My name is Moravia de la O.
INTERVIEWED BY Ayshea Khan (x 4)

"So I remember just getting really excited, telling all of my classmates that I was going to leave… and somehow not being very sad about that!"


DEPARTED FROM
Saltillo, Mexico

ARRIVED IN
Davis, California

YEAR
1998

AGE
10

NOW LIVES IN
Austin, Texas

MORAVIA DE LA O'S FIRST DAY

TRANSCRIPT

My name is Moravia de la O, I moved to the U.S. when I was 10 years old in December of 1998 from Saltillo, Mexico to Davis, California.

I was really excited, it just seemed like a really big adventure and I didn’t really know what to expect. When you are a kid you kinda don’t really think about how challenging it can be, so it just seems very exciting.

Yeah, I remember a lot of the moving because we had to pack everything, go through all of our stuff, and a lot of my mom’s siblings who lived not that far from where we were living, they came to help us do that. So I remember just getting really excited, telling all of my classmates that I was going to leave…and somehow not being very sad about that! I was just excited overall.

We had to fly from Monterey, which is a big city in northern Mexico. But I remember we spent the night at a hotel and I think the World Series was on, like the last day of the World Series? Some sporting event. I really remember that, that was a vivid memory.

I think maybe one of the first things we ate was a burger and we were really excited about that, like, eating a burger in the States! Um, I think one of the first things we did was go visit my grandparents, who I hadn’t really seen in a long time. And the just yeah, just seeing a lot of my Dad’s side of the family who we hadn’t really seen or spent much time with so it was a lot of family time the first day at least.

I really fascinated by my classmates’ lives, it seemed very lax to me compared to elementary school in Mexico, just a lot more informal. I hadn’t really thought about not speaking English, or that that would be a challenge. And then I guess the only other thing I thought was surprising was that there weren’t that many Latinos or Mexican kids in my school. Yeah, there weren’t a lot of people that spoke Spanish.

It was a very exciting moment. I don’t think I fully understood, like, the implications of what a move to the U.S. would mean, or the permanence of it.


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