Ramiro A. Hernandez
Fall 2022
“I think there’s this big misconception about migration in that it is voluntary. My migration was not a voluntary act. It’s not a beautiful journey. It was forceful. My body has taken in that trauma, and to this day, I can’t sleep through the night without waking up.”
The sound of a Mexican helicopter fills the air. The pickup truck swerves and heads to a nearby garage, waiting for the sound to fade before continuing on its way to the Rio Grande River. Suddenly, armed men stop the truck.
“There’s an extra. Someone has to get off!”
Giselle looks at her mom, praying they don’t look their way. Anxious murmuring, and then they are all given floating devices.
These are Giselle’s first memories of the U.S. — but it was not her first time entering the country.
“I was born in San Pedro Sula, in Honduras, but I came to the U.S. illegally when I was three.
We went back to Honduras when I was six, and then my mom made the decision for us to move back to the United States in June 2014.”
When Giselle was 12 years old, her mother’s deli business was being extorted: a quota in exchange for safety and protection.
“Honduras is a really small, violent country. My mom is a single mom, and so it’s me and my older brother at the time, and she’s taking care of us both.
I just remember my mom one day mentioning that we would be moving to the U.S. I didn’t really know what to think. I had only heard good things — everyone dreamed about moving there.”
The weeks that followed after crossing the river showed another reality, though.
“It didn’t even take 5 minutes [after getting into the river] when we had seen another helicopter, a U.S. one this time. Border patrol came to where we were and picked us up, but we wanted to be taken in by border patrol.
The group, mind you, is all children and moms or under-aged kids who are traveling by themselves. In this time that we were coming, you wanted to be either a parent with a child or a child, cause it was known that if you were a minor, they would let you go.”
What the group did not expect was to be imprisoned.
“We were taken to a detention center, is what they call them. It’s basically a prison. We were there for roughly a week. There were different cells, and my mom was put with all the other adult women.
I was separated from my mom and put with the younger girls. There also were no beds, it’s just completely concrete, and then there’s a toilet and that’s it, nothing else.”
For Giselle, it was hard to keep track of time without windows and sunlight.
“I only knew what time of the day it was by the food that they gave us. In the morning, it was this nasty breakfast burrito. Then at lunch it was another burrito, but this time it was a lunch burrito, and then at dinner it was some cold sandwich.”
More unbearable than the food, though, was the temperature inside the detention center.
“They [the detention centers] are referred to as hieleras (coolers). They blast the A/C 24/7 and don’t give you blankets, only these thin sheets of like aluminum… and so, yeah, not the happiest time.
Upon their release from the detention center, Giselle and her mom traveled to New York to live with Giselle’s biological dad, where the middle school she first attended held her back a year.
“Because of the English, I guess, they just put me in seventh grade again. Fortunately at that first school there were a lot of ESL and bilingual classes. Most of my teachers also spoke to us in Spanish, so it wasn’t a drastic change.”
Giselle moved schools several times after that.
At one point, she was one of three ESL students in the entire school district, forced to learn English or fail her classes due to a lack of language resources.
She eventually ended up in Connecticut, where she graduated from high school.
“I never envisioned myself going to like, university or college. I was just a kid.
But when I got to high school, I saw a lot of talk about college and people going to college, and I was like oh shit, that means I have to go too, because everybody’s going.”
The college application process forced Giselle to grapple with what it meant to be undocumented in the United States.
“That’s when I started to really notice, because there were certain things I couldn’t apply to because of my status, and then when I actually applied, a lot of these colleges would think of me as an international student, which I’m not.”
These burdens were on top of other struggles Giselle faced as a first-generation, low-income student.
“I had no idea what college meant, how to navigate the process, there’s a lot of shit you need to learn to do: how to read your parents taxes, you have to write essays, you have to do all these extra curricular activities and other things.”
Giselle found the guidance she needed in the Matthew Gaffney Foundation, an organization that helps low-income students have a successful college experience. Even then, her journey to college was anything but easy.
“The foundation really wanted me to apply to Ivies, because apparently they love their undocumented students and they have like, the money for them. But my grades weren’t good enough. I just felt cheated out of life in a way, because why do I have to work 10 times harder to go to a decent school?”
Giselle was rejected from every college she applied to except the University of Connecticut. After applying to transfer for two years in a row, Giselle finally ended up here, at Swarthmore College.
