By Gabriela Q.

Gabriela once imagined what it was like to grow up American. Not, of course, in the sense of the picturesque Fourth of Julys, but through living out what she saw on TV: brightly colored lockers and roaring crowds at basketball games, reminiscent of High School Musical.

She quickly learned that this was only a dream. 

For Gabriela, a rising junior at a liberal arts college in Oregon who has chosen to withhold her last name for personal reasons, moving to the United States came with reminders of home. 

“I came to a Latino neighborhood that was very ghetto—there’s a lot of crime, and I thought it felt a little bit like home. I saw people from my country,” she says. 

Maryland, despite its inclusivity, did not feel like home. Back in Guatemala, being a kid felt simple.

“I used to play on the dirt without shoes on the rocks,” she says. When they played soccer, “we used to mark the goals with rocks and sticks,” she says. 

After being told that her family would move to a different country at 13 years old, she left everything she had ever known behind. Her experience isn’t an outlier — it speaks to the challenges undocumented students face in finding community and accessing necessary resources.

Gabriela didn’t enroll in school for over a year upon arriving in the U.S. When she did, she realized there was a blossoming Spanish-speaking community, but she still felt behind. Her English Language Learning (ELL) classes were meant to teach her English, but were taught at a slower pace than most of the other classes at her school. 

A.H., a rising junior at the City University of New York, faced a very different challenge after arriving in the U.S. at 16 years old. In Bangladesh, she was taught to speak English at a very high level in school. But after arriving in the U.S., she felt that because she was undocumented, she was expected to know little to no English. “People would say ‘Oh, your English is so good,’” A.H. says. “It’s a microaggression.”

On the other hand, speaking Bangla, her mother tongue, also led to judgment. “There was a lot of stigma in speaking your second language at high school. It seemed like you were fresh off the boat,” she says. 

A.H., who used a pseudonym for personal reasons, arrived in the U.S. at 16. Unlike Gabriela, she came without her parents. She was accompanied only by her siblings in 2020, two months before the pandemic.

She explains that her brother and sister struggled to make ends meet after they got laid off from their jobs. Due to their immigration status, they weren’t able to access the unemployment benefits that 1 out of every 4 workers in the U.S. took advantage of during the pandemic. 

A.H. and her family weren’t alone. Over 50 percent of the city’s immigrants were unemployed during the pandemic.

Exclusion from resources isn’t rare for undocumented students and families. As states start to revoke in-state tuition waivers meant for undocumented students to cut college costs, many are faced with hurdles to enroll in two- and four-year higher education institutions. 

When Gabriela and A.H. began to apply for college, they faced challenges. For Gabriela, studying for standardized exams made her feel behind in the process. 

“Many exams, like the SAT, were hard to read. I remember that we were asking for extra hours,” she says. “We needed more time.” 

Although A.H. was able to receive a full ride through her honors college, she was unable to apply for internships and work-study programs. Instead, she relied on outside opportunities and wished throughout the process that there were more grassroots support initiatives.

“There is a lack of understanding of how faculty can support students,” she says. “I’m tired of therapy circles; I need actual organizing efforts.”

But what does the American Dream mean if not the opportunity to create a new reality?

For A.H., this came as an opportunity to join local organizing initiatives in New York City, including Desis Rising Up and Moving, a social justice movement centered around providing an outlet for change for South Asian immigrant youth, starting in her junior year of high school. DRUM Beats, the organization’s sister program, was one of various grassroots initiatives leading Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for the city’s democratic mayoral nominee. 

Although Gabriela grew up wanting to be a surgeon, she settled on becoming a social worker after being inspired by her own experiences as an immigrant, feeling that stories like hers can be forgotten.

“When you don’t have any legal records or any case open, you could be gone and nobody would know you existed,” she says. “That’s my fear.” 

Gabriela’s future may not reflect the imagination of her teenage self, but it embraces the identity she has built along the way and the stories of younger generations of undocumented students.

“I know that I have the potential to help people, I have always helped people, and I want to work with them,” she says. “I know that I [can] be an inspiration to other students.”