Why Superman Never Resonated With Me as an Immigrant Child

Superman stands as one of the most universally recognized figures, yet before migrating to the United States from the Dominican Republic, I had never encountered him. However, as a seven-year-old in New Jersey, he was impossible to ignore: the Super Friends cartoons blared on TV, and his comic books filled the shelves of every local store. A few years later, in 1978, when I was still struggling to gain fluency in English, Richard Donner’s Superman film burst onto the cultural scene like a phenomenon from Krypton itself.

One might assume that a migrant child like me—who avidly read comics searching for clues on how to navigate this new world, and who, like Clark Kent, wrestled with a haunting connection to a lost homeland—would find a natural affinity for Superman. I even viewed my island as a kind of Krypton, not destroyed by cosmic catastrophe but fragmented by the mundane realities of migration. I juggled three identities: the English-speaking persona in the United States, the Spanish-speaking self within my family’s apartment, and the memory of the Dominican Republic.

Yet, paradoxically, I never embraced Superman the way I did other heroes, such as Spider-Man. In fact, I was something of the neighborhood’s anti-Superman, always ready to criticize the Last Son of Krypton with detailed arguments about why he was a foolish hero. From the outset, he simply didn’t appeal to me. His naïveté as a hero and his outdated, flag-waving patriotism—loving a country I had never truly seen—felt alien. The America I knew was far more a landscape of adversaries than heroes.

Although Superman’s immigrant and refugee origins might have offered a point of connection, even that aspect frustrated me. While we both came from other worlds, Clark Kent’s seamless assimilation and his ability to pass as ‘one of them’ felt as impossible to me as flying fast enough to reverse time.

Superman may have been hailed as the “Man of Tomorrow,” but that tomorrow never seemed destined for someone like me—someone who endured daily scorn and insults from strangers on the street. People would literally growl upon seeing my brown skin or hearing my Dominican accent.