Jocelyn Vasquez-Tax
Fall 2022
“This place was like the best place. This place was like up top. They had the best technology. It was cleaner. It was way better… like I lived in the Third World. And this was the First World, you know. It was that whole perspective for me at first.”
Samantha Ovalle is now a first-year nursing student at the University of Pennsylvania, but this was not even in her slightest dreams as a child while growing up in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. She was roughly about 6-7 years old when her parents decided it would be best for her and her mother to move to the United States. Their reasoning behind the decision? The American dream.
As an only child, her parents wanted to give her the best opportunities at their disposable. Needless to say, Samantha’s parents saw America as a gateway to a better future like millions of other immigrants view America. For the first few years of her life, Samantha’s family was broken up with her father living in the States alone and her mother living in Guatemala with her.
This was because her father had taken a chance with his future as a teenager and moved to America. He lived in California for years and was able to legalize himself before returning to his home country and creating a family with Samantha’s mother.
Despite their love and commitment for Samantha, it was not ideal for her father to stay in Guatemala.
For years, they kept contact through phone calls and yearly holidays visits but it was not the same. Samantha understood that she had both, a father and mother but didn’t understand the separation.
While prioritizing the importance of family, Sam and her mom left behind all they knew to move to New Jersey with her dad.
“Ohh the expectations. It was like ‘This place was like the best place.’ This place was like up top. They had the best technology. It was cleaner. It was way better… like I lived in the Third World. And this was the First World, you know. It was that whole perspective for me at first”.
Despite all the media coverage on the United States of America, nothing could have prepared Sam for her new life.
Her family established in Trenton, New Jersey, a predominantly People of Color (POC) neighborhood, so integrating into the American school system was fairly easy. Learning English was not a struggle either but her home life was more complex than that.
Her parents did not have anyone to turn to, so they slept at family friends houses’ for some time while trying to stabilize themselves. She was getting to know her biological father for the first time as her parents took turns caring for her while the other was at work.
All of the playful freedom she had in Guatemala was gone. With new kids, new streets, and new customs, Sam had trouble understanding why this country created such a restrictive environment for her as a kid. Facing such large changes in her lifestyle at an early age created blurs in her memory as well as large questioning to why things were the way they are.
“And it’s like damn, like where am I? Where do I stand in the whole like nationality thing… am I Guatemalan? Am I Samantha?”
From her initial arrival, Samantha and her mother have been able to legalize themselves with the help of her father but it continues to be an uphill battle to achieve the American dream. While this country has been kind enough to open doors for her and her family, it has also never let her forget how “different” she is from natural born citizens.
Samantha appreciates the opportunities but also points out how this country has been constructed around the idea of feeling at an endless debt with this country. Sam acknowledges all of her privileges from living in the US as well as the limitations it has caused because to this day, she has yet to feel confident enough to voice who she is. The question of who she is becomes more and more conflicting.
American society has created an ultimatum for her to feel obligated to choose between her birth country or new home. Though she has every legal right to own the hyphen in Guatemalan-American because she doesn’t have much recollection of her life in Guatemala and still feels out of place in America, she jumps back and forth. As Samantha continues to explore her identity and seek comfortability in her own skin, she hopes to set an example for Americans to see her as a bridge of two countries and two cultures.
“I think the whole American dream to me is just like seeking the betterness of what like America provides, and what everybody knows America has… There’ll be a better future here than over there. The whole promise of getting out of poverty.”