There’s a quiet power in being an immigrant. You learn to belong everywhere because you’ve been told you belong nowhere. You learn to build not because you were invited, but because you refused to disappear.
In August 2004, I flew with my grandmother from Mexico City to Nogales, Sonora, a border town. I was 13 years old, traveling to meet my family in Georgia. My grandmother didn’t cross with me. She was there to get me safely to the border, and to make sure I was in the hands of the coyote who would take me the rest of the way.
I had heard of coyotes before, the people who guide undocumented immigrants across the U.S. border. But as a teenager, I imagined actual coyotes. They are sneaky, fast, and sometimes dangerous. That’s how my aunt and grandmother spoke about them, like half whispering as if it might bite back.
We spent two days in a hotel, during which I had to prepare and memorize a single phrase: “Yes, I am a U.S. citizen.” I didn’t know what those words meant in English at the time, but I knew what I was saying.
“Say it if they ask,” the coyote said.
He also told me to wait at a McDonald’s in the Nogales across the border, in Arizona. After I left, my grandmother flew home to Mexico City. I’ve often wondered what it was like for her, to hand me off to a stranger and fly back alone, not knowing what would happen.
My life in the U.S. began in the most American setting possible, under fluorescent lights with the smell of french fries in the middle of a hot August summer, trying to look like I belonged. A border crossing tucked inside a fast-food booth followed by a cross-country road trip from Arizona to Georgia.
For years, I survived the only way undocumented people know how: in the shadows. Before DACA, there was no guidebook. I kept my head down, I tried to blend in as much as I could, and stayed just visible enough to pass, but never enough to be seen. I worked under the table at a deli restaurant where I was a cashier, saved every dollar, and planned out futures I might never get to live. And like so many others, I waited.
When DACA came in the summer of 2012, I didn’t apply right away. I was 21 and afraid it might be a trap. I also didn’t have hundreds of dollars saved. When I had it and was finally ready to send in my application, I gathered every document to prove I had been in the U.S. I remember checking every form over and over before mailing it in, terrified of making a mistake.
When I received my work permit in the spring of 2013 and could finally apply for a social security number, I grabbed that chance like a lifeline. But that relief was always conditional. Every two years, the process was always the same: apply, pay, wait, and worry, hoping USPS wouldn’t lose my chance to work legally or just getting denied.
The uncertainty wasn’t just an administrative process, but also an emotional roller coaster. I could perform Americanness, but I could never really claim it. Why? Because there was always an accent, my birthplace, and the paperwork for me to conditionally belong. They were all reminders that I was an alien.
Still, I believed. I believed because I was taught by teachers, textbooks, and morning pledges that if I worked hard, followed the rules, and kept my nose clean, I’d earn my place in the land of the free.
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But over time, the truth grew louder than the dream. It echoed in the ICE raids that shattered homes and parking lots, in the quiet disappearances of people in my community, in the images of people who looked like me shown in handcuffs on the evening news. What kind of freedom demands your silence just to prove your worth? What kind of belonging criminalizes your very breath? I believed I would earn my place in the land of the free, until I realized that the price of entry was to be erased.
I left in 2022, before ICE raids became routine again under the new administration. But what we’re seeing now only confirms what many of us already knew: the fear was always there. It just wasn’t always televised. And it’s the same fear I carried for years until I decided to put it down.
I didn’t self-deport to disappear, and definitely not to validate any administration’s agenda. I left for me, like anyone who walks away from a place that has demanded too much and given too little. I left on my own terms, not because I was pushed, but because I was ready to pull myself toward something better. I wasn’t making a statement. I was making myself whole. I was, in my own way, making myself great again.
When the chance came to move abroad for work, I didn’t hesitate. It was an opportunity to continue my professional growth in Europe through my company’s office overseas. But it was also a place where I could finally breathe. I stopped waiting for a country to see me and started building a life where I could be seen. I walked out clear-eyed, not bitter, and I closed the door behind me.
Across the Atlantic, in Spain, I was offered what had always been withheld: not just the right to stay, but the right to belong. Not a temporary fix, but citizenship with no apology required. It’s not perfect, nowhere is, but it’s a place where I could breathe without explanation. Where the right to be wasn’t a prize to be earned. They said, bienvenida. Welcome. And they meant it.
And while my exit from the U.S. felt personal, it’s not unique. Many others have also left quietly, dispersing across continents, carrying stories like mine.
I’m not undocumented anymore. In fact, I’m very well documented now in more than one system, in more than one language. But I will never forget what it meant to live in the shadows without permanent protection. And I won’t pretend it made me noble. The beauty of being undocumented is not in the pain. It’s in what the suffering forces you to grow into.
To those who are still waiting in limbo, still holding your breath in the only country you’ve ever known, I see you, and I know why you stay. I know what you’ve survived. And I know that leaving is not a cure, but if the moment ever comes, if the door cracks open, I hope you remember that staying is not the only way to prove you belong. Sometimes choosing yourself is the bravest thing you can do.
The post I Left the American Dream to Find My Own appeared first on TIME.
