Maybe My Life Is Here

We are students at the University of Minnesota conducting an oral history project. The purpose of our project is to interview someone who has experienced immigration and to let their story be heard. Our interviewee is Fatima Garcia, a freshman at the University of Minnesota, who immigrated to the United States in 2010 from El Salvador. This is her story.

SHE CAME WALKING

My mother was the first one to come to America. She came walking. It took a month or two to get to the United States. So she had to go through Guatemala and then Mexico. I honestly don’t remember too much about the day she left. I was very young, six years old. It was hard, I just remember seeing all these people crying. My mom decided to hug me. I was just playing with my sister, I actually didn’t know what was happening. My mom lied to me, she told me that she was going to do the makeup. I know it’s going to sound funny but that’s what she said to me. She told me that she was going to do the makeup of models.

My mother left before us. We were going through a really hard situation there. My mom almost lost the house. We did not have enough money to pay for school, the house, food, so my mom just decided to leave El Salvador. She left eight years before us.

After Fatima’s mother left for the United States, she began the process of gaining residency.

It was a long process. My mom decided to become a resident, so it was a long process and a lot of money. The process of my sister and I was for over two years I think before coming. My mom decided to prepare everything. Because she got her resident card, she went to visit for two weeks. She came back for my fifteenth birthday and she told us that the process was almost over.

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YOU CAN TELL RIGHT NOW I HAVE MY ACCENT

We asked Fatima about some of her struggles here in the United States, and she began to describe language barriers and struggles in academics due to language.

I have to say one of my biggest struggles is English because when I came here I didn't know any English. I struggle a lot because of my accent. I have a specific accent and you can tell right now I have my accent. I’m still learning English. So that’s been hard for me because if you don't know any English, where will you go in this country, right? I started to learn, I started to read a lot, and that's my English right now, all about books.

Speaking is harder, but I love to write, I think that’s the thing that comes easily to me about English. I still have some struggles about grammar and everything, but it's easier for me than speaking English. I'm afraid sometimes that I'm not going to say a word right, like people won't understand me.When I came here I had to take a placement test. They put me in a school where there is a program for English learners called the ELL program. That’s where I took specific classes with other immigrant students learning English at the same level as me, so we went step by step. I think that was really helpful, but after I passed the third level of English I was all by myself to keep learning more.

I LEARNED TO FIND MYSELF IN EL SALVADORIAN

When I came here I remember there were a lot of multicultural students at my school but there were also the students that would look at me and judge me by the way that I was dressing. I remember one time a student laughed at me because I was wearing sandals during fall. She told me “it’s not summertime, why are you wearing those sandals?” So she just made fun of me and sometimes others did too because of my English and my accent, but I just try to not give attention now.

I thought maybe I should adopt this new culture because sometimes students will come look at me and laugh at me because of my clothes, my English, and sometimes my color skin. I saw all those student look at me and laugh when I would speak to them. They would just be like “what did you say? I don't understand anything you're saying right now,” so sometimes when I would go and talk to them they wouldn't say anything to me. There was a time when I would cry and tell my mom that I didn't want to be here, that I want to go home and speak Spanish with my family.

We asked Fatima if she sometimes felt American, even with these struggles and challenges.

When it’s about hip-hop, yes. I love hip-hop. In El Salvador we have something similar to hip-hop. We call it reggaeton but it’s just more about love, I think, but it's in this way where you can dance. Kind of like hip-hop, but love hip-hop, so it’s a little bit different. Other than that there’s bachata. Bachata is this romantic music that you will listen to, remember someone and start to dance with the music. I’m a dancer so I like to dance bachata, merengue, all those musics that bring me to my culture.

We then asked Fatima to compare American culture with El Salvadorian culture.

