Carolina Andrada
What resources did you wish you had having newly immigrated to the United States?
“I wish I just knew other immigrants. I grew up in an area where I knew no one else. I was coming from a different place. The Argentine community was me, my sister, my parents, and a few old couples. That was it. And there weren’t too many families from Central America and South America, so it wasn’t like I could speak Spanish with anybody. I think that something really important is keeping in touch with your culture, but also being able to interact with other people that have been assimilating to the new culture as well, and finding ways to integrate yourself within the new culture while retaining your old culture. I feel that’s a really big issue when you are in rural areas like I was. Some kind of mentorship and cultural connection would have been nice.”
What is your best memory about your family’s immigration story?
"So my dad came over and he was here for a year. When we finally moved over, we flew into Tallahassee. I was six, my sister was one, and we’d only been to the U.S. once before. I had been once before to vacation in New York, but I was a toddler then. Another time, my parents had been to New Orleans or something. But, for some reason, we had never seen squirrels. We got out of the tiny little Tallahassee International Airport, and we were just walking around - it was Valentine's Day and it was chilly outside - and then I was like, ‘What is that?’ Squirrels do not exist in Argentina. There is no such thing as a squirrel. My mom had never seen a squirrel and my mom said, ‘It’s so small. It’s like a chipmunk.’ We had also never seen chipmunks. My whole family just started chasing after the squirrels, the four of us, with all of our luggages - two grown adults with a baby in arms, and their six year old screaming at the top of her lungs. That was the happiest freaking moment of that entire trip, after all of those flights.”
