Wednesday, January 12, 2022

My So-Called Life (William Jelani Cobb)

Now that you have annotated a few readings and gotten some practice, please submit photos (or a file) of all the pages and your annotations for "My So-Called Life", e.g, summary words, reactions, places you thought the writing was effective and why, lines you thought were important and how so... under Georgia’s 1994 Sentencing Reform Act, which sets the penalties for trying juveniles, Lexus may actually havereceived more time than an adult who had committed the same crimes because adults are routinely sentenced with the possibility of parole. (In my point view , compare with adult crime its is not fare the sentence is too much for the young juveniles ) In February 2003 Lexus was released from prison after serving two years and has gone about quietly and diligently making a good life for himself on the outside. (Impress the young boy Lexus , he had learn leasson from the previous mistake ,he did not give up and move on ) Lieurance told me about Lexus, how she had come to care about this teenager whose intelligences shone from the first conversation they’d had shortly after he was arrested.

By law, juvenile inmates in Georgia are to be separated by “sight and sound” from the adult population. (Its not fair, some young juvenile might be development of their body structure , but their age still in young juvenile should not place together with adult criminal, however they have done mistake in life or they should be place at the juvenile correction center .

For Lexus, the breaking point came when he and his brother returned from school one day to find that there was nothing in the refrigerator. He tells me it was then and there that he decided something had to change.(That lead Lexus into the wrong way ) (lack of parenting and poverty in the family that may lead our own child lead into the wrong way)

Also, at the end of the reading, please summarize in 3 sentences, including the author and title.

Example Summary:

William Jelani Cobb stating about Lexus Sirmans in his article "My So-Called Life." Cobb explains the Sirmans went through a poor and struggle life that led convicted felon finally he can able change himself to move forward.

My So-Called Life

From Essence, June 2004

William Jelani Cobb teaches at Spelman College in Atlanta where he is an assistant professor of history.

William Jelani Cobb teaches at Spelman College in Atlanta

where he is an assistant professor of history.

What do you know about the experiences of young people in prison?

1	The first thing you notice about 19-year-old Lexus Sirmans is his size. At six feet two inches tall and weighing 200 pounds, he has the imposing build of a heavyweight boxer, with long arms and broad shoulders and skin the color of obsidian. He would seem brooding (Unhappiness)were it not for his warm Georgia enunciation and a slightly embarrassed smile. He has old eyes too, which may be the most obvious mark of the two years he spent in prison, which included one year in Lee Arrendale State Prison, the adult correctional facility in Alto, Georgia.
2	In 2001 Lexus pleaded guilty to armed robbery. At age 16, he faced a minimum sentence of ten years in prison without parole, and although a plea ( appeal)agreement resulted in his sentence being reduced to five years, he would serve two years, not with other juveniles, but with adults.
3	Young men like Lexus—urban, angry impoverished and unincluded—find themselves at the center of a national debate on how to address juvenile crime. “The trend has been to abandon the rehabilitative model and embrace a more retributive form of punishment,” explains the Reverend Roslyn Satchel, an attorney with the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta.
4	This often means trying juveniles such as Lexus as adults. Indeed, under Georgia’s 1994 Sentencing Reform Act, which sets the penalties for trying juveniles, Lexus may actually havereceived more time than an adult who had committed the same crimes because adults are routinely sentenced with the possibility of parole. (In my point view , compare with adult crime its is not fare the sentence is too much for the young juveniles ) Juveniles are not. In Lexus’s case, the conditions of his plea arrangement saved him from a possible life sentence.
5	In February 2003 Lexus was released from prison after serving two years and has gone about quietly and diligently making a good life for himself on the outside. He found a job, went back to church immediately and began searching for a college to attend.
6	“He’s trying really hard,” says Peggy Lieurance, the founder of Starfish Ministry, a correspondence-support ministry for incarcerated youths, and Lexus’s self-appointed mentor and staunch advocate.
7	Lieurance told me about Lexus, how she had come to care about this teenager whose intelligences shone from the first conversation they’d had shortly after he was arrested. “He’s a wonderful young man, despite all he has been through,” she offered.
8	Every day, thousands of young Black men like Lexus leave correctional institutions with no clear sense of what comes next. “There are barriers everywhere when these young people reenter society,” says Satchel. “With a record, they often find it impossible to get jobs and housing. Many of them have no home to return to.” What, I wonder, has made the difference for Lexus Sirmans? He faced the same challenges as other young men who had done time, yet he seemed to be moving consistently forward. With all we hear about the crimes that Black boys commit, we should also hear the story of one young man who is trying to turn things around.