“I think since I’ve gotten to Swat, I have had the opportunity to really explore what it means to be undocumented, what migrating does to a person.
There’s been many instances where I’ve been triggered by something that I didn’t even know was there, but your body’s telling you like, we feel this way because of what we went through in the past.”
These triggers often affect her capacity to engage in classroom discussions.
“This past semester, I took [Borders and Migration], and we were watching a documentary about different borders and what they mean.
There was a specific scene… seeing people cross the river made me feel something, it triggered me, and I felt overwhelmed. I had to put my head down because I felt myself about to cry.
Looking back, it’s like, I did that, you know, I was so young and in the moment obviously you don’t realize what’s going on, but when you look back, when you’re much older, you have all this knowledge, right? It affects you differently. When I saw that scene of people crossing the river, it brought deja vu.”
“I also really like what we were discussing in the class, but I couldn’t help but feel some type of way, because we’re discussing all these subjects, but that was my reality, you know. I’ve lived through it. It’s weird to sit there and listen to people talk and try to make sense of something you live. A part of me was reserved during class, because I don’t want people to think that I was making it all about myself.”
Giselle also faces obstacles outside of the classroom. Despite being a “Sanctuary” campus, Undocumented students at Swarthmore are unable to work any campus jobs, and are often unable to pursue opportunities that other students have.
“There’s days when I’m like fuck, I wish I was documented, you know. Most people migrate cause it’s, you know, a survival method. Because there’s nothing beautiful about migration, may I say. There is so much that goes unnoticed.”
Through all of this, Giselle has found support in the community of people around her.
“I think the biggest person that’s helped me is Cesar, my boyfriend.
He’s a year older than me, so he was doing the college process before I was.
Learning from him, you know, he was undocumented and recently got his green card haha.
I think he’s really the person I go to, my best friend… he supports me even when I don’t know how to support myself.
I’ve also met so many wonderful people here. I don’t know what it is, but ever since I met you [Ram], I feel so comfortable sharing so much about myself.
I’m really grateful that you have taught me a lot about listening to my body and allowing myself to feel, and to let myself know that it’s ok to not be 24/7 on your grind because your mental health is important too…
… and I think that has a lot to do with navigating what it means to be undocumented.
There’s so many identities that I probably wouldn’t have gotten the chance to explore if I hadn’t come to Swat and met people like you. You all feel like a warm blanket.”
Navigating the physical distance between home and Swarthmore, though, can be challenging — especially for students from immigrant backgrounds.
“There’s a bitter-sweet thing about going to college, being first-gen…
… you get to experience things, and you feel sort of guilt for not being able to share those experiences with your people, especially my mom.
She was a single mom, tried to go to college but it didn’t work…
… I had been working so hard to get into a good college, and so when I finally got in and came to visit, I sent her pictures, and she sent me this voice message crying telling me ‘I’m so proud of you, all of your hard work is paying off, there were times that it didn’t seem like it was going to but you make me really proud.’
I want her to feel proud, give back to her everything she’s sacrificed for me to get here. She’s my best friend.”
This distance also puts a strain on relationships with family back home in Honduras.
“You know, it doesn’t seem like a lot when you first move, the distance.
I would try to stay in touch [with my brother], but we don’t talk every day.
The fact that he’s in a different country disconnects me from him… we’re totally different people now. I don’t know this version of him, and he doesn’t know this version of myself.”
When asked if the United States was a welcoming country to immigrants, Giselle was critical.
“You can frame it however you want. At the end of the day, your actions speak louder than words. You can work for us, but we won’t give you a green card in exchange, though. There’s so much prejudice against immigrants, which is a little funny ‘cause we’re on stolen land.”
Giselle’s decades of memories remain scattered between Honduras, the multiple places she’s lived in within the U.S., and Swarthmore, but her message to her younger self remains clear.
“I think I would just let myself be a kid, you know… it’s ok that you want to play with toys. I would tell myself to hold myself with grace, that things will get better even if it doesn’t seem that way, just let myself be a kid because I never really had the chance to.”
To others, she encourages them to re-think how they define migration.
“I think there’s this big misconception about migration in that it is voluntary.
My migration was not a voluntary act.
It’s not a beautiful journey.
It was forceful.
My body has taken in that trauma, and to this day, I can’t sleep through the night without waking up.”