Lab Manager at Immigration Initiative at Harvard
Has a MA in international political economy from King's College London as a Chevening Scholar and worked as an educator for over seven years. She is passionate about civics and early childhood education.
Nancy Palencia Ramirez

Sheila’s Moving Story Recap

Sheila playing the violin

Born and raised in Chicago, Sheila is a super-achiever who exemplifies many themes of being the child of immigrants growing up in a vibrant diverse immigrant community.  

She speaks to the importance of community resilience and being “surrounded by people like you” who are engaged in activities and “having fun together.” The Catholic Church, community pageants, and her involvement with the orchestra give her a sense of belonging and purpose even though sometimes she feels “too Mexican for Americans and too American for Mexicans.”

Her parents cross with coyotes as youths and though active participants in their community for a quarter century are never able to regularize their status. Their motivation to cross the border was to break their family’s “cycle of poverty” and to provide their children the opportunity for good educations—a dream fulfilled through Sheila’s educational trajectory through John Hopkins as an undergraduate and the Harvard Graduate School of Education for a Master’s degree in Educational Leadership. Consistent with findings revealed in the new ground-breaking book Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success by economists Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan (based on longitudinal linked big data examining the pathways of immigrants over the last century and a half) while the first generation may struggle, the second generation reaps the benefits.

Sheila speaks to her gratitude for her parent’s sacrifices and the ways in which they point her to jobs that are not like theirs entailing hard physical labor. At a young age, she thinks deeply about how to advance her life and lands early on a passion for the violin. Through a mixture of a bit of luck in connecting with a community-based music organization and great persistence and drive on her part, the “violin changes [her] life.”  Though her parents are not able to guide her through the college access pathway, their dreams and faith in her provide wind in her sails. She has the good fortune to find mentors and educators who also support her along the way, and she is admitted to and graduates from the prestigious John Hopkins Peabody Conservatory.

Though she does not find herself represented amongst her peers and sometimes feels a bit of an aesthetic dissonance in the choices of the music world in which she finds herself, she also finds her calling—to bridge the worlds of music and higher education to become more culturally responsive in such a way as to become a transformative opportunity for Black and Brown students like herself.

As I listened to Sheila’s interview, I was particularly reminded of Marjorie Faulstich Orellana’s and her colleagues’ important work on immigrant children’s language and cultural brokering. That work has shown the critical skill and mindsets that children of immigrants learn as they translate for their parents. At a young age, “as the first to learn” English, Sheila (like many immigrant-origin children) takes on the role of translating for their family in important, often high stakes, situations like at the consulate, bank, and for legal processes.  Charged with these responsibilities, she developed extraordinary skills, self-discipline, and a sense of responsibility that have served both her and her family well. She carries this into her sense of life purpose and drives to provide transformative opportunities to others. Her passion and dedication are nothing short of inspiring.

 

Listen to Sheila’s Story here

Lab Manager at Immigration Initiative at Harvard
Has a MA in international political economy from King's College London as a Chevening Scholar and worked as an educator for over seven years. She is passionate about civics and early childhood education.
Nancy Palencia Ramirez

Stephanie’s Moving Story Recap

Stephanie as a child

 

Though Stephanie was born in Mexico, they left when they were two and have no memories of there, as they have never been able to return. On the other hand, they grew up in a community in Southern California with many others from similar backgrounds who supported one another in a variety of ways—indeed, they explicitly say that their strength comes from that community. They exchange emotional, tangible, and informational supports that are invaluable and life-sustaining.

 

It is (as they say) “an open secret” that many others in the community are Undocu (the affectionate term they use to describe members of the undocumented community). While some young people do not realize their situation until mid-adolescence, at milestone moments such as applying for a driver’s license or going to college, Stephanie recognized her family’s and her own precarious situation early in her childhood. They vividly recall a moment in their early elementary years when they were walking with their mother as they pushed a stroller and realized as an ICE vehicle passed that they could be deported at any moment.

 

In their adolescence and in college, they become actively involved in activism to promote change, though they confide, “Activism is exhausting.” Juggling, navigating their own status, helping their family, being a good student, working, being in survival mode, and healing traumas have stretched them thin. During the interview, they lament, “I am too tired to be the change I want to see in the world.” “And I am only 23.”

 

Stephanie also shares insights into how intersecting identities play a role in complexifying their developmental journey. As they say, “I am Brown, Undocu, and queer.” They find the UC Berkeley community a particularly welcoming place to first openly disclose and then explore those intersecting complexities.

 

Despite the challenges of their journey, Stephanie’s friends see them as warm, humorous, and engaging. Their interview sheds light again on how their Undocu status complicates access to resources and imposes precarity and uncertainty on what should be a promising life pathway.

