Manuela "Ella" Alexandra Fernandez

More Than “The One That Got Away”

    Whose dreams do I carry on my shoulders? Mine? My family’s? My people’s? That was a question that I asked myself as I saw the news that a tear gas bomb had been thrown into the class right above mine in my school. I’d be graduating and moving soon, so I’d be leaving all of this behind, right? But how much actually stays behind, and how much of it will haunt me? Moving to the United States was the hardest thing I’d have to do, especially with what it meant. Having to leave my father and grandmother behind, along with my country, was a sacrifice I had to make to obtain the title of “The one that made it out”, a heavy title indeed. A certain writer connects with my experience quite a lot, Reyna Grande. Reading her book “A Dream Called Home” made me feel validated in my experience and helped me realize that I’m not alone, so I hope I can do the same for you with this essay. As I write this, I’ve been in the United States for almost 4 months, and it’s been 4 months of intense experiences to say the least, but what I learned most was that my story goes beyond “The One That Made it Out”.

    Ever since I was little, my memories of each day would start with the most beautiful of views, El Avila. The Avila is a mountain range near my home, Caracas, Venezuela, that rises to almost 9,000 feet. Of course, the only thing I really knew about it was that whenever I looked at it from outside my window, it looked just like a painting. Everything in Venezuela seemed painted, honestly. Our national tree had the brightest yellow flowers, and the “guacamayas” (macaws) were like small rainbows in the blue skies. All I could think of whenever I saw my country was that if Venezuela were an art piece, painted and sculpted by human hands, its creator must have loved it dearly. In the book “A Dream Called Home,” Reyna explains her love for her home, and now I understand her point: no matter how far you are, you’ll always have your feet and heart in your home country. The beauty wasn’t the only thing I now miss about home; I now see how much I miss the people and the culture. I grew up very “lucky”. Whenever outsiders are told about Venezuela, they are only told the horrible things. “Savages”, “Loud”, “Violent”, “Crime”, “Blood”, I could go on forever. I always found that so strange. It felt like every memory I told someone was some sort of fantasy or fictitious tall story to entertain them. For some reason, my family’s pride made me feel that I had to be like them and spread how amazing my country is, even if it meant shoving it down their throats.

    This is where I want you to meet a writer whose story reflects my own, someone you will be reading about quite a bit throughout this essay. “The stories were all set in my hometown…a world–an experience–neither she (fiction teacher) nor my classmates knew anything about.” Grande, Reyna. A Dream Called Home. Chapter 10, p. 75, Atria Books, 2018. Miss Reyna Grande moved from the United States to her home in Mexico, where her personal experiences at home were seen as acts of fiction, just like mine. It seemed almost like my life was a movie for the Yanquis to be entertained by. They were already told the horrible things about “my people”, so what stops them from assuming the worst of me? If you are fed one type of information over and over, it will be the only thing you see until proven otherwise. This is what writer Ngozi Adichie likes to call A Single Story. “Show a person as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Danger of a Single Story. Her experience with single stories is pretty similar to mine, but how is it fair that I need to explain or prove to someone that my home is more than war grounds? I felt like defending my home from rumors was basically my mission.

    My life was nothing like the whispers of American streets like to say. I grew up with a religious family, I was always fed, I went to a good school, I had access to technology, and my childhood was filled with laughter. I now feel slightly ashamed of living a blessed life, like I’m betraying something I'm supposed to be. I get looks whenever I mention that I have known English since I was in kindergarten and learned enough to now be listened to with only a small trace of my accent. I hear whispers of doubt when I say I got a Harvard Model of United Nations prize when I went with my Venezuelan debate team to Boston. I hear laughs when I say my favorite music isn’t reggaeton. This made meeting people from the United States an adventure in itself, because suddenly, they were the ones who decided if I was “Latina enough”. Whenever I came back home from my trips, I would sit in my corner of the classroom, thinking about where I would fit best. Would I fit more in the United States or Venezuela? Will I be happier being Latina or hanging with the Yaquis? As mentioned in an essay called “People Like Me: Overcoming Imposter Syndrome in Identity and Latinidad,” University Wire, Uloop, Inc., 2025: “I’m just Latino enough to be interesting to… people who are white… but I’m also not really accepted as a real Latino.” My doubts reflected in school and my social life a lot, especially when a life-changing event happened to me.

