Transcribed by A+ Recording & Transcribing* (212) 813-6700 167 West 21^st Street @ Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10011 www.aplusnyc.com
Transcription For:	Multigenerational Sub-Committee
Project Name:	NGO UN Delegation Sub-Committee Meeting
Date Transcribed:	June 12-13, 2006
Segment #:	1 of 1
Media:	Audio Cassette
Side(s)	Tape 1, Sides A and B Tape 2, Sides A and B
Length:	31 minutes, 31 minutes 31 minutes, 11 minutes
File Name:	BRABBRK0609A
Notes:

NORMA LEVITT: The generations of migrants. Let me give you a very brief overview of our program today and the reason that I’m doing that is that it will run smoothly without a chairperson popping up all the time to introduce somebody. Professor Kevin Brabazon is the moderator of the program presenters – namely Eva Richter as keynoter and a panel of four people, people from various parts of the world who represent a balance of ages, genders and experiences. There will appropriate times for questions and discussion. And finally we will have a summary by our co-chair Rosa Perla Resnick who has had many years of experience with migrants.

This program is a result of a very long process involving a great deal of planning. Guidelines were developed for the presenters to unify their work as well as to highlight specific experiences. In a few minutes I will turn the moderating of the program to Professor Kevin Brabazon who as the noted Director of Intergenerational Programs of the New York City Department for the Aged. He also worked with the Brookdale Foundation and started the initiative of grandparents raising grandchildren called Relatives as Parents. He is the President of the New York State Intergenerational Framework since 1991. New York State Intergenerational Foundation or Framework?

KEVIN BRABAZON: Network

NORMA LEVITT: Network. [UNINTEL] Network since 1991 and you can read his accreditations in the printed programs. As we were planning this program I found myself ruminating over the feelingful aspects of this issue and I will read to you the written expression of these feelings, which is on the back page of your printed program as an introduction and it is titled “Migration.”

Home. Home, a word which calls up images of warmth and comfort, a place which enfolds us with childhood joy and grown up ease. Home, where we are strengthened to leave and where we long to return. Immigration, a word standing starkly, a condition which is filled with anxiety and difficulty. We are mandated to understand the facts of immigration. This word, worldwide state of living for millions of people, old and young, of every color, race and nationality. If we are pledged to repair this world we must understand the conditions of life for so many of the human family, hungry and tired, lonely, ill, far from home. Overarching the understanding of the conditions of immigrants, the numbers and the need or help is the relation to this world, this world our home, the need to feel at home on this planet earth within the human family. What then are the facts and what can we do to help? Professor Kevin Brabazon.

[APPLAUSE]

KEVIN BRABAZON: It’s my great pleasure to introduce some of the distinguished speakers today. And we have a wonderful array with a wide variety of backgrounds, which I think provides a richness to the program. First is our keynote speak, Eva Richter – has probably more nationalities than I can count. I can just about do it on two hands. Eva is a double refugee and this session is not only about refuges, it’s about migration in general. So the refugee portion of it is a portion of migration but there are many other reasons that people migrate and those are certainly part of our agenda.

So Eva first migrated or was a refugee from Hitler’s Germany to China at the age of two. And then while she was still young, from China during the Communist revolution to the United States at the age of 15. She had her primary and second education in China in English and French schools and her college and graduate education in English in comparative literature in the U.S. at, among others, University of Chicago, New York University – I’m happy to say. She has taught English at the University of Nebraska, Rutgers University and for over 30 years at City University of New York at Kingsborough Community College. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to The Netherlands and taught in China from 1986-87 at [NAME ?] Teachers University.

She’s now retired from CUNY and she’s an NGO delegate to the U.N. representing the International Federation of Business and Professional Women. She’s also a member of the NGO Human Rights Committee, a subcommittee on immigrants and refugees and corresponding secretary of the NGO Committee on the Status of Women. She is currently serving on the Task Force Child [ARRANGING ?], the Civil Society hearings on the July 12^th in connection with the high level discussions of the General Assembly to take place this coming September. Eva it’s pleasure to have you here and thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]

EVA RICHTER: Thank you very much Kevin for that fine introduction. When Dr. Rosa Perla Resnick asked me to give this talk on intergenerational conflicts attendant upon migration it suddenly occurred to me that by first hand experience I may be able to claim some expertise in migration issues. But by training I can claim expertise only in literature. So why not marry your two fields and talk about intergenerational conflict in migration as portrayed in literature? Well when I broached this to Rosa there was a sharp intake of breath as she contemplated this offer of not scientific... there were going to be no statistics let alone carefully disaggregated ones, [LAUGHTER] no field work, no questionnaires, no focus groups. Where’s the scholarship? Not that she said any of this but I could almost hear her thinking it. [LAUGHTER]

But she was very brave and with the consent of the committee she decided to let me take my reckless course. So here I am and I’m starting with caveat. Because of the constrictions of time I’ll be only able to deal with a few novels which I’ve selected from various cultural traditions – Jewish, Hispanic, Korean, Chinese, Indian – but all of them dealing with American immigration experience. Perhaps my justification for this may come from the fact that according to the UNDP statistics – and here’s my one statistic for you – currently in America one in five of the entire population are migrants. One in five is a migrant. There are many, many works concerning migration in Africa, in Europe, in Australia but unfortunately I will not have time for these today.

Now as the pace of world migration has picked up in the last 15 years there’s been an absolute explosion of migration literature. A very brief and cursory bibliographical search turned up over 80 novels written in English alone during that period – that is in the last 15 years since 1991 or 1990. Far fewer, maybe 20 or 30, in the 15 years before that and only a handful of earlier ones. In the U.S. and all over the world second generation children born of migrant parents straddle two cultures and strive to take and understand their place as natives in alien lands. Inevitably there are conflicts and clashes between the cultures of the old and new countries and between the generations that represent the old and new ways of life.

In America it’s taken for granted anyway that there will be intergenerational conflict. The generation gap, a term coined in the 60s, was invented to describe the ideological conflicts between the generations. But generational conflict has always been accepted almost as a right of passage, a process by which the individual achieves his or her own identify and becomes an autonomous independent human being. Those are the magic words – identity, individuality, autonomy, independence and they identify very American values. Any migrant coming into this country comes up against those concepts and will have to deal with them and with the ensuing struggle with and within the next generation. The struggle will be framed differently from that of native born third, fourth and fifth generation Americans in terms of the clash of cultures and values as well as race and class and gender.

