In the Ted Talk “What’s Missing from the American Immigrant Narrative” by Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez Elizabeth’s parents get deported back to Mexico and she stays in the States to make a better life for herself. “Now, in the weeks that followed my parents' return to Mexico, when it became clear that they wouldn't be able to come back, . . . And so I somehow convinced my parents to let me stay, without being able to guarantee them that I'd find somewhere to live or that I'd be OK. But to this day, I will never forget how hard it was having to say goodbye.” (Gutierrez)
In the book Border Child by Michel Stone, it shows a family, Hector and Lilia, who lost their child, Alejandra, while trying to cross the border into America from Mexico, which they get deported back to Mexico shortly after losing Alejandra. It shows their struggle to find Alejandra, where Hector finds someone who gives information about where she could be, and he starts taking on other jobs to get enough money to pay for the bus fares to go north to find Alejandra. As Hector continues to find and take on jobs to help pay, he finds a fishing job offered to him, where the boss eventually offers Hector a job that would pay much better, where he would have to pick up coolers with unknown contents and bring them back to shore, Hector suspects that this job is involved with criminal activities, but he takes it anyway due to needing the money. After a little while Hector finally gets the money to travel and tells the boss that he is going to be leaving. As Hector travels to the north he reaches Matamoros, which is where the orphanage that had Alejandra is located, when he arrives at the orphanage with information they take a blood sample to verify that Alejandra is his child. After his relation to Alejandra was confirmed they tell him all the information they have, where Hector learns that Alejandra was adopted by a Mexican couple living in America. After Hector learns this he asks to schedule a meeting with them, and after talking with the other parents, he realizes that they love Alejandra just as much as he and Lilia do. After the meeting Hector seemingly decides that Alejandra would be better off living in America, which is where the book ends. “He wondered, too, about his children, about Alejandra. Would her life in el norte free her from the potentially toxic effects of his village’s polluted night air, or had her brief time here been enough to infect her little body with impurities. Maybe the contaminants, invisible but noxious, had infiltrated her tiny vessels and organs, her pure heart and mushrooming brain, so that even though she’d left here at a young age, the damaging seeds had been planted.” (Stone 247)
The connection between the Ted Talk and my book are both deal with sacrificing your relationships with your children so they can have a better life.
Where do you see examples of parents sacrificing for their children in your novel? What is the impact that these sacrifices have for the parents and for the children?
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