LIZ NARRATION: I wouldn’t change living in Miami for the world. Any time I leave my house, whether it’s on my daily walks with my family or to go get groceries, I’m welcomed by other Latinos. Like Nelly, for example, who compliments my daughter Eva’s bows when she sees us strolling down the sidewalk. Or el señor Juan, wearing his straw hat, diligently selling sus aguacates on the corner of 29th and 34th Ave every afternoon. Bendicidos y afortunados, am I right? It’s a real blessing that this is the environment I get to raise a family in.
But this is not the norm for many Latinos living in the United States.
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While the Latino population is growing — we’re nearly 20% of the US population now — many areas function as they have for decades. Predominantly English-speaking, still segregated, too few Latinos. Add to that the displacement that happens for so many families, it’s easy to see how some people from our community can feel far away from Latino culture even inside their own home. So, what are the ways we can bring Latinidad to us when it’s not as accessible? Yvonne Martinez experienced a reconnection to her culture at two different stages in her life and did something to both embrace and give back to her community
I’m Liz Rebecca and today, we’re talking about the ways we redefine what it means to be family…In Confianza.
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LIZ NARRATION: Yvonne Martinez remembers the first time she ever felt “different.” She was 12 years old, and just starting at her new school in Nashville, Tennessee.
Yvonne: People didn’t know what category to put me in. There was not a lot of Latinos at the time. I remember people saying that I was mixed. And I was like, mixed with what? Because both of my parents are from the same country.
LIZ NARRATION: That country was Nicaragua, where Yvonne’s parents met.
Yvonne: My dad moved here first and sent my mother love letters until he got her to come here.
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LIZ NARRATION: Yvonne’s parents settled near Los Angeles, in Norwalk, California and worked hard to build a new life for themselves in the U.S. They had Yvonne and Hugo, and her dad built a plumbing business to support the family. In Norwalk, they found a strong community amongst other Nicaraguan immigrants in the area.
Yvonne: I don’t feel like there’s a lot of Nicaraguans anywhere I go. But my parents, I feel like they have a radar and they found groups of them.
LIZ NARRATION: Yvonne’s community was mostly Mexican but it didn’t seem to matter — it all felt very familiar to her.
Yvonne: Everyone I knew was Latino. I spoke Spanish more than I spoke English. At school, we definitely spoke English, but my, everything my parents did, you know, we were at church all the time. We were a community.
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LIZ NARRATION: Yvonne was living a pretty normal life as a girl, starting school, spending her days playing with friends. Then, there was a big change in her family.
Yvonne: I was about four years old when he came — my father’s biological son.
LIZ NARRATION: Yvonne learned that her father had a son named Robert, who was still living in Nicaragua. When he was 12, Robert came to the U.S. to join the family in California.
Yvonne: He was significantly older, so I would say when he first came, he did play a little bit more with us. But as he got older, I mean, he was a preteen, he just wanted his friends.
LIZ NARRATION: Robert coming to live with the family wasn’t the weirdest change in Yvonne’s life, but it added a new dynamic to the pecking order of the kids. So to make Robert pay for his lack of interest in her, Yvonne started playing the role of younger sibling.
Yvonne: I was a tattletale.
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Yvonne: For example, me and my brother, Hugo, liked to watch the sunrise. But we didn’t know when it was, so we would stay up all night And we could see him sneak out. So then, we started telling my mom, like, “hey, he snuck out last night.” So I think it was kind of like our way of getting back at him for that. Sibling rivalry kind of stuff, I guess.
LIZ NARRATION: But kids are smart, and even at a young age, Yvonne understood why things were difficult for Robert.
Yvonne: I think it was very hard. I mean, he came from a completely different home. When he came to us he didn’t know how to read or write or even really shower. He didn’t just know the basic things. And so I knew there was a difference because I was like, “wow, your parents didn’t teach you how to read?” I think maybe why he may have sought more of the outside relationships outside of the family more because my dad’s very authoritative. When you have an authoritative parent like that, if you’re not falling in line, it starts to create a wedge.
LIZ NARRATION: Robert started rebelling. Not just sneaking out at night, but staying away from home for longer and longer.
Yvonne: He ran away from home, I think he was 16. You know, it was sad for us as kids, you know, being like, we wish he would get along with dad.
LIZ NARRATION: Yvonne’s dad believed in corporal punishment with his boys. And Robert fell under his dad’s wrath the most. What Yvonne saw changed her perspective, not just on Robert, but on her worldview for the rest of her life.
Yvonne: That built more compassion for him.
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Yvonne: It really affected me because I think that’s what I think of all children is that they need that patience and compassion because we’re all trying to do right, you know? That’s what I saw with my mom.