Many migrants come from cultures in which such a struggle and such striving for individual identify is not a given. In Samoa, for example, Margaret Meade discovered a society in which intergenerational conflict was not universally expected, at least not in the ways in which it manifested itself in the U.S. In the novel Desirable Daughters, a novel of Indian migration, Bharati Mukherjee writes that middle daughters, because they feel less sure of their father’s love, seek ways to please rather than to confront. She claims that in India “we didn’t know family breakdown. Our families existed inside an impenetrable bubble. Anyone entering or exiting was carefully monitored. We honored the proprieties. There was no rebellion, no seeking after individual identity.”

With heavy irony she describes the matter of fact way in which Bish, on of the characters, “became an electrical engineering student in India because his father told him he was going to be an engineer and he excelled at it because that’s what Chatterjees did. When he expressed a desire to get married his father in mind, that is for marriages, cut the deal – best boy, best girl. The Asian students filed ahead, they handled duty very well.” Of course all this dutiful success unravels disastrously when the couple come to America, rebel against the mandates of their lives and fall afoul of the corruption that underlies this placid self satisfied façade which draws lines and never crosses them.

Indian society is seen as rigid and tradition, its customs reinforced particularly by the parents together with the entire educational and social structure. And in coming to America the parents, particularly the fathers, undertake the responsibility of steering an American born son or daughter through the pitfalls of an American life. America made children soft in the brain as well as in the body, it weakened the moral fiber, they grew up without respect for family and tradition. The challenge, Mukherjee says, was to create degrees of difficulty for their children that would emulate the stress and simple deprivation most of them had known in the tropical cities of their childhood.

Now if this illuminates the strictness and high expectations of the migrant Indian family, it also helps us understand the nature of the children’s rebellion against these strictures and against the parents who enforce them. Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club, which I’m sure many of you have read, portrays a similar rebellion against expectations and traditional strictures with the mothers as the authoritarian figures enforcing the cultural [TROPE ?]. Jing-Mei Woo’s mother firmly believes that in America one can be anything one wants to be and tries to force her daughter into being a genius.

Jing-Mei rebels saying plaintively, I failed her so many times, each time asserting my own will, my right to fall short of expectations. I didn’t get straight As, I didn’t become class president, I didn’t get into Stanford. I dropped out of college for unlike my mother I didn’t believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me. She is claiming her right here to a separate identity but her mother replies, a girl is like young tree, you must stand tall and listen to your mother standing next to you. That is the only way to grow straight and strong. But if you bend and listen to other people you will grow crooked and weak.

Another mother in the novel wants to give her daughter American circumstances and Chinese character, by which she means frugality, reticence, modesty, never letting feelings or thoughts show, firmly convinced that Chinese character is best. But to her dismay her daughter simply retorts, oh don’t be do old fashioned, I’m my own person. And the mother, uncomprehendingly wonders how can she be her own person, when did I give her up? [LAUGHTER]

In The Namesake Jhumpa Lahiri creates a character with the unlikely name of Gogol, taken from the Russian novelist. A second generation Indian boy, son of a successful academic and his wife by an arranged marriage, loving and caring parents whose progress in America is painstakingly charted over 30 years. Gogol takes on the name [NICKEL ?] and tried to make his own life and discover his own identity in America. His rebellion takes the form of an involvement with a well-to-do white Anglo-Saxon protestant girl whose family welcome him and go on with their privileged quintessentially American lives. Maxine will argue with her parents but without any of the exasperation he feels with his own. As the author says, “as one would with a friend. Unlike his parents they pressure her to do nothing and yet she lives happily, faithfully as their side.”

He’s attracted to their easy sense of belonging and entitlement to their pleasure and the good life, good food, good drink, good talk and he contrasts it unfavorably with the constant tension and marginality of his parents’ lives as they strive to fit in and never completely do so. They’re always strangers even though they try to adopt American customs – making turkey, celebrating Thanksgiving, of course with samosas and good Bengali food. Setting up a tree with colored lights at Christmas time but not adopting Christianity, dying eggs at Easter and hiding them all over the house and forgetting about them. [LAUGHTER] But they’re only at home and relaxed with their Bengali friends, making mounds of Bengali food and celebrating the traditional festivals.

Gogol Nickel deliberately chooses to go to school in New York so that he won’t have to go home on weekends and remain unquestionably in his parents world going to Bengali parties his parents give where people he feels come together mainly because they share a past. He’s trying to create an American identity, trying to avoid the disparaging label – and this was the first time I had ever come across this label – ABCD, American born confused Deshi. [LAUGHTER] Where Deshi is a familiar colloquial term meaning Indian. At home in neither world Nickel sees his relationship with Maxime break down and finally marries an American born Bengali girl of his family’s acquaintance in a marriage ceremony which means little to them in which both have to be prompted when to throw flowers, when to speak, when to stand.

A similar longing to ease and freedom of discourse and emotional expression between parents and children can be seen Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker. The novel offers an insight into the formality of the relations between the striving immigrant full of the sense of duty and obligation to his family and the discomfort of the child simply wanting the comfort and cultural ease of the non [UNINTEL] migrant native born. He wants actions to spring from love and warm concern rather than from a sense of duty. We’re difficult people he says. My mother was the worst. She was an impossible woman. Of course she was a good mother. I think now she treated it like a job. She wasn’t what you would call friendly – never warm. I so wanted to be familiar and friendly with my parents like my [UNINTEL] friends were with theirs. You know, they’d use curses with each other, make fun of each other at dinner, maybe even get drunk together on holidays. I wanted just once for my mother and father to relax a little with me, not treat me so much like a son, like a figure in a long line of figures. They treated each other like that too, like it was their duty and not their love.

He wants to feel like a person, an individual and not a family responsibility and a bearer of the wave of tradition. He reports also on the formality of address between his parents and how they never used each other’s names but only referred to one another as spouse, husband, Henry’s father, etc. This business of names, by the way, is very, very interesting and very significant in all of this literature. At one point one of the authors said, Americans live on a first name basis and we do not. So there it is, the difficulty of and formality of address. What do you call one another, what is the degree of intimacy one’s allowed outside of the tradition?

Emotional display is never permitted. When Henry breaks down he says, it was the kind of display my father would not have tolerated in a member of his family. It would have sickened him. Nobody give two damn about your problem or pain he might say. You just take care of yourself, keep it quiet. Such emotional control, of course, is not characteristic of American life where the urge to let it all hang out is almost overwhelming.

