Personal Narrative: New Mexico

Imagine being stripped away from everything you knew: your childhood friends; cousins you thought you'd always have with you, and places you called your second, third, or even fourth home. That is exactly what I went through when my family decided to move to Albuquerque, New Mexico. What's different about my experience was that it wasn't necessarily the move that flipped my world upside down but everything that happened in between. I was an awkward, shy, midget-like twelve-year-old when my family and I lost our home during the California money crisis. From that point on it was like a tumbling circus act. My parents ended up losing their jobs until finally my dad moved to New Mexico; leaving me and my family for almost a year. The last thing
Back home I was used to water parks and a million other things to do. In the beginning, I found nothing amusing about New Mexico. I guess this is where my isolation began; New Mexico was so different from my hometown that everything just reminded me of how much I missed California. I ended up staying indoors all the time. The biggest impact that New Mexico had over my person was not the land but the cultural shock that I encountered. I come from a Mexican background and have been speaking Spanish since I was in diapers. I was proud of what I thought I knew about my culture, but the first few months in New Mexico taught me that I couldn't be more wrong and different from the real Hispanic population. I thought I spoke Spanish but upon hearing almost everyone around me speak it, I thought so myself, I’m in trouble. The Hispanic population is overwhelming in New Mexico, and in the beginning I felt very isolated even though we shared a common language. Everything literally spiraled downward from this point. If my family and I couldn't even be comfortable with our own people how were we suppose to mix ourselves with a whole new community? Little did I know that moving to New Mexico was actually going to strengthen my Hispanic culture because I ended up celebrating a very important tradition in the Mexican culture; my quinceanera. A quinceanera is celebrated
I ended up questioning my faith in the sense that I realized that I had let my faith in God escape me. I constantly asked myself where my faith was and why suddenly I was living like I didn’t have any. Thank God, I realized that I had been moping around for long enough and I began to value my life so much more. I started thinking of all the good that moving to New Mexico had brought me and that ended in me believing that God had brought me to New Mexico for a reason. Through this major reflection of the events, that in the beginning I thought of as struggles, I ended up seeing all the positive things that actually came out of moving to New Mexico. Beginning with me personally, I did grow up on my own but looking at it from my current perspective, I think growing up on my own really made me not only independent but dependent, in God and of my faith. I also learned that family isn't always blood-related, sometimes the biggest strangers could come to know you better than your own family, and my close Hispanic community helped a lot with that interaction. My father, although always working seemed happier because he had not only saved his marriage and left his alcohol life in California, but he ended up reaching out to God and realizing that God had never left him or his family. My mother and my siblings all began to grow independently and closer to God;