Personal Narrative: Immigrants

The night when my family fled Argentina for a new life, the sky was dark and the breeze was crisp. I still recall the smooth, salty air that swam through the tangles of my un-brushed hair as we sped off to Ezeiza International Airport in my quiet reverie. My father was young, and had not yet descended into an insanity that would come to consume my life. My mother on the other hand, was aged with a profound sadness and riddled with an eccentric apprehension of a foreign land. We arrived at the airport with spared time and waited anxiously to aboard our flight. I glanced at my mother and watched my baby brother suckle her breast. "Mama, adonde vamos?" Mama, where are we going? I asked. "Vamos a un lugar mejor de aqui." We're going to a place that’s better than here. Finally, our time had come to board the plane. Looking back one last time, my father knelt down on the floor and bid farewell to our motherland with a kiss, right there in the middle of the airport. It was a seal on our former life and it marked a march into the unknown.

The reasons as to why immigrants aspire come to the United States vary greatly, as “some are drawn by a promising labor market”, others are enticed by
Upon my debarkation in the United States, I had the window seat and I awoke to the scene of our plane landing in JFK Airport. My mother and I walked off the plane and over towards a currency exchange booth to trade in our paltry of pesos for American dollars. As a young girl I did not quite yet understand why she suddenly appeared sickly while tucking away a twenty and four singles into her bra. It wasn't until years later when I came to the realization that she was truly exchanging her life for my own ambiguous future and education at that booth. We met up with my father and younger brother in the parking lot and began our walk, our march into the foggy country that awaited