For an immigrant child, the meaning of home

In the fall of 2014, as the number of unaccompanied children illegally crossing into the United States surged, there were calls to quickly send them home. I began to think about the idea of home and what it means from the immigrant child perspective. I asked, “If I was sent home when I was a child, where would home be?”

I was born in Monterrey, the seventh in a family of ten children. My three oldest siblings resided with my maternal grandmother in Monterrey, two with my father in the U.S., and the rest, like me, with my mother. During her career as an educator, she was a teacher in several communities in the municipality of Dr. Arroyo, Nuevo Leon in Mexico. In the last place where she taught, we resided in a room adjacent to the school. It lacked electricity, gas, and plumbing. Originally meant to serve as a kitchen and storage space, the small, stark adobe enclosure served as our sleeping quarters, lounging area and dining space. It was a place I recall; but, in retrospect, I am not sure I ever thought about it as being my home.

As a professional, my mother qualified for a travel visa. During the holidays, we would cross the border traveling by Greyhound bus to visit my father, who returned to Texas after the Bracero Program ended. He lived and worked on various ranches in Washington and Austin County.

I have fading memories of snow and a small frame house off Highway 290 near Chapel Hill, Texas where, according to my oldest sibling, the freezing nights numbed our hungry bellies. But during the time we were tourists, the house I remember clearly is the one that was situated on a ranch between Brenham and Welcome. It was an old cow-shed about four-hundred square feet that my father turned into a residential space. Under the rusty corrugated metal roof of this cramp, drafty barn-like structure originated my earliest memories of having a home. It is in this place where I remember, my siblings, parents and I gathered and lived as a family for the first time in my life.

The places where we stayed when we visited my father, and where we lived once my father finalized the legalization of the family, are the only homes I ever had as a child that met the Oxford Dictionary’s definition of home, “The place where one lives… especially as a member of a family.”

That is why when I’m asked about my home, or I hear people talk about home, I only think of Texas.

That is not to say that I disavow the years I spent as a child in rural Nuevo Leon. I know who I am. My indigenous looks are a reminder that I am a mestizo who is a product of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. I have no doubt that my life experience as a child in the political subdivision in the world called Mexico shaped who I am as a human being. Still, I am cognizant of how fortunate my family is to have found a home in Houston, Texas and how privileged I am to be an American citizen.

Every immigrant’s story is different. Still, as we struggled to conceive the appropriate public policy to determine the future of individuals who entered the country as minors and remained in the country illegally, as it is the case for DACA holders, we should keep in mind that, regardless of when our ancestors came to America, they came because they did not have a safe and stable place to raise a family; a place to call home.

In this instance, like me, the only home most young immigrants have ever known, physically, emotionally and spiritually, is the United States of America. And like the ancestors of any American, living anywhere outside the US after arriving on this land would be tantamount to living in the middle of nowhere.

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