    When I lost my mother, I was 7, and I was one lost 7-year-old. The only thing I had now was a suddenly very overprotective Venezuelan family and a school where I was never approached by my classmates in fear they would “say the wrong things”. I supported my isolation and drowned myself in school, especially in English, where I thrived. With the help of my trips to California and my try-hard attitude in class, I gained the reputation of being a sort of Venezuelan yanqui, the girl who was amazing at English and would do everyone’s English work in hopes of making some sort of friends in class. So even if I were seen as a black sheep at home, maybe I wouldn’t be in the United States. So I started planning, planning what I needed to move to the United States with my aunt and live the American dream. It was the perfect path. Move to the United States, study hard, and do what I love while receiving support from my Venezuelan aunt, who has lived in the United States for years, so she would understand my situation, right? I had already been visiting the States every year since I was little, but I never really knew how big the difference between going for a vacation and living there was. I was blinded by the idea of living the American Dream that I didn’t notice the hole I had been digging for 11 years.

    By December 2024, I had been consoling my father, who had been in a constant state of bittersweet sadness as my day to move approached. For as long as I could remember, it had always been my dad and me against the world. He gave everything to raise me as a widowed father, giving me happiness, a good education, and loving me while everyone doubted that he would do it. That’s why the last words I said to him as I gave him one last hug at the airport were “I’m proud of you”. I had been planning for this moment all my life, but when I got on the plane, I found myself fighting the strongest urge to drop my bags and run back to my dad, something that wasn’t part of my big plan. Suddenly, I was scared. This was going to be my new life, my new home, but what if I couldn’t make it really my home? Like Reyna Grande said: “I was afraid of not being able to make this new place feel like a real home, a place where I belong”. There was the possibility that I had been reaching for the unreachable for 11 years, and as I stepped foot in California and hugged my aunt, that possibility became more real than ever before.

    The days leading up to my first day of class went by pretty fast, and I was so busy with getting a new phone number, bag for school, and class calendar, that I never really felt anything other than happiness and nerves, so when I was stepping into the room where the international student orientation was going to be, I was really excited to meet other students in my situation. This is where I met my friend, Monique, a girl from Mexico. Even though we were from different homes, our Latin American culture made it feel like she was a little piece of home here, and we could be there for each other. MiraCosta College had been a sanctuary for international students, a place where everyone could “fit in”, so I know I made the right choice, a relief that made my nerves go away.

    As weeks passed, I was on top of the world. I made friends, was doing great in class, and felt free. It seemed like everything was going according to plan, but the weird thing is that all this “perfect” plan didn’t make me feel much at all. I was supposed to be extremely happy that everything was going well, but the growing feeling of not belonging started to grow on me. I could count the times I had been stereotyped in both of my hands, but that doesn’t make those incidents any less relevant. With everything going on in the United States, it wasn’t a surprise that a dangerous “alien” like me would find it challenging to spend a week without any “incidents”. In Stephanie L. Carnes and Lindsey Disney’s “Social Inclusion, Belonging, and School-Based Experiences in Central American Immigrant Youth.”, it’s mentioned how "When a Hispanic person does a little thing to an American, all the blame goes to us... They’re really strict with those who are from outside of this country." and I couldn’t agree more. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so aware of my “foreignness” until now. I even felt “too Latina” around my Latino family that has been living in the US for 40 years. “For the first time in my life, I felt uncomfortable in my cultural identity, despite being surrounded by students like me and spaces meant to celebrate our cultures.” These are words of University Wire’s essay called “People Like Me: Overcoming Imposter Syndrome in Identity and Latinidad." I couldn’t relate more to them. Being an outsider in your own family was the worst feeling I could have. That’s where it all started to sink in.

    Calls with my dad now lasted longer, the feeling of loneliness grew, and the hopes of making this place my home seemed to go out like a flame trying so hard to hang on. I entered a stage that was full of doubt. Was this a bad idea? Should I go back to Venezuela? If I don’t belong here or at home, then where do I belong? These are questions that I realized every international student has. I had tried so hard to find a place where I could be me and be a happy me, but each path I walked seemed to take me to a wall. Not only did I feel I was getting nowhere, but I also felt I was disappointing my family in Venezuela. I should be thankful and thriving here in the US. I’m the one who got away from the 3rd world country to live the best life I can in the States. I got away from the tear gas bombs. I got away from the poverty. I got away from it all, but now I had to be great, not just for me but for my family. The deeper I thought about that, the more I drowned in responsibilities. Knowing someone sacrificed everything for you makes it feel like I no longer carry my dreams, but also my country’s dreams.

