The underlying issue that my quilt block is attempting to bring awareness to is the perpetual cycle that immigrants face of paying the price of looking for a better life by leaving family behind. When people immigrate from one country to another it mainly means that they have an issue with the country in which they currently reside, leading them to find refuge elsewhere. A few of these issues may be food insecurity, housing instability, personal safety and medical access. As of 2018, the Migration Policy Institute estimated that there were about 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States.2 This gives the sheer amount of people that are in the United States looking for something better than what they had in their home country. Inherently, the unauthorized immigrants that are in the United States also had people in their home countries that couldn’t go with them. For example, both my maternal and paternal family aren't fully here in the United States even though my parents arrived in the United States more than 20 years ago.  Both my mother and father had to initially leave their parents, brothers and sisters due to the lack of opportunities in Mexico at the time. As of 2021, the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities published a statistic that the occurrence of stress and depression was almost double for recently immigrated people in the United States.1 One thing about this fact is that most of the time, immigrants who leave family behind in their home countries also create their own family in the United States who are actually United States citizens. With that being said, between January 1st and June 30th in 2019, ICE has claimed to have removed 14,324 individuals from the United States, all of which had at least one U.S.-born child.3 This sheer data displays the mass amount of people that are being affected by this perpetual cycle of leaving loved ones behind. As of 2014, the journal Demography published a research paper that attempts to quantify the amount of stress that is put onto Mexican immigrants upon arriving in the United States. They concluded that there is a high correlation on the amount of stress that an immigrant faces with the recentness of their arrival.5 Additionally, another conclusion that can be drawn from this is that immigrating into another country has a two-fold negative effect on immigrants. Not only do they leave the memories, places and people they grew up with in their home country, but they also heavily risk being deported and leaving those things they nurtured in the United States or any other country they sought refuge in. 

One of the ways in which I am trying to achieve this portrayal in my quilt project is through many details like color choices along with object placement. The background of the quilt is three vertical stripes in green, white and red to represent the colors of the Mexican flag. Along with this, the fabric used for the green stripe has different shades of green, depicting a light floral pattern. Similarly, the fabric used for the red vertical stripe is made of a velvet fabric which gives it more dimension and volume to the background. One important detail of the background is the obvious start and stop of the colors in the flag which I plan to use to depict the immediate and stern displacement of the following generation. As background, my grandfather left his father in order to make more money as a lumberjack and farmer to raise his family. Similarly, my father left my grandfather as a lumberjack to go to the United States in order to find more opportunities to feed his family and landed as a construction worker. Lastly, I had to leave my father in New Orleans as a construction worker to come to Iowa for my education, in hopes to become an attending doctor. The boundaries of the colors are used in order to section the different jobs that past generations of my family have had; From a lumberjack to construction worker to an attending doctor. On the top of the white stripe, there is an eagle, representing the coat of arms that the Mexican flag has. Along the top and bottom borders of the quilt there will be the lyrics “Solo deje yo a mi padre, Solo labrando la tierra”. These lyrics come from the song Solo Deje Yo A Mi Padre by Montez De Durango. The main story of the song is of a man who describes that he will be leaving for the United States after telling his dad that he was tired of being poor. As time passed, he lost contact with his father and twenty years later, he returned to Mexico only to find his father dead. The end of the song resembles immense regret of having the hope of finding a better future for yourself as an immigrant.

Works Cited

1. Gearing, Robin E., Micki Washburn, Luis R. Torres, L. Christian Carr, Alberto Cabrera, and Reyna Olivares. “Immigration Policy Changes and the Mental Health of Mexican-American Immigrants.” Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities 8, no. 3 (2021): 579–88. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48707386. 

2.  Tellez Lieberman, Jamile, Nishita Dsouza, Carmen R. Valdez, et al. “Interior Immigration Enforcement Experiences, Perceived Discrimination, and Mental Health of U.S.-Citizen Adolescents with Mexican Immigrant Parents.” Journal of Latinx Psychology 13, no. 1 (2025): 18–34. https://doi.org/10.1037/lat0000263.

3. Modern Immigration Wave Brings 59 Million to U.S. | Pew Research Center  

4. Deportation of Parents of U.S.-Born Children CY 2019 1st half  

5. Goldman, Noreen, Anne R. Pebley, Mathew J. Creighton, Graciela M. Teruel, Luis N. Rubalcava, and Chang Chung. “The Consequences of Migration to the United States for Short-Term Changes in the Health of Mexican Immigrants.” Demography 51, no. 4 (2014): 1159–73. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42920051.