	Man of the House

9	Following a phone introduction by Peggy Lieurance, Lexus and I met for the first time a month after he was released. I wanted to know his story, but I also hoped that I could share something with him that would spur (stiulus) him on. It wasn’t just the similarity of our impoverished, dangerous inner-city childhoods; in fact, we looked as though we could be brothers—two outsized Black men with broad features and reserved demeanors( Manner /behavior) . On the day of our first meeting, Lexus rolled into the parking lot of a fast-food joint just outside Atlanta. His car stereo thumped thick, drawling southern hip-hop. He had been free just over six weeks and was still delighting in things the rest of us take for granted, like being able to eat whenever he wanted to. Nevertheless, Lexus confesses, “The hardest thing about being out is having to make my own decisions. In prison they tell you when to eat, when to sleep, when to dress or see your family. You walk in a line. The only decision you get to make is whether or not you’re going into the block,” he says, referring to an isolation unit that some juveniles prefer to the more violent general-population cells.
10	As we talked that day, I learned Lexus was the first son in a family of four children. When he was 7 years old, his parents’ marriage began to unravel(Untangle/solve). They divorced shortly after that. He seemed to be on the right track, excelling in school and sports until he hit adolescence and his easygoing manner began to give way to a simmering (boil gently/furious) anger. His parents said little to him about the problems that had led to the divorce, but the issue became increasingly more important in his life as he grew older. He came to resent feeling that he was raising himself because his mother, Josephine Sirmans, worked such long hours as a nurse’s aide. His father, Gary, contributed financially, but as Lexus recalls, needs often went unmet. For Lexus, his father’s physical absence also left a void. As with the finances, Gary showed up when he could, but not necessarily when his children needed him most. When he did come around, conversations were brief, boiled down, the bare minimum. “I felt pressured to be the man of the house,” Lexus tells me. “I was 14, the oldest living male living there. It was just me and my little brother left in the house—the others had moved out. My mother wasn’t making enough to take care of us, I didn’t depend on my father back then.”
11	For Lexus’s mother, meeting the needs of her children was difficult and exhausting. She often worked double shifts at her job and was also studying to become a nurse practitioner so she could make a better life for her family. “He saw me struggling to work and go to school, and he would tell me that things would be OK and that one day he would buy me a house,” she recalls. For Lexus, the breaking point came when he and his brother returned from school one day to find that there was nothing in the refrigerator. He tells me it was then and there that he decided something had to change.(That lead him into the wrong way )

	Boys in the Hood

12	“I started cutting school and began to hustle,” Lexus confesses. He and his best friend, Skip, hooked up with the neighborhood players and began selling weed. “I was sick of having nothing,” Lexus says quietly. “Sick of seeing my family with nothing.” Sometimes Lexus still attended school, and he did well in his favorite classes. For a while he made the honor roll and even played linebacker on the football team, but by the time he was 15 he had become a full-time hustler.
13	“I went from being on the honor roll at school to just being about money.” With his drug earnings, Lexus bought clothes for himself and his brother, convincing his busy mother that the money came from odd neighborhood jobs.
14	His peers regularly indulged in drug use,(allow someone to enjoy ) “but I never even tried any of it,” he tells me. He was, even then, something of a loner, and not particularly concerned with impressing others. Instead, he embraced a Darwinist street ethic: “I felt that if I had to make things bad for someone else because that was the only way to make things good for my family, then that was what was going to happen.”

