Daughter of a Deported Immigrant: Part III

Seeds grow.

Trigger Warning: For my immigrant friends, I hope you see yourselves in the story that’s being written for you. But you can take back the story.

A note to the outsiders: I encourage you to read parts I and II if you haven’t already—let it sit with you first as you decide what comes next for you.

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On all accounts, I’m an immigrant success story. I’m college-educated, I work at a wonderful organization, I own my home, and my family is thriving. I am the model of a very modern, successful immigrant who knows her presidents, how government operates, and passed the naturalization test with flying colors (despite feeling very sweaty afterward). Shouldn’t I be the first one clamoring that the system is completely fair if it worked for me?

The Truth: I was able to thrive despite how the system worked. There was no guarantee at first that I would even be able to stay, if I, as some people say, “tried to go through the front door.” The pathway toward my citizenship was extraordinarily difficult (you can read my Coffee + Crumbs essay on how I navigated that process while becoming a mother).

I had to go through the immigration process twice because, like I mentioned, I’m also the daughter of a deported immigrant. The first time my father tried, he was barred—which meant I was barred too. Once I turned 18, the law didn’t see me as a child anymore—it saw me as someone who needed to go through the immigration process as an adult.

Can you imagine trying to navigate entering adulthood, graduating from high school, and then figuring out the immigration process as a teenager? There was no AP test I could have taken that would have prepared me for that.

Still, I had no choice. And neither do others in the United States.

***

One of my favorite ironies about my children is that they are both Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution and second-generation children of an immigrant. They have paperwork that shows how their distant aunts and uncles arrived from the Mayflower.

Yet, they have family members, including their own mother at one point, who aren’t seen as heroes, but rather as criminals, because they had to move.

The story was flipped. That narrative was created to delegitimize people and strip their identities away from them.

Here’s a new one—my kids have been taught that they’re people from both stories, and their legacy is to build something new.

They know the truth.

***

I have a favorite Mexican proverb:

Nos quisieron enterrar sin saber que eramos semillas.

They wanted to bury us without knowing that we were seeds. The narrative may get flipped—but we’ll rise above it. Our names may be stripped from us by calling us “illegal” or “foreign,” but we know we’re building a new home. We may be detained for a chance at survival, but that doesn’t stop us from fighting for it.

Many immigrants have already experienced terrorist threats, insults, tear gas, and more. We’ll survive. We should ask ourselves one question, though:

What comes next? How are you writing the story?