WELCOME TO L.A.

After a long trip where I thought we might die, a lot of luck, and a blessing from the Universe, my mother and I arrived illegally in the United States of America. I was eight years old and didn’t know how to speak English, except for a few words that I learned at school in Mexico. We first arrived in San Diego, California. My mother insisted that she knew someone there, and that this person could help us. She tried to contact him, but he never replied. We waited three more days in San Diego, waiting for him to answer the phone, but he never did. So my mother took the decision to go to Los Angeles. I was somehow excited. At the first moment, I felt like it was my place to be.

The first weeks in L.A. were pretty hard. We didn’t have an apartment, so we were staying at a cheap hotel. But the money she had was getting less and less, we were soon running out of money, and she still did not find a job. We might eat once a day, twice if we were lucky enough, and I am not talking about proper meals, but cheap instant food. The wonderful thing about L.A. is that half of the population speak Spanish, so it was possible for us to survive. She went asking for a job in every restaurant where she heard someone speaking Spanish. Within a short time, she found a job as a waitress in a Puerto Rican restaurant, and she also convinced the owners to allow me to be in the kitchen helping them with whatever was required. I hated every single minute that I was in that kitchen, it was dirty, stinky, hot, and I was being exploited by everyone, with no salary and eight years old. My mother on her side was happy and thankful because she had an eye on me, and didn’t have to pay someone to take care of me.

When things stabilized after a few months, I started to go to school. At first, all I was doing was learning English, but eventually I got incorporated into the regular classes, with all the kids. I was pretty excited about the idea of making new friends, starting a new life, and not having to be the whole day in that kitchen. I came to school with huge excitement. But I got to know how cruel children can be. It didn’t take that long, until they started to make jokes about my accent, my wrong pronunciation of English, my social status. Even though I tried really hard to make friends at school, I spent most of my childhood alone, with no friends, being a freak that none wanted to be around. It broke my heart for sure, and since that moment I felt like something inside of me was broken. Bullying is one of the hardest trauma that a child can experience. It breaks your soul and destroys you emotionally and mentally. I remember myself coming back home every day, asking myself “what am I doing wrong?”, “are they going to like me tomorrow”, a fact that never happened.

At school, I got to choose two extracurricular activities. Luckily, my mother had no intervention in this. So guess what? Yes! I chose dancing, and I was part of the music band. It was fantastic, those moments were highlights that helped me to survive and to be able to experience some happiness in the middle of the chaos I was going through. Whenever I was listening to music and dancing, I felt like I was out of the world, and I was possessed by a divine energy that made me forget everything.