Feeling like an outsider in a place you consider home, is one of the struggles that to this day I still live with. June 8, 1996 was the beginning of the hectic journey of my life, I was only a year and three months when my mother made the decision to pack up and move to the United States, where my father had been living with my two older sibling. A small two bedroom house located in Galveston Texas is what my family would call home for the next couple of years. As the youngest child out of my four siblings, people always thought of my life to be perfect and spoiled; which in true honesty was nothing like that. At the age that I came into the U.S I was far too young to comprehend the type of life I had ahead of me, a life in which parents where over worked to satisfy their children’s needs, a life
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Some people where so shallow that they would not allow their kids to play with me nor my brothers for the simple fact that we were “immigrants”, making it seemed as if it was a terrible thing to be. Another woman once told my mother that if my brother was to make it through the university, she would call immigration on our family just to avoid him graduating. Just imagine being a child subjected to those kind of comments, people like them forced me to believe that my parents had burden me with a horrible life, being called an immigrant made me feel ashamed of my roots; it made me feel the need to lie about my identity. By the end of fifth grade, my peers believed that I was born on the island, that my parents had money and that I was spoiled rotten, when in reality I was none of those. I was just so afraid of being segregated for the mere fact that I have a different birthplace than others, I spoke a different language and I was going through a whole different lifestyle than most of them were. I was still young yet I already felt ashamed of my own actions; my parents worked too hard for me to lie about them; but I just couldn’t live with people seeing me
Some people where so shallow that they would not allow their kids to play with me nor my brothers for the simple fact that we were “immigrants”, making it seemed as if it was a terrible thing to be. Another woman once told my mother that if my brother was to make it through the university, she would call immigration on our family just to avoid him graduating. Just imagine being a child subjected to those kind of comments, people like them forced me to believe that my parents had burden me with a horrible life, being called an immigrant made me feel ashamed of my roots; it made me feel the need to lie about my identity. By the end of fifth grade, my peers believed that I was born on the island, that my parents had money and that I was spoiled rotten, when in reality I was none of those. I was just so afraid of being segregated for the mere fact that I have a different birthplace than others, I spoke a different language and I was going through a whole different lifestyle than most of them were. I was still young yet I already felt ashamed of my own actions; my parents worked too hard for me to lie about them; but I just couldn’t live with people seeing me