With all the conflicts, dislocations and uncertainties, however, most of the more recent novels about migrant families end with some reconciliation and understanding of the problems the older generation has had in adjusting to the difficulties of American life. Though the father, or the mother in The Joy Luck Club, may be authoritarian and domineering at in Native Speaker, Desirable Daughters and Julia Alvarez’s How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, there is a good deal of sympathy for their plight and understanding that they may really genuinely have had the welfare of their children in mind when they insisted on certain patterns of behavior like not dating, conformity with religious tenets or matters of etiquette.

But earlier novels assumed a more confrontational mode. Two novels especially can be singled out for their basically hostile portrayal of a brutal father who represents the old world and almost crushes the life out of a new world pioneer. These are Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, written in 1934, and Anzia Yezierska’s Regulars, written in 1925. In both novels the father is portrayed as a powerful abusive man who stands in the way of his children’s happiness. In Regulars the father is a Talmudic scholar who studies all day and lives on his wife’s and his children’s earnings. He refuses to allow his eldest daughter to marry for love because he fears losing his income from her work. He bosses his next two daughters into miserable misalliances, denying then the right to choose their future spouses for love.

“Here in America when girls pick out for themselves the men they want for husbands, how grand it would be if the children could also pick out their fathers and mothers,” [LAUGHTER] Sarah, the youngest of the four and the heroine says bitterly at one point. “Should I let him crush me as he crushed my sisters? No this is America where children are people.” She determines to become a person not just a daughter, an exploitable female. Yezierska attacks the male dominated tradition in which the only worth of a woman lies in marriage and procreation. Sarah breaks away, gains an education, becomes a teacher. But her father says, “Phooey on your education. What’s going to be your end, a dried up old maid? Woe to America where women are left free like men. All that’s false in politics, prohibition and all the evils of the world come from them.” “I no longer say my father before me,” says Sarah, “but a tyrant from the old world where only men were people. To him I was nothing but his last unmarried daughter to be bought and sold.”

Finally though she marries for love, the principal of her school, an Americanized Jew who knows no Hebrew, the model of the new assimilated and noble man who proves his moral superiority to the Talmudist by taking him into their home when he is old and ill to care for him and to learn Hebrew from him. Wonderingly the father says, “I thought that in America we’re all lost. Jewishness is not Jewishness and children are not children. Respect for fathers does not exist and yet my own daughter who’s not a Jewess and not a Gentile brings me a young man and who, and for what, to learn Hebrew, from who, from me.” This is as close to reconciliation as the author will go. Though Sarah makes her way into her future with her love she says, “I felt the shadows still there over me. It wasn’t just my father but the generations who made my father, whose weight was still upon me.”

In Call It Sleep, the father is physically abusive beating David, the child protagonist of the novel, for the unforgivable sin of taking a rosary from a Polish boy. David sees it simply as a beautiful toy but to his parents it symbolizes the virulent anti-Semitism which they came to America to escape. There is some uncertainty about David’s paternity and the reader comes to realize that the mother has had a liaison with Gentile man back in the old country. The household is an unhappy one with conflict between father and child and also between father and mother. In the end when the child is almost killed in a terrible accident the father reluctantly accepts his paternity but the conclusion is far from the conventional happy ending.

The gulf between the child with the dawning American consciousness and the parents, the doting smothering mother, the epitome of all that’s disparaged as the Jewish mother, and the abusive father is symbolized by the difference in their languages. The child is developing fluency in English, the parents must limp along in Hebrew or Yiddish, forever strangers, forever condemned to struggle for success whose outcome is never certain.

Both these novels which reject the restrictive patriarchal old world society and the brutal father image for the freedom and self determination of the new world were written during a time when assimilation paradigm was the accepted one for the immigrant. The image of America as the melting pot prevailed in which all nationalities and their [UNINTEL] would be melted together slowly abandoning their old forms, their customs, behaviors and languages to emerge refined and purified to find their own way in an amalgamated and free America. Not any surprise that one of the most important units is called the amalgamated. The process involved rejection of the past, the creation of a new generation of American men and women – whatever that meant – at home in a new land and language.

The present multicultural paradigm is very different, dominated by the image of the [UNINTEL] or the patchwork quilt. Each ingredient or square of cloth retaining its own individuality, texture and flavor but enhanced by the proximity of the other ingredients or patches. It’s the latter is more sympathetic to the differences that the old world customs, traditions, [ETIQUETTE ?] and values bring to the new world. And this may account, I think, for the greater tolerance between the generations that is portrayed in the later novels and hold out hope for the resolution of some of the most problematic [UNINTEL].

In Native Speaker Henry, the main character, listens to the voices of two workers, one Korean and one Hispanic, talking with one another sitting on a crate smoking cigarettes. He listens to their stilted English and knows he would have ridiculed them when he was younger. I would cringe and grow ashamed and angry at those funny tones of my father and his workers. All that [UNINTEL], Spanglish jive. Just talk right I wanted to yell, just talk right for once in your sorry lives. But now I think I would give most anything to hear my fathers talk again, the crush and bang and stuff of his language always [UNINTEL]. I want to hear the rest of them too, especially the disbelieving cries and shouts of those who were taken away. And here he is referring to those that were taken away, to the illegal aliens smuggled across borders and taken in the holds of ships, suffering in those overheated trucks, drowning as their ships ran aground and sank, arrested and deported [UNINTEL].

Thinking of his father and the hard life he has had Henry says, “I am his lone American son blessed with every hope and quarter he could provide and yet I am bestowed only with a meager affect of his hard won riches, the troubling awe and content and piety I still hold for his [LOVE ?].” This, I am afraid, will endure for what I have done with my might is what he only dreamed of, to enter a place and tender the native language with body and tongue and no one turn and point to the [DOOR ?]. He has become, in other words, a native speaker, allowed into the homes of the natives, matching his seat with his body language, an American at last, one who will be accepted and not shown the door.

But the price of such belonging is high and most of these novels end in a minor key with an uneasy truce between the generations and a loving acknowledge of all the sacrifices parents have made and all their struggles in a new and scary land to give their children a better future.

[APPLAUSE]

KEVIN BRABAZON: Eva thank you so much. And even though we might not put this under quantitative analysis we can put it under qualitative. And the one statistic you gave, I’m part of that 20% also as an immigrant. We’ve got – and actually also thank you for keeping in the time and we do have to finish the program half an hour early so I’m going to be a strict timekeeper on the... on all of the presenters.

There’s a small change in the program. Reverend [KIESA ?] may be traveling out of the country at the moment and we have rearranged the panelists just slightly. So first will be Talar Iskanian-Hashasian from Armenian and Tamar is an attorney who’s admitted to practice in New York. She specializes in U.S. immigration and nationality law and has been in practice here over 12 years.