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LIZ NARRATION: Her mom showed patience and ease with all of her kids including Robert and Yvonne was struck by how organic it looked for her mom to bring a child that wasn’t her own into the home and love him as if he was.
Yvonne: My mom was such a good parent to him like she never let us call him, um, half brother or step brother or just nothing. He was our brother.
LIZ NARRATION: Her mother’s parenting style became a powerful model for Yvonne — widening her perspective to see family as more than just blood relatives.
Yvonne: It just gave me a perspective in life that you can love more than just your biological children.
LIZ NARRATION: But as soon as there seemed to be some stability in the house, the family encountered another unexpected change.
Yvonne: We lost everything.
LIZ NARRATION: Yvonne’s father’s business went under, and things started changing fast for the family.
Yvonne: We had to give up our car that we had that was kind of brand new. It was such a change going from this brand new car to this 1983 Seville. So we used to make my mom drop us off, all the way out of the way from the school’s view.
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LIZ NARRATION: They weathered the changes as best they could, but eventually something had to give.
Yvonne: My uncle worked in Nashville and he said, “there’s a lot of construction going on here. There surely is plumbing work.”
LIZ NARRATION: You may be able to guess where this is going —Yvonne’s father decided it was best if they left California and moved to Tennessee for better opportunities.
Yvonne: I was not happy about the move. I was worried about racism. I was worried that I would be the only brown person. I think I really imagined the worst like I imagined like I would see the Ku Klux Klan somewhere.
LIZ NARRATION: Safe to say, some of Yvonne’s worries didn’t totally come true. In fact, when she arrived, there were unexpected perks to living in Nashville.
Yvonne: Seeing so much green and the trees hanging over. And then our house had this really huge front yard, which that’s not very common where we were coming from. And it did feel good once we got here.
LIZ NARRATION: On many levels, the move WAS good for the family. The parents, who had just seen the aftermath of the Rodney King beating and subsequent riots felt more relaxed letting the kids play outside. Yvonne’s father’s business picked up again, and they found the few Latinos they could. But it was still a far cry from the life they had back home. A few of Yvonne’s worries — like not having a diverse community — had some validity.
Yvonne: When I would talk about, you know, a friend back home, I would, I remember saying to one person, “you know, oh, she was Haitian.” And this person said, “Like, is that — did you make that up? Like, is that Hispanic and Asian?” And I was like, “no, that’s a country.” There were a few Hispanic students and we all kind of did find each other and we did hang out. But it was, you know, probably 50 percent black and 50 percent white.
LIZ NARRATION: And maybe the biggest thing Yvonne missed from California — the access to Spanish.
Yvonne: Not hearing Spanish everywhere, like you do in California, was a big change.
LIZ NARRATION: It was an adjustment that 12-year-old Yvonne was not prepared for. She was in the same country, but a world away from her community and culture. At school, she didn’t fit in. It wasn’t that the kids were mean to her, but this was Nashville, Tennessee in the 90’s — there just weren’t many other Latinos. This disconnection from her Latinidad, made Yvonne feel isolated and alone.
Yvonne: I was probably depressed. I don’t know if my parents were fully aware of that. They were just in their own worlds.
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LIZ NARRATION: As Yvonne finished high school and prepared to be the first person in her family to go to college, she looked ahead at what kind of person she wanted to be. She pulled from her experiences of feeling alone, her memories of the struggles of her community back in California, and from her love and compassion for her brother, Robert.
Yvonne: I wanted to help the immigrant community. That was important to me.
LIZ NARRATION: Not knowing where to start, Yvonne looked at workplace options where she could use her Spanish to help people.
Yvonne: When I turned 16, I had an internship and one of the things I had checked off was I spoke Spanish. And so my first internship was at an immigration law firm.
LIZ NARRATION: This internship taught Yvonne how powerful a role model could be, how much one person could make a true difference in the life of someone who needs support. It’s a lesson she wouldn’t forget. A couple of years later, she started college, joined the Army National Guard to help pay her tuition. and finally ended up working in DC, returning to a larger Latino community where there were more opportunities to speak Spanish everyday. For the next 10 years, life for Yvonne was full of career opportunities and new friendships. Law no longer felt like the right career path and she continued searching for ways to help and give back to her community.
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Then came a curveball — she was pregnant.
Yvonne: I was happy and then terrified because it wasn’t really planned, but I was full on board. I was excited. I mean, I had my career and I felt like I was in a good place. I always wanted to be a mom.
LIZ NARRATION: Yvonne had a baby girl who she named Sophia. She worked to immerse her daughter in Spanish and Latino culture in and out of the home.
Yvonne: I spoke to her in Spanish from the start. I bought every resource I could, in Spanish. So, Sesame Street was in Spanish. I had a calendar, in Spanish. When she was three, I enrolled her in a Spanish, uh, immersion preschool.