	Screams in the Night

15	Viewed through the lens of music videos and the nightly news parade of Black offenders that reduce our communities to thug habitats, the image of Black boys as predators-in-waiting has proliferated. Some experts cite this as a factor in the new, harsher juvenile-crime laws. But Nina Hickson, chief judge of the Fulton County Juvenile Court in Atlanta, is convinced that the harsher laws do nothing to deter crime. She’s also troubled by the fact they are most often applied to Black boys. “I don’t buy the notion that you have more Black boys committing serious acts,” she says. “What you have is the issue of discretion. District attorneys decide which cases to pursue in adult court, and it’s easier to prosecute an indigent child than a child of means.” While youth crime has decreased, Hickson and a number of other advocates are quick to point out that it was declining even before the new laws were enacted.
16	In February 2001, Lexus and one of his crew were charged with committing a car theft at gunpoint. They were apprehended shortly thereafter and tried separately. Lexus’s trial ended in a hung jury, a situation his attorney used to negotiate a plea bargain with a maximum sentence of five years. His friend was sentenced to a minimum of ten years in prison. While Lexus didn’t get the severe mandatory sentence that so many of his peers did, he was ordered to serve his time in an adult facility.
17	By law, juvenile inmates in Georgia are to be separated by “sight and sound” from the adult population. But a hearing in January 2003 before the Georgia state legislature revealed widespread violations of the age-segregation policy. In one particularly egregious incident at Alto, a group of minors (not including Lexus) was strip-searched in full view of the jeering adult population—an incident the Georgia Department of Corrections denies. But as Lexus commented, “You’re not supposed to go across the yard to the adult facility until you’re 18,” he says, “but it didn’t go down like that for me.” Lexus spent every day of his sentence “across the yard.”
18	Lexus was 17 years old with no prior criminal record when he entered the state prison at Alto. There he would see things that continue to haunt him. Almost inaudibly, he recounts the story of a friend of his—also a juvenile—who was invited to gamble with a set of older inmates. The young man quickly fell into debt, and the older men used this as an excuse to seize any of his belongs they desired. It didn’t take long for the thefts to escalate into something much worse. The boy was raped one night, an incident Lexus overheard as he sat locked in his cell across the corridor. He tells me another story about a fight he witnessed between two adult inmates. “One guy kept getting stabbed so badly,” Lexus says, his face turned away from mine.
19	What says with him, echoing in his memory are the screams he used to hear in the Alto nights. “Sometimes, remembering those times still keeps me up at night,” he whispers. Though his size may have played a role in protecting him from harm, Lexus believes he avoided trouble by keeping to himself, saying his prayers and “staying focused.” He’s big on this word focus. To hear him tell it, learning to focus is what got him through his time upstate. He focused on keeping busy—working out, reading and taking G.E.D. classes.
20	Josephine Sirmans spoke to her son after he was arrested, asking him how he would have felt if someone had robbed her at gunpoint. The question shook him. She urged her son to keep praying and to read his Bible every day. He explains that something clicked for him when he had sat on the witness stand talking about crimes he had committed. “I realized that being in jail wasn’t me,” he says simply. “There was too much out there in the world for me to do to be locked up. I started out wanting to help my family and keep my brother on the right path, but I couldn’t do either one when I got arrested.”

