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I was born in Chicago, my family immigrated here from Mexico before I was born, my mother brought my older sister with her at the age of two years old. My father had arrived here with his brothers before bringing back my mother and sister. Like most immigrants my parents left Mexico because they wanted to come for a better life, to give their two daughters a good education, opportunities and a life that would be less difficult than the one they grew up in. They wanted to make sure their child and future kids didn’t know hardships of poverty and uncertainty as theirs. Both my mother and father have always valued education because my mother never got to finish past the 5th grade and my father’s education only continued because he left his home and family to join the seminary in a different state in Mexico to work and continue his studies before meeting my mother. When he met my mother it changed everything for him. The rest was history, although he didn’t become a priest, he would later become a father to two daughters, giving him the idea that providing for his family would be easier in a land with more opportunity, leaving home would be the only way.
My immigration story is one that does not solely belong to me. The story of my family’s immigration impacts my relationship with family and community every day, because I have always sat in the gray area. The space between. Therefore I have often felt like my relationship with my family and community has always been complicated because of it. Being the only one in my family to have rights and stability it became isolating, confusing and frustrating. It filled me up with guilt. I was privileged. An anchor, holding the boat of my family in a place that has never fully accepted us. Being a product of immigrants in the U.S, the phrase “ni de aqui, ni de alla” never resonated with me more than it did to most people like my family. It took a new meaning to me, never fully belonging in the country my parents recognized as home but also never fully being accepted in the country we resided in. The only place that felt comforting not just to myself but my parents was the community that we lived in. Pilsen has always been home away from home for my parents, and for me it was a mirror to what I had never had an opportunity to know or have an identity in. Connecting to my community became a passion of mine as an adult as it accepted my family and myself since I found I wasn’t alone. It seemed like a safe haven for many families like my own and especially with children like myself. As an adult I have dedicated my entire career to giving back to the community and supporting communities that resemble my own for the experiences that I was able to have as a child in a low-income household. It then led me to dedicate myself to education and the arts as an outlet for voicing the voiceless.
What is home? This is a question I often grapple with. My relationship to Home is ever evolving. To me home has many meanings, rooted in tradition, family and values. The meaning of home has changed with me and the seasons of my life. As a child “home” was a place confined to walls, and material complemented by the warmth of my family. Home was the two bedroom apartment that my family and I lived in for twenty plus years in the Heart of Chicago. A place that we couldn’t possibly own, however, it was always filled with memories, and objects that held meaning, the idea that we had “made it”. My mother held on to objects because they filled her with a sense of security that she had triumphed in building a home for her family. Furniture, clothing, picture frames, things that embodied the blood, sweat, and tears she and my father endured to be far away from their home and family. When it was time to leave that house that had held us for many years, my relationship to home changed to my community, and city, as I had not only moved to a different house, but a different place entirely, when I left for college allowed me to see that my community, and my city was home, not just because it is where I felt safe and seen, but because that is where my family, my parents lived. I then realized how tradition came into play. That my traditions moved with me, in the food that I prepared, the holidays that I celebrated, and the events that continued to connect me with my roots to my culture, my home away from home. It allowed me to now see how my relationship to home is multilayered, generational and built like patchwork because home is carried within me in my heart and my mind. Much like my parents have done, and people like them continue to do. As I will continue to do so wherever I go.
I feel the pull between my present life and my roots the strongest when I am standing in rooms my parents were never meant to enter. Rooms with polished floors and quiet rules, where my last name is pronounced slowly, carefully, like it might break. In those spaces, I am praised for how well I’ve adapted, how well I speak, how easily I move, while my parents’ sacrifices sit just outside the door, unacknowledged, undocumented.
The pull tightens when I remember that I am the only one in my family who moves with minimal fear. That my stability was built from their uncertainty. That I am an anchor, holding us steady in a country that has never fully claimed us. It is a strange inheritance, this mix of gratitude and guilt, pride and mourning.
I reconcile these competing feelings by refusing to let distance turn into abandonment. I carry my roots with me, in my work, in my language, in my devotion to community. I return again and again, not always in body, but in purpose. I use what I have been given as a bridge, not an escape, and I measure success by how many hands I can reach back for.
I have learned that reconciliation does not mean choosing between where I am and where I come from. It means learning how to hold both, even when they pull. Especially when they pull.
My hope is centered around many things but mainly the belief that I don’t have to be understood to belong. That there can be a world or a place where my body, language, and history aren’t treated as foreign. Where existence doesn’t have to feel difficult or painful because of the color of my skin, where my parent’s home is, what I sound like or what I do. What my hope centers is around my family, friends, community, and cultural resilience. The resilience that my love for all of these things allows me to feel like uncertainty is minute. The dreams I’m building for myself are inspired by the thought that there can one day be a time where my body, my language, and my history are not questioned, only welcomed.