the cliché keeps re-emerging, zombie-like, affecting the current generation facing our crisis of American democracy, housing, immigration, climate, and justice. At Cal State Fullerton, my “American Dream” class is part of the required General Education category that is supposed to guide students to think about art.

This year, tired of guessing whether robots wrote my students’ essays, and too-often frustrated with essays in general, I asked my students to create an “un-essay”: a cartoon, video, podcast, zine, collage, or anything else as long as it was not a five-paragraph essay. I asked them to be humanly creative and they were. It turns out that doing the profound work to make my classes AI-resistant has also made my classes better. Iterative assignments, creative tasks, cooperative work that students recognize has a purpose: these strategies for discouraging ChatGPT are also simply good teaching. My students rose to the challenge of an un-essay and their views of the American Dream in 2026 are worth sharing.

In an Orange County that still has a reputation for conservative complacency, my students’ American dreams are anything but. I required them to use quotes from at least five of our class texts, and encouraged them to reflect on how their ideas about the American Dream had evolved during the semester, but beyond that, they were free to choose any format with which they were comfortable. Their creativity reframed my own class for me.

There is an increasingly loud strain of conservatives who worry that teaching the full truth about American history will undermine patriotism by making students ashamed – as if it’s not a greater danger to teach a whitewashed history that can cause any thinking student to become cynical or disillusioned. Recently, timid conservatives who are frightened of history are trying to remove national-park plaques, ban books, mandate curriculum in red states, and increase surveillance of teachers, as if America’s greatness does not include our freedom to fully examine our own nation. Listening to the American dreamers in my CSUF class shows me hope, not shame or cynicism. I hear empathy and resolve as each student engages with a wide spectrum of voices from our past and finds their own place in our complex present.

--Elaine Lewinnek

The American Dream

by Diego Aguilar

I used to think the American Dream

was freedom —

to choose your job,

your beliefs,

your body,

your life.

That definition felt complete

until I learned

how many people never get

real access

to choice.

We’re told a house is the goal.

Keys in your hand.

Stability.

But sometimes ownership is just

debt pretending to be safety,

a future built on pressure

instead of protection.

They say hard work pays off.

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes it looks like

donut shops before sunrise,

families surviving on exhaustion,

calling it “living the American dream”^[1]

because what else are you supposed to call it?

I thought following the rules

meant freedom.

Then I read about growing up

American in every way

except legally —

“I grew up American in every way except on paper.^[2]

”A dream that can vanish

with a policy change

isn’t really security.

The dream doesn’t just live out there.

It lives in your head —

a quiet voice asking

why you aren’t further along,

why you haven’t made it yet,

why stopping feels like failure.

History made it clearer. Some people were never meant to dream.

One life celebrated,

another written in grief and survival.

“Very few is able to beat thro all Impedements,”^[3]

and most never had the chance to try.

So now, when I think about the American Dream,

I don’t think it’s fake —

but I don’t think it’s fair.

Freedom isn’t just believing you can choose.

It’s having access.

Education.

Legal protection.

A real starting point.

I still believe in dreaming.

I just don’t believe

dreaming alone has ever been enough.

Image collages by Kaylee Ayers:

A mock social media post by Jacob Nicolae^[4]:

Another imaginary social media post by Victoria Rivera:

Quotes, in clockwise direction, from Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (1959); Oscar Villalon, “The Evolving Monologue in My Head Desde Saturday, August 3” in Lithub (2019); Kathryn Schulz, “Citizen Khan” in The New Yorker (2016); and Cherokee Chief John Ross’s petition to Congress (1836). The photo on the top left, showing a bread-line in front of a billboard for the American standard of living, is Margaret Bourke-White’s “The Louisville Flood” (1937), the cover-image for our class. The students’ pastiches are all their own. 

A video un-essay from Luke Liebe:

^[1] Students in this class viewed Alice Gu’s documentary film, “The Donut King” (2020).

^[2] Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, “For the Child of Immigrants, the American Dream Can Be a Nightmare,” Vogue 2018.

^[3] Jane Franklin Mecom (1786), quoted in Jill Lepore, “Poor Jane’s Almanac” New York Times (April 23, 2011).

^[4] Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1890) and Philip Alston, “Statement on Visit to the USA by United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights” (2017). 

*cover image by Kaylee Ayers

Elaine Lewinnek is professor of American Studies and chair of the Environmental Studies program at California State University Fullerton. She is co-author of A People's Guide to Orange County and also author of The Working Man’s Reward: Chicago’s Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl.  Her essay, "Park Place Material: Privatization, Homeowners Associations, and My Dog," appears in Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California.

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