	Father and Son

21	When Lexus was summoned to the visiting room one afternoon two months into his sentence, he thought his mother had left work early to take the long drive upstate for a surprise visit. He walked into the room to find his father, Gary, seated at a table waiting to speak to him. They hadn’t seen each other in several months. Lexus’s mother had called Gary shortly after her son was arrested. While Lexus’s father didn’t attend the trial, or the hearing in which his son was sentenced, the more he thought about it, the more he blamed himself for his son’s trouble. “I was never there for him like I should have been,” Gary says. He came to Alto hoping to rebuild their relationship. “It was extremely painful seeing my boy locked away like that.” He believes that his absence from the home had left Lexus with too much time on his hands and too few examples to counter “negative peer pressure.” He took that first long drive upstate from Decatur to Alto, resolved to reconnect with his son. “I felt as if I had to let him know that I’m still his father and that I’d be there for him if he needed me,” he says.
22	“I held a grudge against him at first,” Lexus recalls. But during his father’s biweekly visits, his resistance gradually dissolved. “We spent more time together when I was locked up than we ever did when I was on the street,” Lexus says. The renewed relationship with his father, a heating and air-conditioning technician, helped Lexus let go of the anger he’d held inside for so long, the anger of a boy forced to be a man too soon. “I tried to keep his mind occupied on ways to make money other than selling drugs when he came home,” Gary says. “I told him that I would have a job lined up for him when he got out.”
23	Over the course of their conversations, a plan unfolded: Upon his release, Lexus would start out as an apprentice technician and enroll in night classes. When he had gained enough experience, the two would go into the refrigeration business together. Lexus soon resolved that when he came home, he would avoid the old crew, with the exception of his friend Skip, who had stopped dealing and returned to both the church and high school almost immediately after Lexus was arrested. “They call Alto ‘the revolving door,’” Lexus reflects. “They told me that my chances of coming back to prison were eight out of ten. But I’ve never been one to fall for the same thing twice.”

	You Can Go Home Again

24	Still, returning home has been a challenge for him. “Coming home he found that he had changed, but nothing else had,” says Peggy Lieurance. Many of the old crew were still around, floating from one dead-end hustle to the next. Lexus learned that he would have to remain focused on the outside as well. But by far the most difficult thing he had to confront was losing Skip: The week that Lexus was released, his boyhood friend was murdered, shot seven times on his eighteenth birthday during a dispute. “Before I even got a chance to say ‘hey,’ he was gone,” Lexus says.
25	But as difficult as it was to come home, Lexus also had some support. “Unlike many other young people, Lexus has a strong network,” Lieurance says. “He had a family who stuck by him all the way through this mess.” And he has Lieurance. She has remained a presence in his life, calling regularly to check on his progress and to encourage him to keep working hard. She tells him he has much to offer the world if only he keeps believing in himself. Josephine Sirmans shifts uncomfortably in her chair when talking about her oldest boy and the page he is trying to turn. “He has worked very hard to make a life for himself,” she says. “Thank God he’s putting this behind him at an early age.” The key has been prayer, she says. “This was something that God had to help him through.”
26	Three weeks after Lexus was released, Gary Sirmans was able to get his son the job he had promised him as an apprentice repairman for a heating and air-conditioning company. The hours are long: He leaves home at 6:30 AM and often doesn’t get back until 7 PM. But Lexus works in the same unit as his father and notes that the day goes by faster with good company. In the evenings, Lexus lifts weights on the porch or watches movies. Most nights, he’s in bed by 11:30 PM. His rigid devotion to work is not really surprising considering his long-standing concern about being able to contribute financially to his family. But on another level, it seems that Lexus is trying to distill life on the outside down to its simplest polarities—work and rest—as a means of avoiding the gray areas that could lead to trouble. “I just want to work,” he says.

