A little girl was born 23 days before the expected date that the doctors had told her mom. She couldn’t be born in a hospital because her family lived in a village and the hospital was in the city, 6 hours away driving. So her mother had to give birth at home when she was 17 years old. Her father left her mom and her when she was six months old and they didn’t receive his support until later. It was just she, her mother, and her grandfather. Her mother was unemployed back then, it was hard to get a job at that age, and her grandfather had his cows, from which he made some money by selling the milk they produced, but he usually spent it on alcohol (getting drunk) every weekend. A few months later, her mother started working every day, but she couldn’t cover the expenses for food, housing, and other necessities, so we never had a house to stay, guaranteed clothing, or food.

 She attended school from an early age, at 4 years old,  since her mother needed time to work. She proved to be very intelligent and learned to read and write at 5 years old. She excelled academically among her peers. She always watched how her mother worked hard, so since she was little, she committed to always be disciplined in order not to cause her mother more stress. Unfortunately, at the age of 6, she had to drop out of school because there wasn’t enough money for the uniform, lunch, and materials. So she started selling bags of spices on the streets to make more money and help my mother.

 At the age of 8, her father got back with her mother and things changed but didn’t entirely improve. They moved to the city. Her father bought a small house with one room, a bathroom, and a small kitchen. Her mother started a really small grocery store which it calls”Pulperia ” in her country. A short time later, she returned to school. She didn’t have enough money, so she had to go to the school for the lower-class people in the city. The Education in her country is very bad for schools attended by people from a lower class. She never had the opportunity to learn a different language or learn more than just add, subtract, or read.

At the age of 10, her mother became pregnant. When she was giving birth to her brother, the doctors left half of the placenta inside of her mother, which caused her mother to have internal bleeding and she was very ill in the hospital for a long time. Her family got too deep in debt, so the little girl had to drop out of school and go back to work on the streets selling spices, leaving her education behind.

At the age of 12, her parents went further into debt to come to the United States. Along the way, her family suffered a lot; sometimes they went days without eating, long walks, and sleeping on the streets. When they arrived in Mexico, The Cartel kidnapped the whole family and the group of people they were with. In exchange for the coyote to pay them an amount of money. They remained locked up for four days with a small amount of food and men pointing weapons at them in case they tried to do something. Those four days were like a living hell on Earth.  When they were released, it took them another week to cross the river. They went to immigration and then we were sent here to their destination to live a new and better life.

She and her little brother could go to school without any obstacles, her parents were able to get a house and well-paying jobs which were not easy due to the difficulty of not speaking the main language of the country, they fought and worked hard for more than 5 years so that the little girl whos now a teenager and her little brother had legal immigration status, having residency and the opportunity to study and go to college. Her parents just made one of the family’s dreams to open a restaurant and have their own business making all they went through worth it.