Why were we packing up our stuff? Why was my grandma hugging me tighter than usual? 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 little backpack with my Winnie the Pooh journal and my doll, and we crossed the border from Mexico to the US, seeing my Dad become an ant in the distance as he stayed behind.
Just Disney World. Whenever I have to make a decision now and I’m afraid, my mom always reminds me of that day. “That day, I knew if I thought about it, fear would make me turn back. That’s why when you’re afraid, you force yourself to jump. You don’t think, you just jump,” 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 little room waiting for somebody to come 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, some spent weeks in agonizing anxiety over what the answer would be. Meanwhile, I was wondering when the heck we were going to get 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!” Little did I know.
Little me and my mamá ended up on a Greyhound bus to Miami that took 36 hours — that’s where I have 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, but when she came to America none of the degrees she earned in Cuba counted, so to make enough to keep us fed and put me into school she began stacking shoes in Marshalls and going to school at night to take courses in English, all while taking me to and from school and helping me with my homework all by herself, alone in a strange country. I can’t imagine how frustrating it must have been for her to have worked her whole life in architecture and then have 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, tu estás 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, 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 move us out of my godmother’s house and into an apartment.
