Our roots run deep
In response to our “New Americans” immigration series, readers shared their own family stories.
Along with our “New Americans” series of profiles last month, we invited Times Union readers to share their families’ immigration stories. Below are a few of the responses we received. They mirror the themes we saw reflected in the series’ other profiles: Immigrants’ origins and motivations vary, but hard work, the importance of family and the hope for a better life are threads that run through nearly every immigration story; and making a home in a new place is a process of both discovery and loss.
Getting even by working harder
My family left Ecuador and arrived in New York City in 1961. My father’s business had collapsed and he lost almost everything. The lure of a relative living in New York City telling of jobs and education opportunities was enough for my parents to immigrate.
My parents rented one bedroom within an apartment, where the four of us lived in uptown Manhattan. Later we moved to the Bronx. My older brother took both my parents to job interviews since he quickly became almost fluent in English, and in a way became the head of the household. My father worked as a busboy in a club in lower Manhattan. My mother was a factory worker, manufacturing leather apparel in the Bronx. Our job was to go to school, learn English and become the best students that we could be.
There is one incident in my early childhood in a school in the Bronx that set the tone for my future. As a fifth-grader I was lost in school due to my lack of English and being one of the few Latino students. One day after school, as I was walking across the playground on my way home, a group of boys surrounded me and started to beat me up, all at the same time. I somehow was able to get away and run all the way home. That evening when my father came home, I told him what had happened and asked him to go school with me to resolve the incident. I will never forget or expected what he said to me. He said, “Son, I’m not going to your school because I have to work. And more important, I want you on your own to get even. Yes, get even by learning English better then they, become the best student and not be afraid to be in school.”
I was surprised at his answer, but I went to school the next day. By the end of the school year I had learned English and became one of the best students in my class.
My brother was accepted to Brandeis University in Boston with a scholarship, left and graduated from M.I.T. in Boston and now he is a medical doctor. I acquired my bachelor’s and graduate degrees in education at the state university in Albany and became a teacher.
There are so many opportunities to take advantage of in the United States by studying and working hard, but as immigrants we had many sacrifices along the way. Both my brother and I became citizens and have lived the American Dream! I’m grateful and proud to be a citizen of the U.S.A.
Eduardo Kin Valverde-salas, Albany
Waiting till his number came up
I am 91 years old. Although I was born in this country, Italian was my first language. It was the language we spoke at home because my parents were immigrants. So were my aunt, my uncle and all their friends. Their friends became our godparents. Growing up, I was surrounded by immigrants, and they all immigrated legally to this country.
My uncle’s story is a particularly interesting one. He was my father’s baby brother. During the Second World War, my uncle was a soldier in the Italian army. He was captured by the British and spent the duration of the war in captivity. After the war, when my uncle was released, my father used his own legal citizenship papers to arrange for his brother to come to America. My sister’s employer guaranteed him a job, and my aunt assured him housing. Then the family waited and we waited until his number was called. That was the immigration process I knew.
Anyone who is crossing a river to enter the United States is an affront to all the millions who waited their turn and came here the legal way. We wait our turn at the supermarket line, the movie line, to purchase a ticket for a sporting event, etc. The modern immigrant needs to understand that is how it was done in the past. It worked. Wait your turn. Those who are here illegally should be returned, reapply and wait until their number is called.
Mary Puzzutiello Mcclaine, Colonie
They gave it five years. They stayed.
Although the decision to immigrate to the United States from Germany fell to my grandparents, the catalyst was William Hoyka, my grandfather’s great-uncle and himself an immigrant from Hamburg, who had settled in Albany.
Willie, a loud and boisterous man, waxed poetic about the United States when he was visiting family back in Europe. His words inspired my young grandfather — who was a painter by trade, with a wife, a set of twins and a deep disdain for the grim economic situation he had inherited as a young German as result of the war — to board a boat with his family and start anew in the United States, arriving on April 22, 1957.
The streets were not paved with gold. They were strewn with wind-blown trash, he remembers. But my grandparents, Ronald and Margot, had agreed: They would try for five years. If they weren’t happy, if they weren’t successful, if things looked bleak, they would return to Hamburg.
My grandmother learned to read with Sally, Dick and Jane books from the Italian immigrant family who lived upstairs from them on Yardboro Avenue. My grandfather worked at Tobin Meatpacking’s First Prize Center.
My mom remembers being called a “Little Nazi” by the mother of a little girl in her neighborhood. She knew what it meant.
To this day, I pronounce my own mom’s name incorrectly — the ‘r’ in Marlies is so light it is practically silent, but her teachers could never remember this. Or didn’t try to. She eventually stopped correcting them, deciding to make her true name a bit of an inner identity — a glimmer of the life that might have been hers had Uncle Willie not stopped by on his visit from the United States. Kelly Gallagher, West Sand Lake