LIZ NARRATION: Yvonne raised Sophia in the DC area as a single mom, and it was really tough.
Yvonne: I felt like I was always struggling in DC financially and also struggling with familial support.
LIZ NARRATION: So In 2016, when Sophia was in kindergarten, Yvonne decided she had to make a change. The same change that her father made many years earlier. She packed up her car and made the long drive to her old home in Nashville, Tennessee, but this time, SHE was the parent trying to give her daughter a better life. And it was her daughter, Sophia, who was now the little girl having to leave her familiar home behind for a whole new world.
Yvonne: I think I knew when I made the decision that we would be moving to a less diverse place. I know that I’m already removed from knowing what it’s like to be Nicaraguan. And then she’s going to be even more so. I was worried about her not seeing people that look like her.
LIZ NARRATION: Sophia left a community of diverse friends and teachers at her Spanish immersion preschool, for an all English-speaking kindergarten in Nashville where she was the outsider. An experience not so different from Yvonne’s twenty years earlier. Yvonne started observing moments that left Sophia feeling othered in her new school.
Yvonne: They were reading a story in class — the teacher was. And the little girl was this little blonde girl going on an adventure on her unicorn. Sophia raised her hand and said, “that’s me, that’s who I am”. Another little girl said, “that’s not you because you’re brown”.
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Yvonne: And I think that hurt Sophia a lot.
LIZ NARRATION: This moment was a pivotal experience for both of them — a painful reminder for Yvonne about why it’s sometimes easier to detach ourselves from our latinidad, like a defense mechanism. Sophia, stopped speaking Spanish regularly after her first year of school in Nashville. She was starting to lose her connection to the language and culture she came from. But what Sophia and Yvonne didn’t know was that they were about to learn a profound lesson about culture — one that they would never forget.
More when we come back. This is In Confianza.
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LIZ NARRATION: A few years after moving back to Nashville, Yvonne met Stephen. They started dating and soon fell in love. Stephen didn’t have any kids of his own. So they sat down and had a conversation.
Yvonne: I said, I’m going to make something clear. I’m not going to have any more biological children.
LIZ NARRATION: But Stephen responded with something she didn’t expect to hear.
Yvonne: He said, “well, what about foster kids or adopting?”
LIZ NARRATION: This was the moment when Yvonne learned that Stephen was adopted. Her mind immediately went to the experience she had as a girl, seeing HER family welcoming the son of their father. She remembered the love her mother gave to Robert; how the family completely took him in as one of them.
Yvonne: I do remember thinking, you know, my mom loves Robert just like he’s hers. I could love someone the same. Like I could do that.
LIZ NARRATION: And on that day a seed was planted, a desire to include others into their own family.
Yvonne: And it really made me say, “this is something I want to do”.
LIZ NARRATION: About a year later Yvonne was on Facebook and something caught her attention.
Yvonne: I saw this Facebook ad about fostering kids that are coming to the border undocumented.
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LIZ NARRATION: Every year, thousands of unaccompanied children from Mexico and Central America make their way to the US border to escape violence in their home countries. Often the only way for them to get to safety is to leave their families and seek asylum on their own. Sending these children back would put them at serious risk of being abused, trafficked, and exploited. Instead the U.S. government is keeping them in temporary shelters, until a safe home can be found for them or they can be connected with family living in the U.S. But the number of unaccompanied children crossing the border has completely overwhelmed the immigration system, leading to unsafe and overcrowded conditions where they’re being held.
Yvonne instantly knew she wanted to be a part of this. Stephen was on board too. Yvonne’s daughter, Sophia, was nervous about getting along with temporary siblings, but she was curious and excited, too.
They decided to give it a shot. But first, Yvonne and Stephen had to take care of something important. They got married.
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Yvonne: It was literally like a week after the wedding. My husband was like, all right, let’s start classes.
LIZ NARRATION: They went through classes where they were introduced not just to the practices for housing and taking care of foster children, but learning about the experiences many foster kids face in their life. There were stories in the training videos that stuck with Yvonne.
Yvonne: This little girl, who just keeps getting placed in different homes. And as she gets older, she’s just having more trouble, you know, she’s not trusting because of everything she’s experienced and also this the way she was taken from her parents and things like that. It made me cry, of course. But I think for Steven and I, because I remember we were like looking at each other. We’re like, we’re gonna fight for these kids. We’re gonna make sure that they feel loved and that they don’t have to leave because of something.
LIZ NARRATION: A few weeks later, Yvonne got a call in the middle of the night. She was told that a pair of siblings had arrived and needed a good home while their U.S. sponsor was being approved to receive them. Yvonne double checked all the prep work she’d done.
