This past Thursday, October 1st, Wagner College held a seminar titled “Transnational Families: Staten Island and San Jeronimo de Puebla.” This was a touching event in which families shared their emotionally moving stories of being reunited with each other after ten, fifteen, or even twenty years of being apart. This project allows the family members of the families left in Mexico to come to America for a week or more to be reunited with the family for a short period of time. The family members coming from Mexico had to learn a dance in order to come to the United States and the family members here in America worked hard for a year, attending meetings, in order to make the reunification possible.
The first speaker spoke about how the world now is not the way it should be and that nothing can be changed by just building giant walls between two countries. He emphasized that young people are the ones that must make the change in the world. Following his beautiful words, another family was able to tell their story of being reunited. A mom and daughter gave a beautiful statement on what it was like to be away from each other for such a long time and how great it felt to be reunited. When the mom came to America she left her three daughters behind (ages 4, 5, and 8) in Mexico and tried to do everything to be able to make them happy even though she was so far away. She talked about how difficult it was to come to somewhere where she did not know the language and did not know anyone here. Following her words, her daughter spoke about how wonderful it was to see her mom after so many years. Her mom left when she was four years old and now she is nineteen. She continued to say how she was raised by her grandmother and the only relationship she had was through photos and telephone calls. Thanks to her mom coming here she was able to get an education and was able to pay for her college. This would not have been possible if her mom wasn’t working in the United States and although it is very difficult there are some positive outcomes of it.
The rest of these immigrant’s stories are very similar. They all touched my heart in a special way because I realized how hard it must be for these people to be able to stay in the United States without having their families around.
The families that were reunited through the “Nani Migrante” project.
Personally this event touched my heart because at the age of 19, my mom left her entire family in Poland in order to come to America to work and create a life here for herself. After a long twelve years she was finally able to be reunited with her family. The stories my sisters and I have heard from her are almost identical to those told by these Mexican families on Thursday evening. They all came here not knowing the language, worked hard in order to support their families back home but most importantly they left the people they loved the most back in their home countries. This inspires me because I know how much dedication and work my mom put in into being who she is today. She came with nothing many years back and now has created something of herself. This was only possible through the endless hard work she put in and the mindset she had of achieving her dreams. I think we can all learn from immigrants today because most of them come not knowing anyone in the United States and not knowing the language but through believing in themselves their dreams become a reality in this beautiful country.