Hello everyone, or no one, we'll see how this goes...
Ever since I could remember I've had an affinity for the written word. I'm not sure how much was nature or nurture but everyone in my family is an avid reader and being the youngest, my relationship with books was inevitable.
Like many immigrants to the U.S., my parents came in search of better opportunities than the ones they had in their country of origin. Both were born in Mexico: my father in Mexico City and my mother in the state of Zacatecas. Both were middle children in large working class families and had to sacrifice quite a bit (their individual stories may be the subject of a future post). They met in Los Angeles, California and within three months were married. My sister was born a year later and I followed six years after almost to the day.
In a manifestation of true wisdom my parents acknowledged the adversities my sister and I were to confront as children of immigrants from an unwelcome country with few economic and social resources. We were taught to value the pursuit of knowledge above all else. Instead of vegging out in front of the television on the weekends, we became experts of all the museums in Los Angeles and surrounding counties. To our parents, school did not provide us with enough homework so they gave us more. While our peers were learning addition and subtraction, my father was testing our knowledge of multiplication with surprise pop quizzes at the dinner table. Our parents had us choose 5 words from the dictionary that we had to define, rewrite, use in a sentence and construct a paragraph with... weekly. When my father saw that I wasn't up to par with my Spanish he added 30 minutes every other day of reading aloud to him of a book of his choosing so I could work on my pronunciation and comprehension.
Our parents understood that in order to be seen as 'American' or 'One of us' we had to surpass all expectations in order to avoid being seen as 'other' even though we are born in the U.S. We never looked upon our systemic handicap as a crutch rather, we felt empowered by it. We never understood what it was liked to be bullied by our circumstances because we never saw ourselves as victims. Today, my sister and I both speak four languages. We have traveled extensively and lived lives our parents could barely even dream of. We have since spread our wings and found homes of our own filled with even more books than the ones our parents gave to us.
We are their success, their legacy.
So here I stand, the product of a journey across time, borders, languages and generations. Thanks to my parents, I write.
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