June has been designated as Immigrant Heritage Month, an initiative that aims to bring people together to celebrate the important contributions of immigrants across the nation. It is also an opportunity to encourage people to explore their heritage and celebrate their unique history. Although every immigrant’s story is different, one important virtue is present in all of them: courage. It takes a lot of courage to be a stranger in a foreign land and despite the many challenges that immigrants face, such as language barriers and in many instances discrimination, they manage to thrive.
Immigration is an integral piece of every individual’s life mosaic. Unfortunately, as time passes generations can forget to look back at the amazing stories that preceded them and reflect on the efforts and sacrifices of their ancestors, which play a crucial part of where they are today. My father-in-law told me a story about his grandmother, Anna Schnorberger, who moved to the United States to start a new life in 1923 when she was 18 years old. When he was a child he was impressed by how she ate the cores of apples. When he asked her why she did it, she explained that she grew up in Germany during World War I and experienced extreme hunger so she did it to remind herself of what she had lived through. Today her great-grandson, my husband, and I are fortunate enough to buy apples in bulk at Costco and feed the cores to our guinea pig, Albert.
My great grandmother, Adelina Zerman, immigrated to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico from Florence, Italy. Despite coming from a more developed city and a more affluent lifestyle, she left everything behind to establish herself at a ranch with my Mexican great-grandfather and focused on giving back to her community. Adelina founded a school for children. Since she loved languages and spoke fluent English, she made sure English was part of the curriculum. This had an enormous impact on entire generations of students, as speaking English would prove immensely useful living in a city that borders the United States. Although I never met her, Adelina and I have many things in common. I am also an immigrant who loves languages and works for her community at the Latino Policy Forum.
One-hundred-thousand years ago, some of the very first human migrations took place as Homo Sapiens ventured out of Africa to colonize Asia and other continents. Who knows where future generations will go in the next 100,000 years and how they will get there. A century ago anyone would have laughed hysterically at the idea of a crossing the Atlantic ocean in seven hours by airplane, instead of four days by boat. We laugh at the idea of immigrating to space now, but humanity’s future survival could depend entirely on space colonization. I hope that one day my descendants, whether they remain or not in this planet, will ask me about where they come from so I can share with them how immigration touched their lives.
I also hope you’ll be inspired by Immigrant Heritage Month and make time to talk to your relatives about where your family originated. Only time will tell where humanity’s next great migration will go, but we owe it to our ancestors to appreciate and learn about where we came from.