Crossing The Border Case Study

1. Initially Reyna Grande and her siblings Carlos and Mago were left behind while their parents immigrated to the United States to work. During that time Grande faced many struggles among the most prevalent were her feelings of abandonment, the neglect she and her siblings faced at the hands of their paternal grandmother, and the ostracization due to their circumstance. Reyna and her siblings were left behind when she was a baby by her father, as a result Reyna had no concrete recollection of him during hi absence. Two years after her father left her mother left to help him in America when Reyna was four years old. Until that point Reyna’s mother had been the only parental figure she had known. The abandonment didn’t stop at the physical absence

Reyna Grande, crossed the border with her father and siblings at the age of ten. Initially her father was hesitant to take her due to her age and her ability to handle such a difficult and dangerous trek. Crossing the border was such a difficult task that it took the Grande family multiple tries before they were successful. During their last attempt they hid in bushes after hearing a helicopter and fearing it was immigration. Their first attempt ended with the family being caught. Their father had warned that if they were caught again, he would have to once again leave them behind in Mexico. The stakes of not being caught were raised just that much more for the children as they crossed the

The family member I interviewed is my mother, though she herself is not an immigrant, due to the circumstances of her upbringing, I thought she would relate more to Reyna Grande’s story than my father would. My mother has always shared stories of her upbringing with me and my siblings, she would often tell us stories of growing up in Hasidim from the ages of four to fifteen were like and how assimilating back into secular culture was like coming to a new country. Though I have heard the stories before and knew a majority of the answers to my questions I did find out some things I was not aware of. One of the major things I didn’t know before was that my mother had mostly spoken Yiddish in her childhood and coming back to secular culture a major challenge of that was overcoming a limited knowledge of the English language. And although she did come back to secular culture, knowing a fair amount of English due to the extreme censorship in Hasidim there was a large amount of words and concept she had never heard of before things like dinosaurs and science were completely foreign to her. I sat with my mother for well over and hour and we talked about these sort of things. In conclusion I came to terms with my own culture and feelings of disconnect with my Jewish heritage and