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

[BEGINNING TO TAPE 1, SIDE B]

KEVIN BRABAZON: I’m not going to read just because of the time involved including the Chair of the Young Lawyers Division of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and she will tell you about some of these as she comes up. Talar, thank you so much for being here.

[APPLAUSE]

TALAR ISKANIAN-HASHASIAN: Thank you Kevin. Good afternoon. I would like to thank the NGO Committee on Aging and the Sub-Committee on Multi-Generational Relationships for inviting me to this panel. It’s a great pleasure to be a part of this presentation dealing with an extremely important issue. In my presentation I will talk about some of the multi-generational issues and conflicts which affect migrants and their families as well as how U.S. immigration laws and regulations have an impact on multi-generational relations. I will draw upon my own experience as an immigrant in this country as well as my observations of clients over the years.

As Kevin mentioned, I’m an Armenian. I was born in Istanbul, Turkey. As some of you may know parts of modern day Turkey today were once historic Armenia. Most Armenians by virtue of their history as victims of the first genocide of the 20^th century have migrated from their native land at least once. Thus today you can find an Armenian pretty much any corner of the globe from Europe to the U.S. or from Ethiopia to India. As such I think Armenians probably provide a good example how migrants are affected by multi-generational issues and conflicts.

Today because of economic reasons Armenians have been leaving their homeland in great numbers and an article that I came across as I was preparing for this presentation indicated that, I guess that there is a shortage of young males in Armenia, that a lot of males between the ages of 25 to 55 emigrate out of... outside of Armenia, sometimes to the U.S., sometimes to Russia, sometimes to other former Soviet republics, etc. And similar to other groups of migrants those people leave their spouses and children at home in their country until they’re able to bring them to the new country, they’re able to do it economically.

Because there’s a lot of issues that affect multi-generational relations what I’d like to focus on in the time that I have is the struggle that migrants have to maintain their identity with respect to child care and with respect to bringing up their children. Armenians as I think it’s true in a lot of other cultures place a great emphasis on the continuation of their language, their culture and their religion. They take pride in the fact that although they are small in numbers and they didn’t have a homeland for part of their history, they were able to maintain their culture and still be a vibrant culture in this 21^st century. To emphasize the point of the emphasis they place on their language, religion and culture, I want to point out as a footnote that Armenian adoption laws require that if you want to adopt a child from Armenia at least one parent has to be of Armenian heritage.

Further Armenians, similar to most other immigrant populations, place a great emphasis on their extended family relations. The grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins are an important part of family life and also provide a vital network in childcare and childrearing. Thus having an extended family to take care of your children for migrants I believe ensures that traditional cultural values are instilled in your children. And I experienced this first hand being the mother of a toddler and seeing the importance of having a close knit family. I rely 100% on my family, my parents and my husband’s family, for the care of my child and I believe it’s very important for my daughter to be able to speak Armenian and to know her cultural heritage, her religion and her culture.

But I understand first hand of how not having your family, your family meaning your spouse or your parents, in the country where you live can have an affect on your life. Again, as I was preparing for this presentation I came across a study that suggests that when children are living with non-English speaking grandparents there is a greater number who speak that non-English language, the minority language. In other words, if they are raised in multi-generational households or they are taken care of grandparents they’re more likely to speak the language that the grandparents speak.

And related to this I’d like to point out a conflict that’s faced by immigrants as they teach and speak to their children the language of their heritage, in my case the Armenian language. And even though I guess the speaker before me, Eva, had mentioned that nowadays immigration in the United States is more of a patchwork and, you know, people are able to maintain their own identity, I at times through clients or through friends, I see examples of... I guess that present conflicts and they’re to the contrary. I’m sure in smaller numbers nowadays than it was, you know, 50 or so years ago.

But one example that I’d like to share with you is a young mother who learned the Armenian language herself as an adult, makes a great effort – she has a toddler – and makes a great effort to teach the Armenian language to her child. And there’s a playgroup that she takes her child to that she has been taking her child since the child was born and she... when she’s in this playgroup and she talks in Armenian she feels that other mothers frown upon her because she is talking to her child in a language other than English.

What I’d like to do next is to again give an example to illustrate the issues and conflicts that migrants face and especially as it relates to bringing up your child and also as it relates to U.S. immigration laws. I will give you the example of an Armenian family. This family at first emigrated to Russia from their homeland and then the mother – it was a mother, father and two children and a grandmother – the mother came to the United States in search of a better opportunity for her family. She was able to find a position in the U.S. which allowed her to get a temporary work visa but she was able to only find a part-time position which wasn’t sufficient for her to support her husband and her two children. As a result her husband and children and her mother stayed back in Russia. This was obviously very difficult on her to stay away from her family and to be here. She hoped that her family can join her at some point.

At various points parts of her family came. Her husband came here but he didn’t want to stay since he would not have been able to work legally in the United States. He decided to go back. Her son came, he was of college age. He took some English classes and then when it came time to apply for college because of the high cost involved he would not have been able to afford so he also decided to go back. Her daughter, who was of elementary school age, also spent about a year or so in the United States and during this time it was extremely difficult for the mother to balance her work and her responsibilities as a mother because she did not have any family members to take care of her children, to take care of her child. She had to depend on her neighbors, she had to depend on her landlord to take care of... to pick up her daughter from school or spend time with her until she came home from work. After some time this woman decided to ask her own mother to come here as a visitor so that she could take care of her child but that was not a long-term solution as the mother’s stay as a visitor was limited to six months and she had to go back at the end of that time period.

This woman spent almost six years in the U.S. and at the end she decided that she could not continue doing this, that this had a great impact on toll on her relation with her children, with her mother, as well as her relation with her husband. So she decided to go back to salvage her family life. And in this time her children could not understand why she was away from them for such a long time when they were at a stage in their life where they needed her the most. And she in turn felt the guilt of not being there for her children when they were young.

What I’d like to point out is that this example illustrates the inadequacy of current U.S. immigration laws as it relates to multi-generation relations of immigrants. For recent immigrants to the U.S. it’s nearly impossible to have their parents in this country let alone their relatives. Those who have – just to give you an idea – those who are here legally and have permanent resident status in the U.S. cannot sponsor their parents until they can become citizens, which means they have to spend five years after being generally a permanent resident. Also you have to bear in mind that it usually takes several years for a migrant to obtain permanent residence if someone doesn’t come in to the U.S. already as a permanent resident.

Similarly people who are in the U.S. on visas that allow them to work here in the United States are not able to bring in their parents. So the only way their parents could come in such a case is to obtain a visitors visa which may be only good for six months. And as a result I’ve seen numerous examples in my practice of young families who are here, who are professionals, who are working in the United States and they’re struggling with child rearing decisions and they feel the lack of the familiar support network that they’re accustomed to in their home country. And I believe this example also – the example that I provided earlier – also illustrates how spousal relationships, in a way cross-generational relationships are affected when one spouse is not able to join the other spouse or when one spouse is not able to work even though they’re dependent of the legal worker in the U.S. Those people are either forced to put their careers on hold or to live in different countries or to live in different states if they’re able to... if they have an opportunity to get a position in a different state.

But current U.S. immigration laws are not drafted with the understanding of the importance of the nuclear family as well. People who have permanent residence status in the U.S., if they were to marry someone who is not a permanent resident or who not is a U.S. citizen they will have to wait over five years before being able to bring in their spouse, which will mean that someone who is a legal migrant in this country, if they were to get married they would have to live separately from their spouse for more than five years before that person can join them here in the United States.

Also if when family is eligible to become permanent residents they have unmarried children who are over the age of 21, those children for the most part are not able to come to the U.S. with their families and are subject to a wait of more than 10 years. If they have married children those children can only come when their parents become United States citizens. And even at that time they have to wait an additional eight years to come to the U.S. – let alone the case of siblings, permanent residents cannot sponsor siblings until they become U.S. citizens and then the wait is more than 11 years when they become U.S. citizens.

What I’d like to conclude my remarks by is to say that I’m hopeful that the U.S. immigration laws will eventually change to reflect the realities of migrants’ lives in general and I also want to point out that although I’ve given you examples of my own experience or of Armenians in general today, I believe that issues and conflicts facing migrants are similar in most of ethnic populations. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

KEVIN BRABAZON: Talar thank you for that well informed presentation. Very much appreciate it. We have now a very interesting young lady from Kazakhstan, Irina Makarova. Irina is coming from a multi-generational perspective for two reasons – one from her family perspective but also she is a student at Edward Morrow High School and participates in the inter-generational work study program her in New York City which pairs young people with older New Yorkers and there is another inter-generational aspect to her life in that as well. Irena thank you for being here today.

[APPLAUSE]

IRINA MAKAROVA: Thank you. I apologize in advance for not having an in depth knowledge of this subject other than my experience. And I’m afraid I’ll have to get a little bit of instruction. So, my name Irina Makarova and I’m currently attending E. R. Morrow High School. Next year I’ll be attending NYU [STEINEM ?] [UNINTEL] but, you know, for the important facts I am an immigrant and I have immigrated to the U.S. on April 6, 1998 from [NAME ?] Kazakhstan. And I’m not a native of the land as you can see [UNINTEL]. I’m not a Kazak but... although me and my family have participated in their culture equally as we have been discriminated against. It’s really mainly about like love and hate there. I’m an [UNINTEL] Russian who attended a German private school and who had many Kazak friends as well as many Kazak... as well as Russian enemies.

I actually barely know the language of the country I was born in but certainly I have a few phrases embedded in my mind. But – although along with the anthem – but I’m not exactly sure to whom we have been like swearing our loyalty to all those years. As for discrimination the people of that land have made it clear that they’re not really fond of the [NAME ?], their allies, so I personally have been harassed in school in the playgrounds and for my brother, he has been attacked a few times, he was beaten, his personal belongings were stolen from him and he was just – I don’t know – humiliated for a very long time of his life. That had an affect on him.

And me and my family would go away to visit our grandparents and then we’d come back and our windows would be shattered and there would be hate messages all over our walls. But, you know, the term hate crime doesn’t really exist there because people just really don’t care much. And... but what can I say, like man is man and the police would just shrug it all off as insignificant nonsense and, you know. I, of course, was really completely unaware of all things because I was a child and... which automatically meant that there was not more to life than trivial tantrums and school drama but that’s why I didn’t really see the purpose of going to America and I didn’t know that it would be eight years until I would actually have the privilege of thinking that I could go back and see my family which we left behind there.

I mean there were evident highlights to America but the only ones I know that it was a place where... from which my father would send us like peanut butter [UNINTEL] trees and trinkets and all that. And so after ridiculously difficult [ACRIMONIOUS ?] and even warlike clash with the border police we managed to escape into American by a train ride to [NAME ?], plane ride to Moscow and then a plane here. That’s why there aren’t really many Kazak immigrants here because it’s impossibly difficult to get out of there. They really do not want people to escape from Kazakhstan. And it was just absolutely magical and surreal, you know, especially for me because I was an eight year old child when I came here and I was like... I was enchanted by everything that my eyes came in contact with. And in my mind I had created that I would come there and my father, you know, who I haven’t seen for about two or three years – probably after that – you know, would take us to be big house and we’d buy a dog and... I’d break the social barrier and I’d get many friends.

But disappointment hit really hard when, you know, we entered our leeched and cockroach infested abode and we actually had to sleep on the floor for a couple of days because that’s how completely spacious our apartment was and this really wasn’t the America I had in mind. Compared to our gorgeous lifestyle in Kazakhstan, our residence really seemed more like a third world country now.

And immigrant really didn’t smile upon us because our situation was terrible. I mean, yeah, I was... I was still very young and I was free from the troubles of the adults but I could still tell that this wasn’t really the [ROYAL ?] living. I mean we were one of the those people on the streets who collect, you know, bottles, cans and the travel to Shop Rite and dispense them. So pride and dignity were really kind of pushed to the back of the mind because these were the times of tough life and tough love and we literally had to scrape.

And what’s really depressing is that my mother, she was an engineer back in Kazakhstan but once she came here she might as well not have had the experience because she did not know the language and because of that she was kind of useless. And it was really difficult for her because she didn’t have her parents or her siblings with her. And it was even harder for my father because her having... his mother died on the day we came to America and... But for my mom it took her a while to assimilate and she managed to apply for a position as a home attendant and things kind of gradually began to improve from there.

School for me was a really unpleasant experience because not only did I have a really heavy accent and little to no knowledge of the language, I was also overweight, which I guess is sort of irrelevant but it was still a big part of my misery. Although it was an immigrant school where you’d think that all the different cultures would, you know, make the whole melting pot image come to life, I was once harassed by the other immigrant children. Sociability was really not my thing and it’s not like I could speak to others because all my [UNINTEL] words would just cause them more amusement and this inability to communicate and poor relationship with people continued until middle school where... until I memorized vocabulary and words profusely and I practiced my English so I could prove everyone wrong and I did. So in a way I guess... I managed to accomplish my purpose and goal.

However, in all those years I did not have my extended family to back me up and it’s really difficult to contact Kazakhstan so the only forms of communications were like once a month letters and once a month phone calls. Right now we can send emails to each other and all that but just the whole thing of not being able to be with your family for eight years, that has really rubbed off on me because a struggle occurs within you where you do not wish to lose your culture but you can feel it ebb away because all you do is communicate with teenagers whose only purpose in life is to fit in.

And I feel very lucky right now because I can still read, write and speak fluently in my language and that I still carry on a bit of my culture and tradition. I personally feel that not being able to be around with people who genuinely care for you makes you kind of cold hearted. But I have missed out on many things and I was not there for the birth of my cousin and she’s four years old now and I really don’t know when I will actually meet her. And we wanted for a green card eight years and now when we actually have the opportunity because of mere technicalities with Kazakhstan’s border police again, we cannot travel there. So... and we never know – like now my mother’s father has passed away so we really don’t know what’s going to happen next and who we’ll never see again.

But... as an employee of [UNINTEL] Care Centers I really can’t find words to describe the definite amount of help that I’ve rendered and that I’ve absorbed from interacting with those who are [UNINTEL] [HEALTH FAIR ?]. The age difference is blatantly out there, seeing how the younger persons provide a certain level of dependent with age. The not too particularly pleasant truth remains a fact though, which is that not every resident there is visited by their extended family members and it’s a [SARDONIC ?] [UNINTEL] that just human beings simply become exhausted from like to a point of complete apathy. And they’re just... most of them stay seated in their wheelchairs for a whole day and just stare outside with some sort of unextinguished passion.

While talking to them I realize that they realize their situation and because of that they either become docile or refuse their inevitable fate and become insane. Sad but true but these are just my observations I guess. After all the real reason for most of the elderly being there is because they were a deniable burden to their families or they simply don’t have anyone to take care of them. Very rarely do I find people there who actually choose to [UNINTEL] such a facility. And it’s not just nursing homes. It’s the... the idea of a hospitalization in general. I had to lie in Maimonides for four days and by the fourth day I remember that I thought I would actually lose my mind if I had to stay there one more moment. Just the inactivity and inaptness are very painful things to bear and I remember having difficulty to prove to the doctors that I was sane because I was just hysterical all the time from being unable to breath real air and just being unable to move.

Well after return from there I had a completely different perspective on the way the residents were. You know, I can... I could not imagine what it’s like to be confined to one spot for years but now I understand why some of the residents in the wheelchairs would look at me with envious and beastly, almost loathing stares whenever I would walk by. Whereas before I would get irritated now I’m there with them, I’m there with them body and soul. Just looking at them fills me with a... just paranoid fear of the future because suddenly you realize that I will age and someone will have to take care of me eventually.

And what about the people who have to stay in these facilities for years but they can’t speak the language because they’re immigrants? These... it can painfully dull to be unable to communicate even with the nurses and being unable to participate in the therapeutic recreation programs which are the only source of entertainment there. That’s why it’s so pivotal to know that for some reason or another, your age or culture or just good old plain amiability are helpful in bringing some light to the monotonous existence of those residents. And it would have been extremely helpful for me to encounter these people when I was growing up in another country.

But at least now I can help the immigrants who don’t have anyone to depend on. I don’t want to be a pretentious egomaniac and say that my presence there has changed the course of life for those people but – not at all. But I can tell that the communication is doing something to them. Many times I get confused with being their... being their granddaughter and that just makes them so happy because they truly believe that someone who cares for them is there. And that’s true. I do care for them and it’s not deceit nor is it cruelty. Just basic almost silly things like sitting next to someone and holding their hand and responding to them in their language can me so much to a person. And I do whatever I can just to get some sort of humane response for them, be it a participation or just a smile.

I didn’t have anyone to help me when I was struggling as an immigrant because my parents had an overwhelming amount of their own problems, personal and religious. And everyone else was just an ocean and a continent away. But this gives me an option that if I ever reach a point of being unable to help myself and my children are too busy with their own lives and they send me to a nursing home, that there’ll be someone there who’ll talk to me and keep me company and convince me that they’re related to me. Alright.

[APPLAUSE]

KEVIN BRABAZON: Irina, words from the heart. Thank you very much. Our next speaker, analyst if – and Gabriel gave me permission to pronounce this in the American way [CHUCKLES] – so Gabriel Verdaguer, a 25 year old. I met him at NYU, he’s graduate student there, a native or Argentina, and emigrated to the United States with his immediate family of nine in July of 1990. So Gabriel – and we’ll wish you the best with your graduate degree too because I know you’re going to do a great job.

GABRIEL VERDAGUER: So thank you for the invitation. I’ll break down my presentation into two parts. The first part will be just background information, some of it’s repetition of what Kevin mentioned but in a little bit more detail. And the other part is just addressing the issue of the panel and the impact of multi-generational perspectives on some of these issues of migration, conflict, etc.

So as mentioned, I emigrated with my immediate family, nine. So I’m one of seven kids and my two parents. We left Argentina ironically on July 4, 1990 and arrived here on July 5^th. At that time I was nine years old and I had completed my third grade of elementary school over there in Argentina. My paternal and maternal great grandparents had emigrated from Spain and Italy, like many other Argentines. We have backgrounds to Europe and also the experience of emigration within our family. But it’s distant enough where our move... my immediate family’s migration was still sort of very much a big deal within my family.

So as mentioned, the move within my family was the first and the only to migrate among the members of my extended family. So we are a unique sort of branch of the family tree. We migrated mostly by way of my father’s profession. In Argentina he was an oncologist and here in the U.S. he practices psychiatry and he did his residency through a match program which started in Brooklyn, New York. And then my mother was a biochemist and a professor in Argentina and when we came here, because she couldn’t work because of the legal aspects of the visa that my father had, she basically raised us as her full time employment. And, you know, there’s a lot of kids to raise so that’s a big job. And then seven years later she became a teacher, a Spanish teacher here in the U.S. So we...

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

[BEGINNING OF TAPE 2 SIDE A]

GABRIEL VERDAGUER: ...and it was an affinity or an admiration for some of the American ideals and the ways of life, at least as they stood back in 1990. And I think things have changed drastically within the last 16 years. And some of it is, you know, freedom of religion, freedom of speech and some of the effectiveness of the public mechanisms to make change happen. Whereas in Argentina, for example, colloquially you could say that it’s a lot of talk but not a lot of the walk. So people will talk, talk, talk politics. You know, people on the street to political... yes. And they, you know, there’s sort of the change in public society, those do not occur as quickly.

And we’ve returned to Argentina with my immediate family for the first time in December of 1990 [sic], so for the holiday season in the turn of the millennium and I have returned three times since then. We became American citizens in March of 2004 so that’s 14 years later. So it’s a long road for us. So now I’ll address the issue of the panel and I have to say that my family is mostly the antithesis of the typical immigrant experience – to some extent, not... there’s some of the trivial stuff of adaptation. I think I have many anecdotes that I could share, you know, about what it was like to get acclimated to this country. But in terms of conflict and multi-generational conflict, I think my family serves as an example of the exception to the rule.

And there’s two sort of multi-generational conflicts that I want to address. One of them is within the nucleus that moved to this country. So the generation of my parents and then my siblings and myself and then the multi-generational or three generational with my grandparents, my parents and myself. In terms of my parents and my siblings or my siblings generation, I think the conflicts weren’t really of a cultural divide or anything like that. They were just conflicts that were based on growing pains of kids growing up, you know, stay out of drugs, don’t drink alcohol, don’t do anything illegal, unwanted pregnancies. I think those are pretty universal growing pains that created conflict within my family. But I don’t attribute them to them having a traditional view of culture and us trying to rebel against it being here in the United States.

And then I think the reason why there weren’t conflicts with my family were the reasons why they’re multiple and why I think we’re the young antithesis is mostly because again the migration to the U.S. was only two generational. So it was my parents and us. The other reason was because my parents are generally progressive and have a very open outlook about life, about individuality, etc. My parents also carried on effectively this dichotomy of integration and preservation. So they encouraged us to learn English and to get acclimated to the environment that we were in in order to succeed. But they also – especially early on and it’s kind of tapered over the years – but early on they also wanted us to preserve our language, to preserve our culture and also our culinary traditions, which, you know, my parents have both been able to carry very well and transfer to us.

The other reason was because our country of origin is generally developed. Argentina has gone through economic crises and most of their development is concentrated in the urban area of the capital and some other cities, not so much in the provincial where I was born but still generally the country is not, you know, so far from the United States. The other reason is economic status. My parents were able to succeed economically and so I think that’s eased a lot of the conflicts that would have occurred otherwise. And then lastly it’s because I think in general we have very strong family values and very strong relationships amongst direct members of my immediate family and my extended.

With respect to the multi-generational impacts of grandparents, etc., and extended family in terms of cousins aunts and uncles, I think there were two predominant areas of conflict. One of them was religion and the other one is just sort of cultural differences, which is not as important as religion. My parents were raised Catholic through the typical going to school on Sundays and the same, you know, the traditional way of passage of right in terms of Catholicism. But they decided with their kids, which was an area of conflict with the rest of the members of my family, to baptize all the kids into the Catholic faith but then allow us to venture off into our own religious journeys, etc.

As a result, you know, in my family I have a sister who’s Jewish, another who’s Pentecostal and myself I’m Catholic and we have different brands of agnosticism and etc. in my family, which has empowered us to assert our individuality. And I think it also has negated that area of conflict in my immediate family but not so much with the older relatives. So my grandparents, aunts, uncles sometimes frown upon the fact that my parents weren’t so firm with the, you know, with the religious position.

And then the other one was just, you know, like I said cultural or political differences. You know, it’s very common for my grandparents or aunts and uncles to ask me every time I talk to them on the phone about my love life and do I have girlfriend or what, etc., and it’s sort of not... so and I think that’s kind of cultural thing. I don’t attribute that to them specifically and it’s not an issue so much with my parents.

So, I think... I think that covers most of it. I’d be more than happy to take questions when we break from the panel, especially because I think I’m offering an exception to the rules. So I welcome any questions that you may have. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

KEVIN BRABAZON: We always welcome exceptions to the rule. And the prove another rule, while they may in the end underscore the original rule but we’ll see. We have a stand-in or substitute who has very gallantly offered to substitute for a speaker who I believe is out of the country at the moment. Mara Medina immigrated from Mexico in April of 1988, just graduated from Boston College, lived in Europe for a while and first started actually doing some research on multi-generational issues on migration with people, peers she encountered in Europe. She is going to be in Jordan serving on a Fulbright Scholarship doing research on Iraqi migrants and refugees. So Mara, thank you so much especially for this very impromptu last minute stand in.

[APPLAUSE]

MARA MEDINA: Hi, thank you. I’m sorry if my thoughts aren’t as collected as the others. So I’m going to give you a little bit of my background and then just I guess two sort of instances where the multi-generational... I guess effects of being an immigrant has come about that has made me reflect a lot. So, actually my extended family, meaning my grandmother, my uncle and my aunt, had immigrated from Mexico to the United States before my immediate family, i.e., my mother and my brother and my father and I came. And that was for various different reasons.

My grandmother was actually in a very hostile relationship with her husband, her ex-husband, you know, domestic violence issue in Latin America are actually quite high and help and support for women don’t really exist there as much as they should. And so my grandmother fled and that’s why she and my aunt arrived in the United States and they were in New York with my uncle. And they came through more or so legal means. My uncle married an American, my uncle was then able to sponsor my grandmother legally and therefore my aunt conveniently also married and they were there because of this. As you heard, sponsorship takes a long time so my uncle was the only one who was able to sponsor and that sponsorship was actually to my grandmother who was being sponsored over several years. So my mother and our family could not be sponsored.

My mother had lived here when she was 18 for one year, in California in the 70s. Maybe it wasn’t such a great experience because she was like, I never want to live in that country ever again. [LAUGHTER] Was very happy with her, you know, Mexican background and country. We’re from Acapulco Guerrero and it’s a very small... it’s a small city even though a lot of people may know it. It’s not Mexico City, although we’ve lived there, where it’s much more cosmopolitan. So my mother perhaps liked the small town atmosphere – not that Los Angeles provided.

My brother, however, was born very sick, he was born with spina bifida. In developing countries, in G-7 countries, this is a very sort of okay handicap to have. You can survive, there are many programs there and... but in developing countries, including Mexico, this is almost a death sentence. Like my mother’s doctors told them just leave the baby and we’ll take care of the body and my mother was very angry and she took my brother home. His life expectancy was five years at the most in Mexico. So my mother did everything she could to possibly get us to the United States. She knew that this country was going to be heaven for my brother.

And so we were actually here illegally for many years. We were illegal immigrants and we came here with a visa to visit our wonderful grandmom and aunt and uncle in New York. So with that visa – I think back in 80s in Mexico it was much easier to get a visa than it is now. We were also not a poor family from Mexico. We had money, we were in the middle class in Mexico. And so that wasn’t... you know, if you had a certain amount of money in your bank account you were allowed visas cause they would assume that you were going to return and have your nice jobs in Mexico.

So with that my mother obviously didn’t tell me and my brother what was going on. We were going to go visit grandma for a while and so we were just going to pack up our bags and go there. But she did mention how like all my dolls and all my toys were being donated and she’s like well you don’t want them to sit here for six months without anyone playing with them. And, you know, I was six years old, I was like okay. Okay, you can only bring one doll. I’m like, one doll out of all my dolls. And she’s like, okay but like choose the two little ones to come with me. And I said well those are children I need those both.

But in case we arrived in New York and just like Irina had mentioned, we actually had a very difficult beginning because we were illegal. We were in a very squalid apartment, I would say somewhere in the Bronx. I was not even allowed to go to school cause my mother was so scared of the neighborhood. So I learned English with Mr. Rodgers and Sesame Street and we didn’t leave that squalid apartment for about five months. There were no windows, there were... the shower was just a spigot on the wall. I mean it was quite different from sort of middle class background in Mexico where like my father worked at five star hotels and we stayed there regularly.

So again, so we immigrated with this sort of extended family already waiting for us. However, the best hospital for my brother was actually CHOP, Children’s Hospital Philadelphia, and were therefore moved to Philadelphia within six months. My grandmother and my aunt came with us. My uncle, a New Yorker, decided to stay put in Queens and so he was there. Although he always visited us about twice a month growing up. So my uncle was an important part of my... when I was a child. In high school it kind of sort of ended, with the visits it came to be once a month. But anyway, so we lived all together in one house – my grandmother, my aunt, my mother, my brother. My father unfortunately didn’t like the situation. He was used to better means and he left shortly, a year later. So we don’t have any contact with him.

So my mother was left sort of uneducated in the sense that she has a high school equivalency and, you know, in Mexico, you know, you get some sort of training to sort of meet a husband and then you get married and you’re a mother. So... but now with two children, one being extremely ill and we were illegal again, so she obviously cleaned houses. My grandmother cleaned houses for many years. And my grandmother is a bit of a different story. She was actually an accountant in Mexico in one of those hotels and, you know, considering that she’s now 65 that was very strange for her time for a woman to be an accountant, I guess a very man’s job especially in Mexico. So the fact that she was here and although she was legal here, because of language difficulties she could only clean houses. So my grandmother was able to find jobs for my mother.

And growing up like that, that’s what happened. Now my grandmother had more time. My mother had to work two or three jobs cleaning different houses in Society Hill in Philadelphia where all the very wealthy people live. And therefore my grandmother was the one who took me to school, she’s the one who picked me up from school, she’s the one who did a lot because, you know, while we were in school she would be working but, you know, my mother was very used to either being in the hospital with my brother or actually working to feed us.

However, because my grandmother was this sort of strange woman in Mexico with a career, she’s not the usual grandmother. She doesn’t cook. Like honestly, she knows two dishes and that’s very odd for a Mexican grandmother. And she still now cleans houses even though she’s a citizen and she speaks fluent English. However, she does have a very heavy accent. She tends to pronounce every letter. And, you know, my aunt who is now 40 years old – she turned 40 in April. I don’t know, the tradition in Mexico is that if you’re not married you kind of stay and live with your parents. So my aunt is still living with my grandmother which means that, you know, we’re still living in the same house. And, you know, my mother always made the exception, like well I’m a single parent with two kids, of course I’m going to need help from my grandmother. But my aunt’s a different story. She’s, you know, she’s not sick, she doesn’t have, you know, children and she works very well so why is she still living at home and having my grandmother fold everything for her and her laundry is still a mystery to us.

So that’s a bit of my little family. And I guess with two sort of little instances that have prompted me for more reflection are two... okay. So one – I mean this might seem a little trivial at first but I was in relationship for five years with a man called Stephano who’s actually from Italy. And my family, you know, having my grandmother be 65 and my mother 44 and I’m in my... you know, I’m 24. You know, they sort of... you see the trend, you know, having children in their early 20s. And since my family loved Stephano very much and saw that he was really nice young man and that we were so happy together, they were very much expecting a marriage or children quite soon. Well children following a marriage obviously. [LAUGHTER]

And so when Eva talked about like who we are as individuals and how, you know, usually I guess daughters try to assert themselves saying we are who we are as ourselves and not as daughters of somebody and this kind of resonated with me. I had to explain to my mother that, you know, because I have an education and because I’m trying to graduate from university and hopefully go do my masters and, you know, having children and getting married wasn’t like on my sort of near future plan. That, you know, being in a happy relationship was fine with me but, you know, marriage was a different thing. So, you know, and one of the things that happened in my house was that, you know, one time I fought with Stephano. I don’t even remember the type of fight we had.

And my mother knowingly she kind of left us be and, you know, that was okay. It was my grandmother, however, when everyone went to sleep who came to the room and, you know, was going to give me her world advice, her, you know, all her relationships and knowing. And she came to me and she warned me that, you know, men don’t like women who raise their voices and who fought back. You know, and I... she really loved Stephano and she really wanted us to stay together forever and so she... you know, she didn’t want me to fight with him. If we had any sort of discontent I was supposed to swallow and stay put and sort of like say, yes Stephano it’s okay, I’ll change. And, you know, angrily, you know, she’s the woman who left her husband, you know, so it’s kind of ironical.

But, you know, I told her being sort of respectful because, you know, Mexican tradition is to be respectful of all your elders whether you really respect them or not, you know, so it’s sort of like... And that’s not for grandmother but for other individuals [LAUGHS] that have sort of. So I told her quite sort of respectfully but trying to put my foot down saying, you know what grandma, we’re not in Mexico. Stephano is definitely not Mexican and this is who I am. I’m going to fight back if I think I have the right to fight back and I’m not going to lower my head just because I want him to love me forever, you know.

So that was a thing that made me sort of reflect what my family has in mind for me and my future, my relationship whether it’s with Stephano or somebody else. That sort of seemed that, you know, my grandmother had a different view than my mother and not telling my mother what to do she just came to me directly.

Also having lived abroad in three different countries in Europe over three years I found myself being labeled as an American and I was carrying my U.S. passport so I could see the