I Didn’t Come Here to Be a Hero. I Came Here to Breathe

An Immigrant Confession

We drove into Santa Barbara on Thanksgiving Day, 2004. I didn’t know the word Thanksgiving, not really. I just knew I was sitting in the front seat of a car with tinted windows, hands on my knees, watching a whole new country glide by. The sun was soft that day, the hills rolling like something out of a dream. I had arrived, apparently. But I didn’t feel like I’d made it. I felt like I’d been dropped into someone else’s life.

At the house, there was coffee on the stove, relatives I barely knew, and a baby girl staring at me like I was the alien everyone else was too polite to mention. Everyone was kind, don’t get me wrong, but I couldn’t understand more than two words at a time. I nodded and smiled like I was fluent in survival. That, at least, was true. I didn’t speak English, had no papers, no job, no direction, just this buzzing hope that somehow I’d figure it out. That night, I lay on a borrowed mattress and promised myself I would not become invisible. Not here.

A few weeks later, I got my first job at Super Cuca’s, one of the oldest Mexican restaurants in town. I was the dishwasher, got paid minimum wage. People barked orders in a hurry, the dishes piled high, and grease coated everything, even your dreams. That’s where Genaro—my cousin—came to me as I was hosing down the rice cooker and told me the one sentence that cut through all the noise: “You don’t want to be a dishwasher for the rest of your life, do you?”

It hit me like a slap from the future.