My family's sacrifice

 

Hello readers! I hope that all of you had a great January and that you guys are doing well!

This week we discussed the article “The Cost of Getting Ahead” (Smith, et al.) and the article was about research conducted on Mexican families that moved to the United States. It went into detail about the sacrifices that the families had to make and the consequences of those sacrifices. As I was reading the article I could not stop thinking about my family and I went through the same situation.

In the article the families moved out of necessity or to give their children a better future. My family moved to the united states for safety reasons. Back in Mexico we were doing well and as we were progressing people began to get upset and started to treat us differently. We started to get threats telling us to shut down our store and if we did not do so there would-be severe consequences. My family contacted the authorities, but the police could not do anything because there was not enough to determine who sent out the threats. My parents kept going with the business and continued to improve it as well. However, everything changed one night; in the middle of the night, we were all asleep, but we were woken up from the house shaking unexpectedly. My parents were really confused, and it was not till the next morning that we found out that our house had been shot up.

My parents made the decision to move to the united states. Like the article, my family left extended family behind, our jobs, our home, we left everything and needed to start from scratch. We had a hard time adjusting and starting a new life. My parents do not have the same opportunities as they did back in Mexico. My parents gave up their successful life in Mexico for the safety of my siblings and I. According to the article the language barrier was one of the significant barriers that people need to work through after immigrating to a new country. I agree with the article, I have seen it in my family and with other families how language is a huge struggle. It not only limits their opportunities, but it makes it hard for people to get around; for example, they might have a hard time at the doctor’s office, at the grocery store and with other basic things since they might not be able to read signs.

Another struggle that my family and the families in the article went through was leaving family behind and losing connection to them. In the article it mentioned that family conflicts start to arise such as resentment. Resentment can happen when extended family sees the family in the states is doing better financially. *This is a little hard for me to explain so I will try my best to explain without making this too wordy. * Our family has gone through this, some of our extended families have cut off contact with us because they thought that we had forgotten about them. They thought that we did not want to do anything with them because we were advancing in life and “leaving” them behind. This caused resentment which led to them not contacting us anymore and only seek us when they need help financially. Our family is hurt from this because they do not take a second to understand all the struggles that we had to go through.

At the end of the day, us coming over to the US for our safety has affected us severely in the aspect that we had to leave so much behind. The way that I see it is… everything is a sacrifice. For a better we may need to sacrifice some opportunities, but I think you guys get the gist of it.