My name is Raquel Hernandez, and I am an immigrant.
Many people come from around the world to the United States looking for a better life, but many times what they find is not even near what they had expected. In my small town in Mexico, people who plan to come to this country, either legally or illegally, plan to stay for only two years, find a job, send money to their families to build a house, and save money to return home with a truck and with enough money to start up a small business. HOWEVER, this is only “The Mexican Dream” that very few manage to accomplish. From the people I know, I can say that the majority of them who have migrated to the United States start by baby sitting or cleaning houses. If they are lucky to migrate with legal papers, they end up in a factory, in a restaurant, in the fields, or in construction. Most of them don’t take the time to go to school and learn English.
My parents were living in this country when I was born. When I was only eight months old, they moved back to Mexico and that’s where I grew up until the age of 19. Upon being unable to continue my education in Mexico due to a financial crisis that my father was having, my parents and I decided that it would be best that I returned to the United States to study English for two straight years, go back to Mexico to find a job in a touristic place and hopefully catch up with my education. However, it has been 11 years since I came here, and I am barely finishing my B.A. degree.
Even though I didn’t have to swim to cross the river or walk for days through the dessert, I have gone through many sacrifices. I arrived at my godparents’ home, whom I only knew from their sporadic visits to Mexico. Relatives took me to Palomar College to register for ESL classes (English as a Second Language), but in order to contribute to the expenses of the home where I was graciously being hosted and to provide for my parents, I had to look for a job. After 15 days of my arrival, I had a full-time job in a factory in the second shift and a few days later I was attending school in the morning.
It took me a year and a half of saving money to buy an old car, but in the mean time since I didn’t have my own transportation or a parent to take me to school, I had to buy a used bike and a used helmet with my first earnings; on rainy days, I used to get home completely wet. For work, I had to walk all the way to my cousin’s house to ride with her since we both worked in the same factory. The shift ended at 1:30 in the morning, so I used to get home around 2 AM. My bed was a sofa in the living room. My godparents had to get up at 4:20 AM to go to work, and on weekends, they let me borrow their son’s bedroom; so they would wake me up from the sofa to send me to the bedroom after their son had left for work. This was my routine until I had to leave the house.
The house where I was staying belonged to my godfather’s mother-in-law, and when they got in a fight, he decided to leave the house, and because I am his relative, I had to leave the house as well. Having nowhere to go other than my car, my boyfriend proposed to me getting married before we had planned. I called my father to ask for his permission (my mother at that time had passed away already), he approved my decision and the next day after work, I got married wearing a stained shirt and stainless steel-toe boots that I used for work. Thank God, my husband has been a great support for me and I have been able to continue to attend school, work, and lately my internship.
My story proves that even when an immigrant person has legal documents, the change is never easy. One of the things I regret the most about migrating to another country is that I left my parents behind and I couldn’t spend more time with my mother during her illness. People who don’t have legal papers cannot even be with their family members in their deathbed because if they leave the country, they are afraid that they may not be able to make it alive in their next attempt to cross to the country that has offered them a better way of living.
