ANA

It will soon be six years since the day I left Colombia to become the cosmopolite I had always dreamed to be. During my first year in the U.S. as an international undergraduate student, I was usually afraid to speak, ashamed of my accent and my “foreignness”. I felt uncomfortable participating in class, especially when the sound of a different accent suddenly attracted a lot of unwanted stares. Somehow, most of the conversations I had involved people asking about my country of origin, and some of them even included a brief South American geography lesson from me. After some failed attempts to connect to local students, I resigned myself to only connect with people who made me feel understood, typically international students going through the same experience.

I found that, like me, a lot of international students would surround themselves with other internationals. I started to notice that most of us tended to auto-segregate and form our own groups. After all, we tend to connect through experiences and similarities. It was among this group of very diverse backgrounds that I started to feel a sense of belonging, like I was where I was supposed to be.

I was pleasantly surprised whenever I was able to have a genuine conversation with a native student. Conversations like these meant that the message I was trying to communicate was for once more important than the way I sounded or my “unusual” choice of words. I noticed, however, that many of these conversations were with students who were born in the U.S. but came from immigrant families. They might had not gone through the same experience, but their loved ones had, which was enough for them to empathize.

I finally understood that most people were just genuinely curious about my origins and that their questions were not intended to make me feel uncomfortable. For many people, I was one of the few interactions they had ever had with someone from a different country. They simply were not aware that their reactions or curiosity were not very encouraging for a person who was trying to fit into a new culture. Over the years, telling others about my country of origin became a normal part of my life. I decided to be more tolerant and to embrace people’s questions.

During the last of my undergraduate years, I participated more in class and educated a few people about the difference between Mexican and Colombian cultures. I was happy to see that after some studying abroad and international studies classes, most of the people who had made me feel like an alien before, were more receptive and accustomed to new international students. It turns out that education really is the cure for ignorance.

Six years later, I am two years away from completing my doctoral degree. I have worked a handful of different jobs, gained a vast amount of knowledge, and overcome many challenges. Still, it is my experience as an immigrant which makes me feel the most invincible. Today I can say that I have never been prouder of who I am and where I come from.