My Childhood Struggles

My childhood was difficult and my family struggled to fit into society and become members of the United States. I will first discuss the background of my parents and the reasons they immigrated to the United States. My mother and father were born and raised in Guadalajara, México. They were from the same town and came from very poor families. My mother grew up without a father and my father grew up without a mother. My mother and father grew emotionally detached from their families and had difficult childhoods. They did not have all their family united and would struggle economically. They would struggle to have food on their plates and lived in poor houses. My mother would say that they lived in a small shack that required them to use cardboards …show more content…
My father would search for jobs in anything he would be able to work in, but it was very difficult for him to find a job. My father did not go to college and did not have a good education. He said that he only graduated up to the sixth grade and then had to start working at the age of 11 to help support his family. My father would go search for jobs in construction, restaurants or other low-paying jobs to make a living. My father said that the most difficult thing to find as an undocumented male in the U.S was finding a job. My father would find many job openings, but no one would want to hire him because he did not have an education or have legal papers to work in the U.S. My father said that one of the most stressful situations he experienced when immigrating to the U.S was not being to find a job because he did not have legal papers and was not able to give his family a home of their own. In January 1994, my mother got pregnant with me and they were living with my father’s oldest sister (Maria). As months passed by my father worked in some gardening jobs once a week and had very little money. They were not able to pay rent or buy much food and my aunt Maria told them to look for somewhere else to live because they did not want to feed two mouths for free and I was in my way in a couple months. During this time my parents were …show more content…
My father said he had to start working as a dishwasher winning the minimum, but as time passed he became a cook and earned more money. My father would pay rent to my uncle and when I was born, my parents were able to move out and rent a small apartment. My parents struggled a lot financially, but my mother was not able to look for a job because my father believed she had to stay at home to cook and care for the home. My mother never argued with him because they came from families where the male would go work and make the money, while the female would stay at home to cook and care for the children. My parent’s believe in the binary gender and believe each gender should follow the norms and not become deviant. My parents followed the expected norms of how a gender should act and later learned that it is okay to share roles and not act the gender they are assigned. After my father started his new job in the restaurant, my parents moved into a small apartment that was surrounded by people from different cultures and ethnicities. For example, they had neighbors who were African American or Asian. My parents said everyone had very different cultures and that everyone looked different than in México. My parents were from a small town that everyone knew everybody and when they came to the U.S they met a lot of different