“Wow, they’re beautiful,” I told my friend one minute into a Fourth of July fireworks show last year. We stood on the roof of his apartment in Brooklyn, with an amazing view of the fiery blooms and streams lighting up over the river. Am I finally starting to like fireworks? I thought. I stood there thinking about how much I had grown, all my ups and downs over the past year, where I had come from, my ancestors and their history of struggle for sovereignty and freedom, oftentimes in the face of the country these fireworks were meant to celebrate.