	College-Bound

27	Less than a month after his release, Lexus returned to the Regional Youth Detention Center to speak to young men who were being sent up to the adult facility. He talked with them about how to make the time serve them, rather than their serving the time. “As you get older, seeing young people incarcerated gets to be painful,” he says, sounding aged beyond his years. “You know they’re gonna wind up having bad memories.” Going back inside may have been as useful for Lexus as it was for the young men he spoke to: It was an additional reminder that he didn’t want to be one of the many who will find themselves back behind bars. Lexus advised his peers to “avoid troublemakers.” Near the end of his talk, he told them to “stay focused.”
28	Four months after our first meeting, Lexus calls, asking me to help him with his application to a local technical college. When I pick him up, we slap palms and run through the elaborate Brothers’ Handshake before punctuating it with The One-Armed Hug. He whips out a picture of his “lady friend,” a young woman who’s going away to college in a few weeks. We walk across Spelman’s campus where I teach history. When I show him my office he marvels at the shelves of books I have. “I read this in prison,” he says, holding a copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I pull several of my favorite Walter Mosley novels off the shelf and give them to him. A few hours later, we mail off his application. As we part I tell him that he’s out to do some big things. Lexus pauses, then cracks that slightly embarrassed smile.

Monday, January 10, 2022

The trauma of immigrating didn’t stop when i crossed the border.

The Trauma of Immigrating Didn't Stop When I Crossed the Border

Sum up this article in 2-3 sentences with the author, title, main people, events, and so on. Make sure you put "quotation marks" around article titles, not italics, as those are for books.

Reyna Grande BuzzFeed Contributor who wrote and published in2018 “ The trauma of immigrating did’t stop when I cross the border” is a documentary real life story about a child who went through emotional distress while crossing the border and the painful situation that immigration barrier their family into stranger.

Find a line or passage that stood out to you that was well-written or folks could connect to it or both.

Include that line here: line 25

It is the central irony of my life that my parents emigrated to try to save our family , but by doing so, they destroyed it.

Now discuss why that line is relevant, important. What do certain words or phrases within it imply/suggest?

After ready the article I fully understand about their father good intention to save his family to get a better life. It is not that he wanted to abandoned his family , left his own child hungry , poor , vulnerable. But the child was grew up without parent and they went through the painful situation , dealing with emotional distress . On the other hand the parent had destroyed their life journey and emigrated to the other place find a better life to save their own family.

As for me I never want my parents leaves me behind with other people . In my opinion a child should live and giving care by parents. But i understand that sometimes the circumstances not allow us to fulfil our desire.In order to improve our life or get a better life we had to surrender other matter and struggle and we had passed the painful situation , unwanted situation to get a better life. In the article her father risk his life went to the United States to find a better life to save his family to give a better life for his generation.

Reyna Grande BuzzFeed Contributor Posted on June 19, 2018, at 2:23 p.m. ET

1. My parents destroyed our family when they immigrated to the US — but I'm still grateful they did. (An excerpt from The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives.)

2. Nobody had to tell me who the man sitting on my grandmother’s couch was.

I’d grown up looking at his photograph hanging on our wall.

He’d put on weight and wore glasses now.

Instead of being black and white like in the photo, he was in color, his skin like rain-soaked earth.

3. I had to stand before this clean, well-fed stranger while wearing a tattered dress, my head infested with lice, my belly swollen with tapeworm. I looked down at my dusty feet, the dirt caked under my toenails, my broken sandals held together by wire.

“Go say hello to your father,” my aunt said, pushing me toward him. All I wanted to do was run away.

4. He had left eight years before, when I was 2, and had now returned to find his children — me, my older brother, and sister — just as he had left us: hungry, poor, vulnerable.

5. He hugged me too briefly, too hesitantly. And I realized that we were strangers to him, too.

6. This stranger, my father, had borrowed money from everyone he knew and hired a smuggler to take me and my siblings north to his home in the United States, where we were to begin a new life together. So, at the age of 9 and a half, I found myself at the US border and became an “illegal” human being by crossing without permission for a chance to finally have a family.

7. I remember so vividly that moment when we were trying to cross, crawling through bushes, jumping over rocks, my body burning from the heat of the unforgiving sun and the white-hot fear inside me at the thought of being caught and losing my chance of having my father back in my life. At 9 years old, I was too little to make the crossing, and I could not make my legs run fast enough. I prayed for wings.

