Opinion: What my mom’s iconic Volvo 240 taught me about the American dream

When I think of my mom’s blue Volvo 240 station wagon, I recall a sweltering spring day in the mid-1990s. The vehicle’s air conditioning was struggling against the Florida heat. As sweat made the bottom half of my body stick to the cognac leather seats, my innards were in shambles.

Not too long before my mother had gathered my brother and me from school, I had managed to win the Easter egg hunt. The eggs, however, were not plastic and filled with treats. They were real chicken eggs, hard-boiled and then left out in the heat of the day. And I ate them all.

About five minutes from home, I cautioned my mom to pull over. I then proceeded to throw up all over the interior of my mother’s precious station wagon, nicknamed Denise.

I remembered Denise recently when I binged the Showtime series “Your Honor,” which spent the last seven weeks among Netflix’s top 10 shows in the U.S., racking up millions of viewers. The thriller centers around parents and children who encounter an old-school Volvo 240 station wagon with a blue hue slightly lighter than that of my mother’s old car.

This wasn’t the first time I’d seen that make of Volvo on TV. I began to wonder why it seemed to appear throughout films and shows as the “it” car of the white upper middle class. And I questioned why when I was growing up, my mom, a Black woman, was the only person I knew who drove that car. What I’ve come to understand is that both Hollywood and my mother envisioned the Volvo 240 as the embodiment of a very specific and illusory American dream.

Versions of my mother’s Volvo have appeared more than 2,000 times onscreen, prompting Reddit users to observe that “there is a Volvo 240 in almost every movie.” The box-on-wheels has appeared in such major feature films as “Spider-Man,” “Beetlejuice” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and in critically acclaimed series such as “Scrubs,” “Six Feet Under” and “The Sopranos.” The Volvo has even been dubbed “Sweden’s biggest movie star.” The 240 in particular is known as one of the company’s most popular models of all time, and you can still buy one today, though it’ll take a bit of work.

The car manufacturer may have initially built its reputation on safety with its establishment in the 1950s of three-point seat belts. But that sense of reliability grew into cultural cachet: As one dealer put it, the Volvo 240 is “the elbow-patched sweater of the car world.”

It’s a vibe that matches the progressive stances, presumptive wealth and prestigious careers that the now-iconic Volvo 240 conveys about its owners in “Your Honor” — a milieu of sophisticated cocktails, highbrow debate and exotic vacations. But that couldn’t be further from the truth of who my family was before, during or after the time when my mother owned her Volvo. Looking back, I suspect it was who she wished to be, or wanted people to believe we were — or maybe who she willed us to become one day against all odds.

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In reality, the evangelical Christian home where I was raised allowed no drinking of any kind, and no one in my nuclear family had ever left the country. Money was available but not abundant. My father, a second-generation Italian immigrant and registered independent with conservative leanings, worked as a city government employee my whole life. My mother had escaped the grasp of Jim Crow, childhood poverty and extreme hardship to become the first person in her family to graduate from college. Her father was unable to read or write his own five-letter name.

But as the story goes, nearly four decades ago, my mother walked into a Florida Volvo dealership and saw Denise sparkling on the showroom floor. She says that, heavily pregnant with me, she squeezed her way behind the wheel and decided that we fit perfectly. Having worked to establish herself as an agent for a nationwide insurance company, and with her oft-dreamed-about baby girl on the way, my mom needed a high-quality car that would project success and guarantee the safety of her most valuable cargo. That is precisely the promise of the Volvo 240, both onscreen and off.

When we got back home after the Easter egg hunt, my mother wiped away my tears along with the mess inside her station wagon. To my surprise, she wasn’t mad that I had desecrated Denise.

Maybe she hoped that one day, my real-life résumé would come to mirror Hollywood’s popular depiction of a successful, Ivy-League-educated lawyer. She couldn’t have known that the pedigree would not be a salve for society’s cruelties toward Black daughters or imagine the life I would go on to lead even after we’d grown apart.

Regardless, my mother kept on driving her blue Volvo 240 station wagon until the power steering went out.

Anika Collier Navaroli is a senior fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and a public voices fellow on technology in the public interest with the OpEd Project in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation.