Becoming Mexican, Becoming American: My Grandparents’ Opposite Journeys in Identity Through Migration (proposal)

I’ve always thought it is so interesting how one can share a life experience with another, yet each person can have completely different stories which came of that shared experience. My grandparent’s respective migration journey’s remind me of the unique and valauble story each migrant has to tell.

For my migration memoir project, I will be exploring my grandparents opposite journeys and struggles through migration. My Grandpa; growing up in Mexico and immigrating to the US, having to “become American” for his own survival. My Grandma; a very Americanized upbringing in Texas as a first-generation daughter of a Mexican immigrant mother. Often feeling that she wasn’t Mexican or American enough, feeling out of place with a lack of cultural identity. Then later, upon marrying my grandpa, becoming much more in touch with her Mexican roots.

Some goals I have for the project are to better understand my grandparents journeys, to showcase the unique nature of each immigrant/migrant background, and to empower them through recalling their difficult yet fruitful journeys. One main question I am trying to answer are the exact reasons for my grandfather’s move and how he got the courage and ability to do it on his own first. A deeper and more personal question I am trying to answer is what my grandparents greatest struggles were as they adjusted to their new lives and the new expectations of them at such a young age.

I will be conducting several in-person interviews with my grandmother, grandfather, aunt, mother and most likely a close family friend. Some of the resources I will be utilizing are these statistics on immigration numbers during the time my grandfather immigrated to the US, this study on immigrants identity struggles, and my grandmother’s Ancestry.com report for some background on her paternal side which she grew up knowing little about. I am in the process of searching for family videos, photos, scrapbooks, journals and other memorabilia from this time to help bring the story to life.

My migration memoir project will take a multimedia form using text, photos and audio. Inspired by the format of “Cindy and Dayana”, I’d like to write important parts of the story with photo and audio attached beneath, to further explain that moment or the significant of it within the story. An example would be interviewing my grandfather about his physical journey to the US, and including audio from that part of the interview beneath the last photo he took in Mexico, or the first one he took here.

(Photo: My grandmother and grandfather with their five children on Christmas Eve in the first house they owned in Santa Monica, CA.)