A Narrative Essay About Immigration To Brazil

My high school days all merge into one large blur, except for one. This happened to be a Thursday afternoon after we had dropped off the carpool and my father told me that my grandmother had been diagnosed with stomach cancer. There was a sense of despair and disbelief in the air, as we both held the notion that stomach cancer was more or less the equivalent of a death sentence. My father seemed to be especially upset as he kept repeating the fact that she had relinquished her green card a few years earlier. This meant that she would have to perform surgeries and treatment in her native country of Brazil, instead of the United States. In the end, she had her entire stomach removed and her mental health deteriorated immensely as a result.

I am a Brazilian-American whose mother came to the United States at the age of 22 from her homeland in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to pursue greater opportunities. Ever since childhood, she has been determined that I be fluent in Portuguese in order to communicate with my relatives in Brazil, and thus be able to maintain a strong connection to my Brazilian cultural heritage. As a result, I have always felt a strong connection and desire to reach out to other immigrants. This past summer I volunteered at an ESOL Program at my university for 8th graders from low-SES schools. They were predominantly of Hispanic backgrounds and I had the opportunity to speak on a panel and take them on tours of the campus. As I talked to these 8th graders, I discovered that many of them viewed college as the pinnacle of the American Dream, especially since most would be first-generation college students. I gained a greater appreciation for immigration through the law system in the United States when I interned with an immigration law firm. I was intrigued by the facts and legal issues raised by clients, as well as the clients’ personal motivations for obtaining employment visas, attaining permanent resident alien status (“green card”), or