 

Listen to Stephanie’s story Here 

Lab Manager at Immigration Initiative at Harvard
Has a MA in international political economy from King's College London as a Chevening Scholar and worked as an educator for over seven years. She is passionate about civics and early childhood education.
Nancy Palencia Ramirez

Estela’s Moving Story Recap

Estella as a child.

Estela’s moving story is a testimony to and a celebration of multilingualism.

She shares with us her complex and “unique” identity as the daughter of Japanese origin and second-generation immigrant growing up in Brazil. They remind her that her “only inheritance is education,” a message reinforced by observing them peruse higher education at night after long days of physically arduous work.

While she grew up in a Japanese-Brazilian community, as a child, she learned to speak only limited Japanese and now identifies fully as Brazilian. At college age, she pursued a unique opportunity to study abroad in Japan in a program conducted in English. Embarking on this educational, linguistic, and cultural journey, she begins a life-changing course. She describes how language became “an entry point into culture” and a “way to connect to people by understanding their viewpoint and language.” She speaks to her privilege of becoming multilingual through an alchemy of her exposures, “encouraging environments,” and natural curiosity.

She pursues graduate studies to better understand the process of language acquisition, and as she does so, she begins to see how many newly bilingual students experience prejudice and marginalization from both their peers and teachers. This sparks in her a “bright desire” for children to have a positive experience learning a new language and culture as they make their way into a new land. She reminds us of how language is so deeply interconnected in the experience of immigrant children and, in her parting words, reminds learners of new languages to “be brave” and “not be ashamed” as they make inevitable errors that come with the process of learning. Indeed, Estela’s philosophy of “approaching life with a learning heart” is a lovely reminder to us all.

Listen to Estela’s Moving Story here

Lab Manager at Immigration Initiative at Harvard
Has a MA in international political economy from King's College London as a Chevening Scholar and worked as an educator for over seven years. She is passionate about civics and early childhood education.
Nancy Palencia Ramirez

Daishi’s Moving Story Recap

 

Daishi as a child in Japan.

Daishi was born in Japan to a Filipino mother and a Japanese father. As a child of mixed origins, he finds himself bullied in school in the monocultural context of Japan.

His mother’s father, who had moved to the US and become a citizen, offered to help the families move there. When Daishi is six, the family comes on tourist visas, expecting the process to take a few months. However, they discovered that the immigration process in the US had become much more complicated since the grandfather’s entry. The way the country quota system works makes it harder for people from bigger countries with long histories of migration, like the Philippines, to get into the country. After more than a decade, the families’ application is still pending.

Having overstayed their visas, they become undocumented. Daishi discusses some of the hardships and sacrifices his parents endure as a result of their situation, as well as the painful choice they made to self-deport after Daishi established himself at Harvard and received some protection through DACA. He shares the sorrow of not being able to see them or be present for significant occasions like vacations or graduations for more than seven years because neither he nor his parents are able to travel abroad.

Daishi and Bruno discuss their experiences as undocumented students at Harvard. They talk about how they feel afraid and vulnerable when the 45th president is elected because he ran on a platform of being against immigration. They also describe how this mobilized them in their course of civic engagement and change agency.

Many lessons can be taken from this important conversation, including some insights into the current Faustian policy dilemmas. One lesson that jumps out is the significance of community, acceptance, and belonging. When Daishi first arrives as a first grader in Los Angeles, he finds himself in a place where everyone in his school is different and yet is (in his words) “holding hands under the same flag.” The relief of finding a place of potential inclusion is immense. He describes the comfort of finding a community that, “implicitly or explicitly, knows what it means to be an immigrant and is unified and supportive of one another. After the election of Donald Trump, Daishi utilizes his activism and community-building work with Act on a Dream to establish a community of support. As he says, what we wanted was “to know that tangibly and symbolically, the campus cared about us when the country did not.”
Indeed, the right and essential human need of belonging to a community and country is denied to the many deserving people depicted in these Moving Stories.

 

Listen to Daishi’s Moving Story here

Lab Manager at Immigration Initiative at Harvard
Has a MA in international political economy from King's College London as a Chevening Scholar and worked as an educator for over seven years. She is passionate about civics and early childhood education.
Nancy Palencia Ramirez

Bruno’s Moving Story Recap

Listening to Bruno’s story, we gain insight into what initial entry into the new land feels like from a child’s perspective. We hear of missing extended family, downward mobility and living circumstances, the inability to communicate, and so much more. For Bruno, school becomes a refuge. When he starts learning English, he realizes he is a very capable student, in part because he works “20 times harder than everyone else.” Despite the losses and costs, we also hear laughter, the pleasure of finding community, and small moments of joy.

Listen to Bruno’s Moving Story