8. Border Patrol caught us and sent us back to Tijuana twice. It was a miracle that we made it the third time, although my father had to carry me on his back most of the way. It was there at the US border where I got my first piggyback ride from my father.

9. My parents didn’t leave Mexico, they fled — not for their lives, but for life — seeking economic refuge from a country that couldn’t or wouldn’t give them the means to provide for their family. Mexico had failed them, and so they fled across the border to pursue the dream to give us a house and a better life.

10. Later I would come to learn that immigrant families who relocate together tend to fare better than those who go through separation. Unfortunately, my family couldn’t immigrate together. Financially, it wasn’t possible. Legally, it wasn’t feasible. We couldn’t come here as “real” refugees. Poverty, no matter how extreme, doesn’t meet any of the criteria for asylum. The term “economic refugee,” a negative term here and in Europe, doesn’t encourage compassion in the receiving country, either socially or politically.

11. Yet, what all displaced people have most in common, regardless of where we come from, regardless if we are “official” refugees or “illegal” immigrants, is our trauma. The trauma that propels us to this land, and the traumatic experiences that await us.

12. My first traumatic experience happened before I had the ability to remember. Due to a national debt crisis and subsequent peso devaluations, there were no jobs in Mexico, so in 1977 my father left his wife and children behind and became part of the largest wave of migration from Mexico ever, a wave that has only recently ended. I don’t remember his departure. In my earliest memories, he was already gone. My identity as a little girl was that of a daughter with an absent father — a father I knew existed only through that black-and-white photograph. While he was away, our relationship was the empty space he’d left behind in my life.

13. Then the second trauma of my life occurred. I was 4 years old when I watched my mother walk away from me to go to the land across the border — El Otro Lado. I didn’t know if I’d ever see her again. I stayed behind with relatives who didn’t want me, who treated me as a burden and made me feel even more unloved and unwanted than I already felt.

14. My childhood was defined by the fear of being forgotten or abandoned, of being replaced by US-born siblings.

15. As a child, I didn’t understand why my parents had emigrated(verb) ( moved abroad ) . I believed that they had left because they didn’t love me enough either to stay with me or to take me with them.

16. Part of me didn’t blame them for leaving.

Though only a three-hour bus ride from Acapulco, my hometown is no beach resort.

Iguala, Guerrero, isn’t a place where you can thrive.

You live a hand-to-mouth existence where all you think of is how to survive another day.

Guerrero is the second-poorest state in Mexico, with 70% of the population living in poverty.

Due to the so-called war on drugs, it is also now the most violent state in Mexico, which is the second-most-violent country in the world.

In 2016, there were 23,000 homicides in Mexico, surpassed only by Syria, but our war — supported by the United States through the millions of dollars in funding, training of soldiers, and provisions of military aircraft, weapons, and vehicles to the Mexican government — isn’t considered a “real” war, so Mexicans don’t qualify for asylum.

The United States considers persecution by a government a valid criterion for asylum, but not exploitation (taking advantage) by criminal gangs or cartels.

17. Iguala is surrounded by the poppy fields that feed the US drug epidemic, and the city bus station doubles as a distribution center for the cartels.

Mexico supplies 90% of the US’s heroin, and Guerrero grows 50% of the poppies for the heroin trade.

In this city of dirt roads and shacks, many locals survive by working in the poppy fields or in the US-owned garment factory in my old neighborhood. The factory pays the workers $5 a day, but a pizza in Iguala will cost them $10. Iguala is also a place of special infamy — 43 college students were taken and disappeared by the police working together with the cartel in 2014. To this day, we still don’t know what happened to those students.

18. What sustained me through the years of separation from my parents was my dream of having a family again. I clung to it through the birthdays and Christmases, Mother’s Days and Father’s Days. I clung to it through the three attempts to cross the border and the drive along Interstate 5 to the front door of my father’s home in Northeast Los Angeles.

