Family and Immigration

Herrison Chicas talks about how his parents are forcibly taken away from him and deported back to El Salvador. He says how he wasn't always an orphan, always struggling with redefining family, and that there wasn't a time when he was constantly having to try to figure who he is and who he's not and where he belongs. He talks about how much his parents cared, and that he has few memories of them because he has ben without them for so long. His parents were taken away because of the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, which was basically terrorist control. The immigration officers that took his father away mistook him as a terrorist, so they took him away, and later that week they took his mother too, even though they were El Salvador citizens with their American green cards.

He expresses what it was like to always feel like the odd one out, always standing out in a crowd but not in a good way. He knows what it's like to not be able to see his parents, to have to make an international call just to talk to them, that every digital hug and I love you just wasn't the same.  He also talks about how 5000 children have lost their parents due to deportation and 15000 more face similar threats in the next five years. That we are all seeds that have gone in different directions but rooted in the same tree, and we are all part of the same race, the human race. He ends it with saying how everyone has a family to get home to and he wishes that he still had his too.

Reyna struggles with many of the things that Herrison struggled with as well, they both have been orphaned due to their parents being in other countries. The major difference is that Reyna's parents chose to leave them, but Herrison's were forced out of the country. Even though they have drastically different equations they still had the same result, no parents. They both had to live with family members, hold onto the few memories they had of their parents from a young age, only get to talk to or see their parents when they can write a letter, send a picture, call, and in Herrison's case Skype.

They both struggled with the meaning of family      and what it's like to be an orphan. Herrison
describes what the outcast is like of being an orphan, "I spent the rest of my life like a hijab in rural North Carolina, like chopsticks in an American restaurant, like a sore thumb in a room of middle fingers all staring at me." They both know what it's like to be alone, to not have your parents and have no choice in whether or not they leave you or stay, to not fit in no matter what, because without your parents you can never be as things once were when you had them. They know how immigration can destroy families.

Link to the TEDx Talk: Family and Immigration