Personal Narrative: An Immigrant Interview

I come from an immigrant family and I have had the privilege to be exposed to different social, cultural and economic realities all my life as I constantly navigated across cultures. Aside from family origin in Ecuador, I was born in Virginia and lived in the Caribbean (Puerto Rico) for six years. The biggest influences on the way I see life comes from my immigrant parents. I have learned to perceive their differences and appreciate their interactions with me.

Immigration has always been a topic of conversation in politics, especially in the last election. People’s views towards whether immigration is a bad or good thing for the economy is up for debate. Many people find that immigrants destroy the economy, and have no right coming into the United States. Whereas some people view immigrants as a vital part of the United States’ social class, and they view immigrants as strong, willful people who made the difficult decision in coming over to the United States. In the two articles, “In Trek North, First Lure Is Mexico’s Other Line” written by Randal archibold, and “The Heartache of an Immigrant Family,” written by Sonia Nazario, it gives people an insight into the struggles and hardships families endure

I am an immigrant. I look and act like any other student at Reading High School, participating in class and school extracurricular activities. But, I live in constant fear. I am afraid that I may never be who I want to be. I worry that I may not get a job, go to college, or even get a driver's license. But what I worry most about is that my parents will be deported back to Mexico someday and I will lose my family, forever.

I chose my immigrant participant from a personal perspective, yet not knowing much about him. Last year, my first year teaching, I had a little boy in my class that was Latino, very shy and quite. He struggled in reading and writing and after meeting with his parents and ESOL teacher several times, the decision was made to retain him in first grade. His parents, especially dad was hesitant about the decision, and began to tell small glimpses of how his son was very much like him, shy, and scared to reach out because of the language barrier. There was never much elaborated on, but I could tell that dad had possibly been in a similar situation before. This year, I was lucky enough to have this same child in my first grade class again. After receiving

No one get’s to choose what environment in which they were raised. I grew up in a very difficult environment that has affected me in various ways. Although it has left some very scaring memories, it has made me who I am today.

I moved to the United States in 2003 to live with my mother who then resided in the country for five years. The thought of escaping the war in Monrovia was thrilling but I soon realized that my country’s war was not my only battle. After my arrival into America, I was faced with oncoming waves of challenges. The war had prevented me from attending school for two consecutive years. The knowledge I had was incomparable to that of my peers. My inability to speak English, along with the overwhelming burden of my native tongue made learning in a new American school difficult. I was a foreigner left to present my capabilities clearly through black lenses with no words spoken depicting that I came from a third-world country. I accepted these faults

Immigrants are human beings who want a better life. They bravely risk their lives and safety, are often exploited, tolerate extreme weather conditions, face strange cultures, discrimination, and local hostilities. They cope with loneliness and alienation. Sometimes immigrants come to the U.S. without any money and no prospects. “Most of the people I know in the United States have no friends here; they’re crowded together in apartments. They’re cold; they’re lonely, they’re worn” (Diaz 62). U.S. citizens and immigrants both have the same experiences when they move to different places. But the real reason is prosperity. The desire for a better life somewhere other than the current residence and this country offers that better life they wish

Stepping off the plane in June 2005, I knew I was no longer in Colombia and I had not yet realized my life would change. The first noticeable difference was school; I was motivated to learn, advance, and achieve greatness. I was told I could accomplish anything I dreamed; however, I knew I did not have the resources to procure my dreams. We started from zero, scratch. My own version of the classic immigrant story—moving and hitting the restart button. I was told my socioeconomic situation did not matter. Little did they know, it does.

My poor and uneducated mother immigrated to the United States in two thousand one and brought me along at the age of four where she knew I would have a viable opportunity of becoming something more than what our poverty stricken, gang ridden country could offer. My father in a cruel gesture named me Leo without my mother's approval, for he figured a hypocoristic name would allow me, a future illiterate, to at least write my own name. A decade later after experiencing variations of homelessness, hunger, medical conditions, and gunshots outside of our home, my mother remarried, and gave birth to my brother who has been a blessing in disguise. After my mother's short-lived marriage we struggled financially once again; however this time we were

Let me just start off by saying that while stigma about immigrants may lead people to believe that they all have the same story or entered a country the same way, this is not true, we all have our own stories just like everyone else. People do not realize that if people are willing to leave behind everything they’ve ever known in the hope of finding a better life, they are essentially walking the path of the American Dream, the same path the founders of this Nation walked (Sailed, irrelevant to my point). Relations between people of different “races” seem to be fickle, at one point people may get along and then suddenly things change for seemingly no reason. Some may attribute this to life being change, yet there are no moral positives to

We started off with a bang. We started with me thinking of what to do how to do it and what were my ideas. Then, a little later we actually started it and not gonna lie, it was scary. I didn’t know that much about my family, yeah i've heard stories but they're stories. Later on we went home i didn’t tell my family anything just unsuspiciously getting all the information and I learned a lot yes. I learned about my names and why they're my names, I learned about my dad getting lost a lot, I learned about my mom moving here to america when she was 14 and how her life was before she moved and why she moved. I learned about my uncle going to jail for crossing the border illegally which is kinda funny. All those I learned but i couldn’t find anything

My grandmother always loved to tell me stories. She would always tell me story before tucking me into bed a night. My favorite story was about when she went to New York City. There were so many buildings. She would say these buildings were not like the ones that we had back at home in the little town of Roland Oklahoma. These buildings were so tall it looked as if they the clouds was their top hats. There were vendors on every street corner trying to sell just about anything you could ever need. She would always go off on the same tangent about some poem her mother had read to her. The poems name was “The New Colossus.” This was her absolute favorite poem of all time. She would continue on with there is a ginormous

Within two years in her part time job, she managed to accumulate money to pay for a "used car" and "her own apartment" (Small 94). without this migration, she would continue to live as the "quiet and dutiful child" of Atu and Malia (Small 88). In America, she learned how to fend for herself. She did not enjoy the fact that a Tongan elderly was taking advantage of her modesty. She used to let her borrow money in which took "a year and few months" to pay back. She would buy food for herself and the lady and they would eat together. Now, they alternate in buying lunch which seemed to prove to be "more equal" (Small

My mother is just like many other immigrants. She dreamed of a having a good life, with a promise of a better future and education for her children. Although she knew that she would face many challenges down the road. She still embarked boldly on her journey, driven by the hope of her American dream. Even though her life was simple back then, she never stopped dreaming and always showed passion in everything. In fact, she graduated in Pharmacy and became the top of her class to pass the board exam in the whole Philippines. Soon after, she migrated to the U.S. because of the lack of job opportunities and low wages in the Philippines. She felt that the only chance for our family to have a decent future is to live and work in the United States due to the Philippine mentality of the American dream. My mother experienced hardships, struggles, and took whatever jobs were available just to earn money. Eventually, because of her hard work and determination, her dream of giving our family the life she had

It was the third grade, a year I don’t remember all that well. expect for bits of a series of events that has stunted my ability to strongly connect with people. I had a friend, let’s call him Anglo for the sake of his privacy. He and I would sit on a slab of concert at marked the as the border of school playground, and an expanse of black top where the buses were parked when not in use.  We talked more than anything, food, and Pokémon where the main topic of discussion, along with verbal retellings of the last movie we watched.