Yvonne: The room was made. Everything was just ready for a kid, but then, you know, the clothes and, you know, what size are they? You know, then you just start going into this like checklist mode.
LIZ NARRATION: She got out of bed, and got in the car and drove to the center.
Yvonne: I went, picked them up. These particular kids were very quiet. And so I was like, okay, they’ve probably been through a lot.
LIZ NARRATION: Unaccompanied children like these siblings arrive at the US border after days or weeks of traveling in difficult and dangerous conditions. They surrender to border patrol and are processed through immigration services, then they travel to another state to a pickup center where they go through an intake process before meeting their host family for the first time. In this case, Yvonne’s family.
It’s A LOT for anyone, especially a child to process.
Yvonne: You just got off a plane that you may have been on for the first time in your life. And then now you’re being transported to yet another location. Even if it’s 3 in the morning when we’re done, they still have to go to school the next day. It’s a rough day for them.
LIZ NARRATION: Yvonne watched as these new children in her home adapted to a very new life, while Yvonne’s firstborn, Sophia, started to embrace more of her Latinidad at home. There were more conversations in Spanish, more comprehension of Spanish phrases, and it didn’t just stop at language.
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Yvonne: Sophia is more like a pasta girl. I am definitely more of a rice and beans. The kids do ask me a lot for, for like, you know, things that I am used to eating more. and it’s also made me kind of realize I don’t really know how to cook Latino food.
LIZ NARRATION: To help the kids feel more connected to their culture, Yvonne is re-learning recipes from her childhood. But in the meantime, the family tries to take the kids out to a local restaurant of their choosing, when they can.
Yvonne: One little girl told us, we took her to Pupusas and she said, she goes, I’m giving you a little bit of my country.
LIZ NARRATION: Even though it was tough for the kids to open up and feel comfortable in such a short amount of time, Yvonne did the best she could to relate to them.
Yvonne: It takes a lot of me opening up to them because it’s such a short period that it’s hard for anybody to trust anybody and I get that. So a lot of times I’ll tell them like my family they were immigrants, and this is how they came. After like a few days, they start making their demands so you know that they’re comfortable. Like, I don’t like that food, give me something else. They start opening up a little bit more.
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LIZ NARRATION: These children come with very little in the way of luggage, but lots of emotional baggage. How could they not? Regardless of the situation at home or in their home countries, many of these children face harrowing journeys to arrive in the US and are completely displaced from everything that’s familiar to them. Often the children can’t grasp the reality of leaving home, they don’t understand what it means until later when they realize just how life changing this journey was.
Yvonne: These kids, they get to the country and they’re like, “that adventure is done. My whole journey to this point to where I’m going to get to the rest of my life is done.” And they can’t go back. Now they’re hugging a stranger, and crying on their shoulder as they realize that their life is about to change completely.
LIZ NARRATION: But the stay with Yvonne is only a small part of the journey for these kids. It’s a place to land and feel a little bit of safety for the first time, until they head off to a permanent home. They rarely stay past six weeks, before it’s time to reunite with their U.S. relatives. This part hasn’t been easy for Yvonne’s family.
Yvonne: I didn’t think that the love would be so immediate. When we are connecting, when we are meeting, it is a very vulnerable time for them. I’m glad I am that person and that Steven and Sophia are the people that are there for them because I do think that we try to show them as much love as possible and they bring it right back and it’s really nice.
LIZ NARRATION: The merits of bringing Latino culture into the home for Sophia is important, but in spite of the struggles that come from bonding with these children for short periods of time, Yvonne stays strong and keeps her door open — always remembering the example she saw as a girl, of a love that went beyond blood relations. And maybe that’s the most important lesson of Yvonne’s view on Latinidad that she can impart on Sophia.
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Yvonne: It does bring up things about my upbringing, because I realize that they are just like Robert, that they’re coming into families that they have met but may not have seen in years. It always takes me back to like, these are all the things he had to experience all at once. It just made me want to do more.
LIZ NARRATION: As of this recording, Yvonne and her family are taking a break from fostering due to summer travel, but are aiming to pick it up again very soon. In total, they’ve fostered 13 children. And Yvonne says that she’s seen Sophia speaking more Spanish and becoming more curious about Latino culture.
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This episode was produced & written by Maribel Quezada Smith, Mark Pagan, & Charlie Garcia. Editing by Charlie Garcia and Mark Pagán. Audio engineering, scoring, and mixing by Charlie Garcia and Mark Pagán. Additional audio editing by Julian Blackmore. I’m your host, Liz Rebecca Alarcón
You can subscribe to In Confianza wherever you get your podcasts, and if you like what you heard please leave us a review on apple podcasts and tell a friend to give us a listen.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for joining me, Pulso Fam. We’ll be back next week, in Confianza.
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