Three Latinx writers reflect on their immigration journeys and the meaning of home

A Venezuelan New York poet whose tattoo represents the grief of losing her mother reflects on how it might be weaponized against her, a Mexican American poet and entrepreneur remembers that his mother’s tenacity is woven into his DNA and a Dominican American novelist fully accepts her new country’s permanence — three personal essays that showcase the hopes, hearts, humanity and the meaning of home for Latine immigrants in the U.S.

Orchids in April

I moved back to Caracas in 2017 to be with my mother on her deathbed. Venequian chaos comes in waves. The country was enveloped in one of its biggest (most recent) catastrophes as I held mami’s hand one last time. I spread her ashes in the waters of Mochima, near the Caribbean coastal town where we spent some of my childhood. Her most beloved home. Her final resting place.

Mami hated tattoos; made me promise not to get any. I had already done it a few times behind her back, and she texted me regularly that “I was so beautiful and didn’t need them.” My devastation, however, was so severe that it needed a physical representation; a scar of rage and pain. So, I got a new one, a red flower with a little frowny skull blooming out. A rebellion of its own. How dare you die and leave me here. I named her Ingrid.This year, on the anniversary of her death I, again, craved Caribe. The impossibility of it, however, made me settle for the New York Botanical Garden’s orchid show instead —Venezuela’s national flower.

I found a few compatriots confined to a greenhouse. Orchids — colors vibrant and petals open. Bromelias — prickly and shiny and smooth. Stunted palm trees that belonged elsewhere, a distance too great to name. I cried recognizing my pain in theirs. In the musty air and the dehumanization of being on display.

Against the garden’s rules, I touched them all. Talked to them like my grandma taught me. I felt them listen; wondered if they yearned for a land they wouldn’t embrace. “I’m with you,” I held them. We weren’t meant to be here, them and I. Our roots are still in shock; cut from the earth that nurtured us and the sea that still calls to us. We long for it, like Odiseo for Ithaca. A mirage.

We didn’t choose to be here, but we do choose to survive.We choose to ignore the fear caused by being political pawns to merciless governments —villains to their fearmongering and theater of the absurd.No one wants the tired and the poor.No one wants the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.The Venezuelan humanitarian crisis — the most critical one in the continent’s contemporary history — is but a nuisance to our neighbors. Racism and xenophobia run rampant:We’re loud and ignorant.We’re stealing jobs and husbands.Ingrid now looks at me with apprehension: four points worth under Trump’s Alien Enemy Validation Guide. A list intentionally vague. A written weapon.

An excuse:We’re gang members.We’re ruining nations.Eight points are enough to confirm supposed affiliations with terrorist groups.We are but migrants living in exile, so we get used to it.A resilient kind, not by choice but obligation.We dream of time zones and elders and one roof that loves us all.We dream of serenity after a never-ending storm.We dream of orquídeas and bromelias and the soft Caribbean breeze.We dream of home. — Sofía Pereda

Claiming a Home for Good

During a blistering heat wave last May, I took my two young kids to Applegate Farm, a shop that boasts the best homemade ice cream in our neighborhood of Upper Montclair, New Jersey. As we waited in the long line, my son, Julian, turned to me and asked, “Do you ever think about going back home? To live there for good?”

I found myself at a loss — the words locked inside my throat.When I arrived in the United States from the Dominican Republic at 10 years old, a blast of cold air had welcomed me and my siblings on that frigid February day. We had to be split all over New York City’s Washington Heights neighborhood because no family member had had enough room in their apartment to house all four of us children. Our mother worked 24-hour days to save, and within a few months was finally able to afford an apartment so we could live under one roof. But even after reuniting, there was the ache of missing our father, who had stayed behind in Quisqueya.

During those early months, I’d often longed to go back home, for good.As my children both turned toward me, puzzled at my silence, the last three decades unfurled. From the trip to Saratoga Springs, New York, where I attended college, to the return to New York City and the moment when I proudly held my hand -over my heart at 23 as I became a naturalized U.S. citizen. I’d gone on to gain my master’s degree in creative writing a short while later, bought an apartment while still in my twenties, all that time dreaming, dreaming that someday I’d become a writer.

Next came crushing rejections and heartbreak. It seemed the only reasonable move was to push away childish dreams of publication and focus my attention on that good-good job I had at the insurance company. I worked ceaselessly, got promoted repeatedly until I became an executive.

It was easy enough to forget about publishing a book, then came marriage, homeownership, crossing the George Washington Bridge to make a home in the Garden State with the man I adored. Better still, I’d given birth to the two of them, who in an unexpected turn gave me the courage to quit my career and leap toward that impossible dream that finally did come true. I published my first novel.

Now I am poised to publish a second book this fall. In all my adult years, I had never thought of going back to the Dominican Republic, to live there, for good.

“Mom?” Julian and Penelope nudged me for a response in unison. I turned away from them so they wouldn’t see how affected I was by that question.

My eyes stung, the tears ready to spill.“No, honey,” I said. “This is my home. I don’t ever think about going anywhere else.” — Cleyvis Natera

The Trellis and the Plant

Being an immigrant today means walking a fault line: You’re too foreign when you arrive, too successful when you adapt and too dangerous when you thrive. In Los Angeles, my hometown, protests rage as ICE raids intensify — yet we’re still questioned for existing between survival and success.And let’s be honest: Immigration has always been about race. White immigrants who can blend in are not being deported. It’s the brown ones, the ones who look different, who carry the burden of illegality.We have always lived in a Trump era: 1950s, Operation Wetback; 1970s, La Migra raids; 1990s, Proposition 187 turning teachers and nurses into immigration enforcers. Fear has always been policy. Trump just made it louder.

I live on these fault lines. I tell a white novelist friend I’m writing about my immigrant journey. He interrupts: “Do readers want a real immigrant or a wealthy entrepreneur immigrant? According to him, I don’t count. I’m not poor. I’m not desperate. I’m not a “real” immigrant.

The Left needs immigrants to be victims so they can save us. The Right needs us to be threats so they can exclude us. My success — scholarships, businesses, properties — disrupts both narratives. I don’t fit the script. For that, I’m dismissed.

Apparently, the immigrant is only visible when bowed by suffering, never when standing on the shoulders of sacrifice. If you succeed, you stop being an immigrant and start becoming a problem: too visible, too comfortable, too close.

In 1971, my mother crossed the border with no English, no papers, no money and a second-grade education. Ten mouths to feed. When no one would hire her, she walked into a sewing sweatshop and said, “I’ll work for free for a month.” The owner, smelling free labor, agreed. She signed.

I was five. I watched her stretch every dollar. One day she surprised us with a Disneyland trip. Trying to help, I told her, “I don’t want to go.” She looked at me, surprised: “You’re the only boy who doesn’t want to see Mickey Mouse.”I learned sacrifice fast. I wore shoes until the soles slapped like fly swatters. I studied until 3 a.m. “burning your eyelashes,” she called it. Hard to complain when your hero woke at 4 a.m. to catch a bus to her 10-hour shift.

At private school, kids called me spic and wetback. I rode the bus four hours a day from East L.A. to North Hollywood, but still people tell me my sacrifice doesn’t count.

This year, I won a literary prize. A white poet told me, “You only won because you’re queer and Mexican.” Another friend echoed, “You had an advantage.”

What advantage? Their parents were U.S. citizens, college graduates, homeowners. Mine was a woman who sewed piecework for pennies and refused to let me fail.

Maybe that was an advantage.She was the trellis. I’m the plant. She rooted herself in hard soil and stood tall, so I could climb, twist, reach light. — José Enrique Medina