Coming to the United States: Nothing Becomes Something

The native language in Puerto Rico is Spanish. Although some people who are mostly liked to tourism do speak other languages such as English. In school we were taught English. However what we learned was insufficient when moving into an English speaking country. All I had the opportunity to learn in Puerto Rico was the names of the countries, how to be polite, numbers, letters, colors, and lots of grammar school stuff, that we helpful but would not get you to communicate the right way with people.

It was June 30th when I moved into Paterson. I was crying a lot because my parents stayed in Puerto Rico and sent me with my aunt and cousins to this whole new world. Stores were not called “Colmado”, instead they were called “Bodega”. When I asked about the word bodega my cousin told me that it came from the Spanish language. However, in my native country we never called the stores in this way. For us this word was a warehouse, and I am very sure that for other immigrants from other countries this was hard to get used to. The general mix of cultures in New Jersey makes it a lot harder for a person to adapt to the environment. You have to learn their culture and the way they speak Spanish and then you learn English and the culture within it.

On my first day of school I was very ashamed. Although I had a couple of friends on my building, I didn’t know how to communicate with people in English. The first thing that I was asked when I was trying to register for my classes was: Do you speak English? And I replied “yes, sure”. After that a bunch of questions came out of the counselor’s mouth and I was not able to understand all of them. Whatever I understood I gave her an answer for. But for everything else I felt very ashamed. I eagerly...

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... after I gave birth and strived for my best. It was not easy to do but I wanted to make my mother proud. I also wanted to give a bright future to my babies, and this is what I did. I graduated as the eleventh of my class and the class had two hundred and fifty seniors. I was given a seventy thousand dollar scholarship that I could not enjoy because the University was in South Carolina and I had to take care of my babies. So I took a scholarship that was given to me by Ramapo College and went there for the summer and the fall. On April I transferred to Berkeley because I had difficulties with the transportation to Ramapo. My only option in Ramapo was to dorm and I couldn’t live without taking care of my beautiful twins. So I came to Berkeley College and am a little behind but will do my best to make my parents proud again and provide my babies with a better future.