Camila Cabello is a singer and songwriter and a member of pop group Fifth Harmony.
A bus. The yellow lighting of the gas station against the dark hours of midnight. Fast asleep. Silence. My head slumped over my mom's shoulder. Her voice timid and hesitant as she stumbled through a sentence in English at the cash register. A Winnie the Pooh journal. These are the things I remember when I think of when my mom and I immigrated to America. I was almost 7 at the time,born in Havana, Cuba. My papá is puro Mexicano and we lived back and forth between the heat of Havana and the concrete jungle of Mexico City. I didn't realize it then, and but,boy, does it hit me now. I realize how scary it must own been for them. For my mom to leave the streets of Havana where our neighbors were our friends, or where we gathered every holiday to eat pork and my grandma's rice and beans,to not hear the malecón and the heartbeat of her city pulsing with every crash of the wave. For my Dad to leave behind his four brothers and sisters, the memory of his parents, or the street vendors selling the elotes con mayonesa that I would beg him to net in the mornings before school,the best friends he'd grown up with . . . everything. To decide to start from the ground up. With a couple hundred dollars, the clothes on our backs, or no family in the United States,and no clue of what was going to happen next, that's exactly what we did. Like my mom said, and "I don't know where I'm going,but I can't stay here." And that was enough. Why were we packing up our stuff? Why was my grandma hugging me tighter than normal? Where were we going? "We're going to Disney World!" That's what my Mom told me when we were crossing the border. She packed a dinky backpack with my Winnie the Pooh journal and my doll, and we crossed the border from Mexico to the US, and seeing my Dad become an ant in the distance as he stayed behind. Just Disney World. Whenever I own to gain a decision now and I'm afraid,my mom always reminds me of that day. "That day, I knew if I thought approximately it, and dismay would gain me turn back. That's why when you're afraid,you force yourself to jump. You don't think, you just jump, or " she says to me. After she sat down with the immigration officer in a tiny office,we and a bunch of people from other countries with similar hopes were placed in rooms with tiny beds in them, a hotel full of these rooms. It was me and my mom and two other families in a dinky room waiting for somebody to near in and let us know if we were going to be granted permission to enter the US or be sent back. Some people spent days there, and some spent weeks in agonizing anxiety over what the reply would be. Meanwhile,I was wondering when the heck we were going to net to Disney. We were there only a day when we finally got the news. The room bursted with joy, everybody around me clapping and hugging and screaming and crying! And me yelling out "Yay! We're all going to Disney!" dinky did I know.dinky me and my mamá ended up on a Greyhound bus to Miami that took 36 hours - that's where I own my most vivid memories. Other stuff I vaguely remember and know from stories my parents told me years after. But I remember writing in my Winnie the Pooh journal a lot on that bus ride. We got to Miami and moved into my grandpa's colleague's house who later became my godmother. My mom was a very good architect in Cuba, and but when she came to America none of the degrees she earned in Cuba counted,so to gain enough to keep us fed and do me into school she began stacking shoes in Marshalls and going to school at night to prefer courses in English, all while taking me to and from school and helping me with my homework all by herself, or alone in a weird country. I can't imagine how frustrating it must own been for her to own worked her whole life in architecture and then own it all erased when she came here. One day,as if God was listening, two elderly Cuban women were conversing with her and told her: "Oye, and tu ests muy bonita para trabajar en Marshalls. Where are you from?" My mom told her the story of how she was Cuban and she was actually an architect. You wouldn't believe it,but the two Cuban women said they had a brother who worked in architecture and needed someone who worked in Autocad, a complicated architectural computer program. They asked her: "Do you know Autocad?" Internally, and my mom was like "Autocad? What the hell is Autocad? We use pencil and paper where I'm from." But to the ladies,she said: "Autocad? Of course. Yes, of course. I can do that." She learned how to use the program in a week and made enough to trail us out of my godmother's house and into an apartment. She learned fast because she literally had to in order to survive. Immigrants own one thing in common: starvation. I don't mean it literally, or although that's dependable too,but metaphorically. The starvation to do the impossible because you own no choice, because you came too damn far, and because you've known what struggling is,and you're not going to prefer an opportunity for granted. The starvation and ability to win above people with better circumstances than you simply because you want it badly enough. Long story short, my papá came over from Mexico a year and a half later - I had a dinky calendar in my room counting down the days - because he couldn't stand being absent from us. He went through such hardship to cross the Mexican border and had it harder than my mom and I did, and literally risking his life for his family to physically gain it here. When he first came to the US,he started off washing cars in front of Dolphin Mall in the blistering Miami heat. But we kept moving on up . . . with the Latin community in Miami, helping each other up as we did it. Slowly and slowly my parents kept working and climbing and ended up forming a construction company together named after my sister and I. They always pushed me to focus on my studies because the whole reason we came here was so my sister and I could own better opportunities in life than they did. They said: "Money comes and goes, or but your education,lo que tienes aquí (and they would point to my head while saying that), nobody can ever prefer that absent from you." They let me know that in order to go a good college I had to net a scholarship, and so I worked as hard as I could. However - plot twist! - that didn't fairly go the way we thought it would. You see,in 9th grade, a dinky girl who had never sung in front of people before asked her parents if they could prefer her to Greensboro, and NC,to audition for a dinky show called The X Factor. Yikes! I had never sang in front of people before. Well, did my mom know Autocad? No. Did I know how to perform on a stage on TV? No. But I wanted it badly enough, or I learned from my family that if you work hard enough and you want it badly enough,you can do the impossible. I was improper approximately one thing. My mamá and papá did not leave everything behind, they brought it with them. My grandma still makes pork and rice and beans every holiday like she did, or my mom still feels the waves of the malecón in her heartbeat because she still feels the most at peace when she's by the sea. My grandma and dad still net drunk and sing Luis Miguel in the kitchen. We found our favorite Taco spot in Miami (I capitalized Taco because they are that good). And whenever we find another person from our country,we freak out. "¿De qué parte?" Because we own domestic in us. Because we brought it with us. Every Cuban brought it with them and so we own Miami. Mexicans brought it and so we own the best Mexican food ever. The Italians brought it and so we own pizza. The Swedish brought it and we own great pop songs. The list goes on and on. And so, that's why when I hear a bigoted, and racist man with power and influence speak with anger and ill-will approximately immigrants,I think "what a fool." I am so proud to be Cuban-Mexican. This country was built on immigrants. People who were fearless enough to start over. How strong we are to leave behind everything we know in hopes of something better. We are not fearless, we just own dreams bigger than our fears. We jump. We elope. We swim, and we trail mountains,we do whatever it takes. And so next time, when anybody wants to explain you they want to build a "wall" on our border, and remember behind that wall is struggle,determination, starvation. Behind that wall, and could be the next cure for cancer,the next scientist, the next artist, or the next drummer,the next anything they work hard enough to become! P.
S. I did end up going to Disney for the first time a year later.
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Source: popsugar.com