19. I wish I could tell you that this is where and how my story ends, with this long-awaited reunification. With my siblings and me arriving at our father’s house and starting a new life together in this great land of opportunity. I wish I could tell you that we got our happily-ever-after, and the trauma ended with the border crossing, and as soon as we overcame that barrier the psychological wounds began to heal. Unfortunately for us immigrants, the trauma doesn’t end with a successful border crossing. I believe that for the rest of your life, you carry that border inside of you. It becomes part of your psyche, your being, your identity.

20. Even beyond being undocumented and fearing deportation and having to live in the shadows of society was the dawning realization that there was a mismatch between how I had imagined my new home and the reality of how it actually was.

21. After so many years of separation, we didn’t know each other.

Though physically we had crossed the border, we’d missed so many years of each other’s lives that emotionally and psychologically there was still a barrier between us. (Having emotion distress while crossing the border)

Immigration had turned my parents and me into strangers. The family I once had in Mexico no longer existed.

22. As time went on, the separation continued.

As I grew up and assimilated ( fully understand ) , my assimilation became another barrier between me and my parents.

When I learned English at the expense of Spanish, language increased the separation.

The day I started junior high, I surpassed my parents, who had only gone to elementary school, and so my education further separated us.

23. Our emotions became a barrier as well.

I was the daughter they left behind, and for most of my life, my relationship with my parents was filtered through that lens.

Anger, resentment, and shame tainted how I saw them and interacted with them.

My father dealt with his own psychological pain by drowning it in a can of Budweiser.

Alcoholism helped him numb the suffering caused by his low-paying job, his limited English skills, his alienation in US culture, but it also led him to a slow, painful death.

24. Thirty years would pass, and I would become a mother, wife, and successful writer.

Yet when my father died in 2011, he was as much a stranger to me as he was when I first met him in my grandmother’s home.

25. It is the central irony of my life that my parents emigrated to try to save our family, but by doing so, they destroyed it.

26. I know my experience isn’t unique. Eighty percent of immigrant children in US schools have been separated from their families during the process of migration.

Complicated family dynamics add to the burden these children are already carrying, and schools that serve these children need to consider the trauma created by separation.

Nothing is more counterproductive than the goal of rapid integration of immigrant and refugee children into the community.

Assimilation and acculturation add to their post-traumatic stress. Immigrant and refugee children need time, patience, love, and psychological help to heal from their experiences.

Trauma follows them into the classroom as it did me, and powerfully affects performance and the ability to learn.

27. My education in US schools was almost as traumatic as being abandoned by my parents.

When I started fifth grade in Los Angeles, language was a barrier.

Because I spoke no English, I was put at a corner table and ignored by my teacher.

I felt voiceless. I sat in that corner, on the outside looking in, marginalized, excluded, “othered.” Months went by, and for my teacher, it was as if I didn’t exist.

28. Once I learned English, I still felt invisible when the books given to me by my teachers and the librarians had nothing to do with my experience.

While I was fascinated by books such as Sweet Valley High, which gave me a glimpse into a world that wasn’t mine — white, middle-class America — I knew that life could never be mine.

Through the years, I’d often wonder, Where am I in these stories? Invisibility became another barrier to overcome.

29. At 13 years old, I understood that I would have to write my way into existence.

30. Growing up, however, I didn’t know I was traumatized.

I didn’t have the words to describe what I felt: anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder.

These words weren’t part of my vocabulary, so I never used them — I described my feelings through stories. ( she went through alot of painful situation she was lucky that she did not suffer emotional problem . All her painful life she express with the story )

31. And yet, I know I was lucky. If I arrived at the border today seeking asylum, I would have the door slammed in my face.

I would be told that I haven’t suffered enough, that I should go back to my country and suffer some more.

Even if I was seeking refuge, I was not a refugee.

32. Three years ago, there was a surge in unaccompanied child immigrants, most from Central America, who came seeking refuge from poverty, oppression, and violence created by criminal gangs.