    Suddenly, my nights alone in my room not just felt more lonely, but a waste of precious time. I could be studying, I could be looking for jobs to apply for once I graduate, I could be making a better budget plan, I could be using all this time to make my family’s sacrifice worth it. As the one who made it out, I had to be great; I had to be something worth sacrificing for. My walks were also a lot quieter now, and a whole lot longer. I started thinking: “Did everyone feel like this? Did every young child of immigrant parents or first-generation students feel like this? Would my story be told in celebration of my own successes or my family’s?” Wow, this walk in the park suddenly got so much more depressing, but the laughter of a little girl yanked me out of my thoughts. I got to see a little girl playing with a small fire truck with her dad’s firefighter hat; she wanted to be like her dad when she grew up. 

    I remembered a conversation I had when I was younger, a memory that I most likely had abandoned at the back of my mind. In my memory, my dad and I were on the couch watching TV, watching the riots going on in my country. By that time, I thought I would be the solution, the hero that could change the tide of the war in my country. I wanted to join the military, just like my dad. So I asked him if all I had to do to make a change was be like him? Will the money come? Will the laughs come? Will salvation come if I become like him? I thought it was a genuinely good question, but the only answer I got was the sight of my dad bursting into laughter. Rude. “If I wanted you to be like me, then I would have made you start working at 10 years old. If I wanted you to be better than me, then I wouldn’t have raised you at all.” Those words stuck with me because he never made me do any of those things, and they were coming back, so I did the most logical thing, and called my dad on the phone. He answered, and it didn’t take long before I started crying. The pressure and weight on my shoulders had made me falter like a 5 year old crying for her dad. When I told him what I felt, he went silent. My father, who was always a smart mouth, had gone silent. After letting out a sigh, he finally spoke. “You can come back home if you want. You can stay on the phone until you feel better if you want. You can hang up if you want. Any decision you make won't change all the decisions I’ve made, but what I can tell you is that the most beautiful dreams I’ve ever heard have been yours. Giving you my all has just been me being a father, but from now on, I get to see you grow while you thrive at being my daughter. Your dreams are your own because the biggest honor I have had has been seeing you grow to reach those dreams.”.....Now I went silent.

That call with my dad changed something in me. For the first time, I understood that his sacrifices weren’t chains meant to bind me to his path; they were gifts meant to give me freedom. His silence, his words, even his laughter, weren’t dismissals, but reminders that I was never meant to carry the full weight of my family’s legacy alone. I realized that their legacy didn’t live or die through my success; it had already lived through their survival, their endurance, their love. I had mistaken my purpose as being the one who had to “make it” for everyone, but my father’s voice reminded me that I was never their last hope; I was their proudest chapter. It was never about replicating their dreams; it was about building my own on the foundation they laid. And in that moment, the guilt started to loosen its grip, and I began to believe that my own dreams were valid, worthy, and enough.

    For the longest time, I believed my purpose was to fulfill the dreams my parents had for me—they sacrificed so much to get me here. But somewhere between late-night study sessions and quiet walks through campus, I started hearing my own voice, faint but persistent. Dreams of becoming an artist, dreams of belonging, dreams of being free to choose what I want. My family didn’t want to control my future because the biggest gift they’ve gotten has been the honor of spectating my life. What was I doing? The definition of “success” has been so concrete for so long, I felt I couldn’t make it my own. Did the quotes I mentioned here make you doubt? Did they make you feel seen? Did they give you hope? I hope these are the questions Reyna asked when I read her book. Thanks to her and other amazing students, I realized that I was allowed to want something different, something that truly felt like mine. And for the first time, I gave myself permission to dream my own dreams. 

To every other kid who’s crossed oceans on the strength of their parents’ hopes, I see you. I know the pressure of feeling like you have to succeed not just for yourself, but for everyone who sacrificed for you. I know what it’s like to question whether your dreams are selfish, to wonder if choosing your own path means turning your back on where you came from. But I want you to know: you are not a burden, you are a continuation. Your family’s journey didn’t begin with you, and it doesn’t end with you either. You carry their strength, not their debt. You deserve to thrive, not just survive. So choose boldly. Study what you love. Dream in your own voice. That is not dishonoring your family; it’s the very thing they crossed borders to make possible. You are more than your people’s dreams; you are more than the one that got away.