The borderlands are in-between spaces where contradictions merge and where multiple identities can coexist. It is a place of anger, trauma, and wounds as well as a space of new possibilities.
Dr. Stephanie Rivera Berruz
I grew up seeing my parents love in the most complicated and persistent way. As a daughter of immigrants, I soon realized how much colonialism, patriarchy, migration, and trauma had impacted their bodies. Both of my parents arrived from distant and distinct lands culturally and linguistically. Mami spoke in a direct and sharp way, with quick wit and so much Honduran allegory than papi could ever keep up with. Papi was a lone wolf, adaptable to surviving the U.S. as a Mexican immigrant and true man of the pueblo. In other words, he was humble, hardworking, and easy going.
According to my dad, when dating mom early on, he received an invitation to try baleadas (a typical Honduran dish). After hearing the word “baleadas” uttered out of my mom’s mouth, dad reacted in a fight or flight response thinking this had to do with a shooting and bullet wound instead of food. Let's just say this is one clear example of how Latinidad is not a monolith.
I imagine the complexities evolving among both my parents coming together as a Mexican and Honduran couple. Their worlds were colliding in the midst of the socio-political landscape of the United States in the 1980s. There was an increasing and fluctuating migration of our Latin Americans moving and escaping to the States, El Norte, la tierra prometida. Here we can envision such vast and complex layers merging in our communities, and truly it is here where we find borderlands taking place in our homes, families, and day to day life in the U.S.
In her book, Chingona: Owning Your Inner Badass for Healing and Justice, author Alma Zaragoza-Petty writes a chapter on healing inner childhood wounds and her family’s struggle while adapting to life in the U.S. in the midst of hardships. She shares,
I don’t blame my mother for what she did in those years-all the choices she had to make, the people she had to rely on, the way she had to cross into different lands…like Malintzin, the Nahua woman who is the mother of mestizos, my mother made the compromises necessary for us to survive.
Dr. Alma Zaragoza-Petty
I think often of the hard work and emotional healing children of immigrants have to do in light of our family histories and realties. I think of how we compartmentalize our parents' complex migration and healing journeys, and the impact all this has on our own perception of love and life in the U.S., how we hold grief and understanding in our very same breath for our families.
I remember once trying to hold this tension with a white therapist for the first time regarding my family history and dynamic. I trauma dumped everything on this man thinking he would help me heal from my family wounds. Instead, he reprimanded and demonized my parents by telling me, "Heidi, your parents were never meant to be parents." I remember feeling confused, shocked, and eventually offended. How the hell was this emotional excommunication suppose to heal me from my collective upbringing and unresolved trauma? How was this statement suppose to move me and my family forward when we belong to one another and our own selves? I understood that my parents were emotionally unavailable, but damn they also had very little tools and made choices out of the very survival author Alma talks about.
This is a hard place to hold as children of immigrants. That therapy session felt culturally insensitive and dismissive of the fact that our families can't just write off our marginalized histories, we don’t have that privilege nor luxury. It was a very white way of viewing life. No nuances but binaries that penalized us an immigrant family for "not keeping up," even in our healing journey. Needless to say, I worked through a two year journey with a Korean woman therapist a few years later touching base on mother and family wounds. This therapist led sessions with much more compassion and an understanding of our lived and complex realities as an immigrant family (God bless you Ellen).
More compassion and understanding is what our immigrant families need in order to heal.
Beloved, I can't speak for your family journey only mine and for this I give my parents credit: for simply showing up, for me and for themselves. They may not have had the resources for therapy, and may not have had the education to undo stigmas, nor did they have a healthy model of love, but they were present.
I call this immigrant love.
Immigrant love is complicated, it does not have the best communication, most times it is not even verbal, but it is demonstrated by actions. It is by no means perfect, in fact it stings and burns in an unfamiliar land such as the U.S. It gets it wrong at times but still, it is present, and physically shows up.
I also grew up on immigrant love that was DRAMA.
I grew up on a love that would fight and yell, while telling each other hours later, "what do you want to eat? I did laundry. I am going to the store, do you need anything?” Was this pity or sympathy led by Mami and Papi or was it unconditional love? I would like to think the latter. I commend them for doing because at the end of the day, they chose each other in their mess and in the hardships of this country.
I think there is something beautiful and eternal to be said about this love. Our families continue to navigate borderlands and complexities in these ugly and ratchet systems, despite our odds and circumstances, we keep choosing each other. Today, Mami is learning how to care for Papi through his terminal illness and it is but another layer added to their borderlands. This has been a hard and ugly place and it is immigrant love that keeps her going. It is immigrant love that teaches us as children how to show up for our parents especially in times like these.
As children of immigrants, we become the buffer to the systemic blows after our parents so they don’t have to take them so hard. We ease and sometimes stop the trigger because it is immigrant love that has taught to do so. It is the love we felt and saw embodied in our families that we lead with in return.
Community also helps us and replenishes our losses through collective care and through sharing knowledge in how to best survive, because community knows what is is like to traverse borderlands as well. Immigrant love has been passed down and is among us in our families, friendships, and communities.
The traditional trio Mexican group, "Los Tres Diamantes" sing of a romance they say demonstrates God's glory.
Dios dice que la gloria
Está en el cielo
Que es de los mortales
El consuelo al morir
Bendito Dios porque al tenerte yo en vida
No necesito ir al cielo tisú
Si, alma mía
La gloria eres tú
The translation reads, “God says glory is in heaven. It is the comfort in death for mortals. Bless the Lord because I have you in my life. I don't need to go to heaven. Yes, love of my life, the glory is you.”
I think I see this glory and Divine in our families and such love we embody. It is eternal and consistent. It traverses, moving silently across borders making its way to this country. Words and communication skills might not exist in immigrant love but there is a meal, there is folded laundry, and we get to come back to each other at the end of the night.