by Janine Quijije

To give better context of who I am, I would like to share my background.  I am a first generation American and proud Latina. My family immigrated from Ecuador, a small country in South America. I was raised in Queens, New York, in a community of immigrants, some of whom were undocumented. 

While both my parents entered the country legally and were green card holders, my mother didn’t become a naturalized citizen until two decades after she arrived. This was mainly because she was discouraged by seeing many of her friends failing the citizenship test who felt the questions were extremely difficult. I’ve always wondered how many Americans would actually pass these tests. 

My four siblings and I received a public school education. We always qualified for free/reduced lunch and am pretty sure everyone I knew did. That was the norm. The high school that I attended and graduated from is among the list of currently failing schools.

While in a very broad sense there was an expectation from our mother that we would all go to college and then get jobs, it was a vague picture with no real trajectory painted for us. We had to figure that out on our own. This is where the conversation of equity vs. equality really resonates with me. I have no doubt of my mother’s love and desire for us to succeed, but this country was a new experience for her. 

How could she help expose us to opportunities that she didn’t know existed? How could she do this when she had 5 kids to feed and care for with limited financial resources? How could she create stability in our lives when our father, who we also lived with, was so unstable in every way?  All I know is that I certainly did not have the same starting point as students in more affluent communities, nor did I have the same resources along the way. I didn’t know that then, but I know that now.

In spite of the many challenges I experienced in my upbringing, the value of hard work was deeply instilled in me. Our mother spent many years working in a factory or what we refer to as sweatshops. That was how she was able to put food on the table and put a roof over our head. The hours were extremely long and the work was hard but she never complained. She also made sure we had a home cooked meal every night and were at Church every Sunday. We were raised with love and raised to be kind and respectful of others. Our values were very much in alignment with other immigrants in our community and shaped my own identify.