When I think of a typical American I think of a white person having breakfast at Perkins with the scrambled eggs. Yeah, and maybe I don’t know what else, I guess when I describe an American I think of food. Basically really different foods, like pizza. There are some El Salvadorian restaurants around here but they're not the same. Like a lot of people come and say they are so good, oh my gosh, but nuh-uh, you haven’t been in El Salvador. Pupusas are my traditional food in El Salvador. We have something called los nuegados, it’s like a really sweet food made out of corn. Basically we do everything from corn in El Salvador.

Maybe playing sports is something different in America too, in El Salvador I did not know about sports. I think most Americans do lacrosse. And music, the hip-hop and the country music. I know a lot of Americans listen to country, and if you’re American when you dance hip-hop you jump.

After Fatima described the cultures and their differences, we asked her if she ever felt pressure to choose one culture over another.

No, because I learned to find myself El Salvadorian. We will always be El Salvadorian, so that’s not hard. I mean, I'm living in this country, I consider myself an American to live and I love the weather. I see the weather and I look at the trees. In El Salvador I don't have the opportunity to see fall like this, actual fall. So basically the weather and the seasons made me fall in love with the United States. Now I just feel comfortable here and I can say that maybe my life is here and I will stay here.

THE HARDEST PART

We asked Fatima about her family, her relationship with family members and how she felt about leaving her family when she left to El Salvador.

The hardest part about coming to the United States was definitely leaving my family because I grew up with them. The night before we left we had dinner with my family. That was a hard time, I cried all night and I didn’t sleep at all, I was just awake. I was nervous and I was sad. I was thinking of all the things I was leaving behind.

All my memories I have of my family are just amazing and just thinking that I wasn’t going to live with them anymore made me cry sometimes. I do sometimes cry still. I talked to my grandma last week and started to cry because we started to talk about my uncle and how much I missed him. That’s basically the hardest part.

We also asked Fatima about how it felt returning to El Salvador to see her family, and if any family has ever visited her in the United States.

Going back to El Salvador is a lot of excitement. Like I cried when I saw my grandma, my uncle, and my cousins because I love them so much. They were all in the airport and I was super excited, I just couldn't speak. I just went to hug everybody, I miss them.

My grandmother is really important for me, she was the woman who raised me. She taught me to be a good person and care about people around me. She taught me to forgive others, even my father who left me as a little girl and never came back to see me or my little sister. Even though we were not always within reach, she gave us love, and for me that was the most important thing. She never let my sister and I go a day without eating. She always worried about us, always looked after us. I like to talk about how I use to drink coffee with my grandma everyday at 3:00 pm with her always watching TV, with her drinking coffee. I'm really excited about her coming to visit here in America, I'm even having dreams of that moment already. I miss her so much, and I can't really wait until she gets here. Two more weeks and I will have my grandma with me again. After two long years of not feeling her warm hugs, I’ll see her again soon.

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LOOKING AHEAD

After describing her past, we asked Fatima to describe her plans for the future.

I want to help immigrant kids and their families overcome the feeling of coming to a new country and leaving family behind. I want to share my own experiences with these individuals and let them know that it's hard to succeed in a country that you do not have any idea about, but if you work hard you will. The U.S is a country of opportunities. That's the reason I'm here. My mother wanted a better education for my sister and I, a better life without having to go day by day worrying if we are going to have money to buy our school supplies or to buy food or to pay rent. I'm volunteering at Marcy Open School, a school with a variety of students. There I have the opportunity to interact with multicultural students and listen to their experiences. I see Latino, Muslim, Asian, American, and African American students there. I like to see their parents come and pick them up. I had the opportunity to talk to one of them about the difficulties people face here. I'm planning to major in family social sciences and maybe a double major in child psychology. I want to work in an organization that helps immigrant families or work in a bilingual elementary school that will help immigrant kids to overcome the difficulty of language and also to overcome the transition of coming to a new country.

FOOTNOTES:

(1) http://www.operationworld.org/country/elsa/owtext.html
(2) Fatima and her little sister in El Salvador

STORY FACILITATORS:

Lindsay Kallman, Sabastian Villarreal, and Martin Waddell