I was born on a balmy March day, in my native land of Mexico, a place today I only reminisce from pictures and whatever I happen to eavesdrop from mi familia. Mexico was always denoted as a place of broken dreams and corruption, experiences that Mamá wanted to assure Hermana and I never had to encounter. When I was only three, Mamá felt the need to give us a better future, one free of a drunken machismo father and the constant reminder of our poverty-stricken lives. She came to a conclusion that we would immigrate to el país de los sueños, the United States. Little did I know that one day, before my eyes, I would be on a one-way flight from the only place I had fraternized with. Naïve of the future, the fears and challenges I would face based on my unique identities, my intersectionality would ultimately lead me to going beyond the confined lines of being labeled as an undocumented burden. My remarkable struggles would point me in a justifiable direction of opting into a college education.
Intersectionality Limitations
As I grew older, I noticed how being a
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At 14, it was strange to find out that I couldn’t travel out of the country like my cousins; and at 15 was the first time I heard someone refer to me as an illegal alien. Illegal alien. I repeat those words in my head, over and over again. As I look at my reflection in the mirror, the only pigment I see is brown; brown hair, brown eyes, brown skin. A person of color. I felt “inferior in a white world, alien and ashamed, I longed for another place to live, outside of society" (Baca 2001, pg.4). It was probably the first time I hated being myself and became negligent of my mother’s struggles. Shame washed over me as I cried because my skin was not white, because in a land of free I felt imprisoned with fear, because I was me, a brown skinned