Their migration continues, though their arrival at the border is no longer in record numbers because the United States is now paying Mexico to catch and deport these children before they reach the border.

But for the ones who do arrive in the United States, after all the trauma they’ve endured in their countries and during the long journey to the border, they’re thrown into detention centers and forced to face federal immigration judges to plead their cases in court, often without legal representation.

33. At 9 and a half years old, the same age my daughter is now, I broke US law and became a “criminal” for daring to aspire to a better future. I ran across the border seeking refuge from abandonment, desperate to leave behind me those feelings of being unwanted and unloved.

Once across, I thought I was done with borders; I didn’t know there would be more.

Yet, in the past 32 years that I’ve lived in this country, I’ve had to cross cultural, language, legal, gender, and career barriers, and more.

34. Writing continues to be an act of survival.

As an immigrant or refugee, there is no end to trauma.

You’re always the object of hostile acts and political rhetoric that accuses you of being a criminal and a rapist.

And it takes a toll. But I’m grateful that my experience was not as grueling (exhausting) and horrific as that of those coming today.

Unlike these new immigrants and refugees, I did not experience the terrors of war; I did not have any family members killed or disappeared by criminal gangs or narcos ( illegal drug); I did not have a gun put to my head to force me to join a gang.

I did not travel alone to the border: I did not ride the deadly train, La Bestia, across Mexico;

I was not robbed; I was not raped; I was not attacked by gangs, bandits, or corrupt Mexican officials along the way. I was not a victim of sex trafficking or child labor.

35. I was a victim of a consequence of migration that is often overlooked or given little importance — the psychological violence of watching your family fall apart.

Family separation and disintegration is the price my family paid for a shot at the American Dream.

36. My story in the United States was full of abuse and instability, and it was hard to find my way in this country, to try to earn my right to remain and find a place to belong, but lucky for me, I finally did.

Under an amnesty signed by Ronald Reagan, my family became legal residents, and eventually US citizens.

Despite psychological and emotional distress, I went to college and became the first in my family to get a university diploma.

She became the first graduated kids in the family.

I became a teacher, a published author, a homeowner. I have won awards.

I married a good man and have two beautiful children. I accomplished every goal I set for myself and have been more than lucky.

37. With children of my own, I have come to understand my father in a way I could not have before.

I look at my children and try to imagine what it would be like to leave them, to walk away from them because I cannot provide for them.

I look at my 9-year-old daughter and try to imagine endangering her life by taking her across the US border.

Would my own child survive what I survived? I don’t know. What I do know is that if I were put in my father’s place, I would do the same.

I would risk everything for my children.

38. I bear witness every day to the trauma of our loss, suffering wounds that will never heal.

It’s a price I would pay a hundred times over because one of my father’s greatest gifts to me, and indirectly to his grandchildren, is this: His decision to immigrate has allowed me to be the parent he could never be.

Unlike him, I will never be a stranger to my children.

At first she misunderstand to her dad because his dad abandon them

39. I now get to be the parent who stays. ●

Born in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico, Reyna Grande was 2 years old when her father left for the United States to find work.

Her mother followed her father north two years later, leaving Reyna and her siblings behind in Mexico.

In 1985, when Reyna was going on 10, she left Iguala and entered the United States as an undocumented immigrant, and later went on to become the first person in her family to graduate from college. Now, she is an award-winning novelist and memoirist.

She has received an American Book Award, the El Premio Aztlán Literary Award, and the International Latino Book Award.

In 2012, she was a finalist for the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Awards, and in 2015 she was honored with a Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature.

Her novels, Across a Hundred Mountains and Dancing With Butterflies, were published to critical acclaim. In her latest book, The Distance Between Us, Reyna writes about her life before and after immigrating as a child from Mexico to the United States.

It is now available as a young readers edition from Aladdin Books. She has contributed an essay to The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, which was published in April 2018. Her new memoir, A Dream Called Home, will be published in 2018 by Atria.