It’s been almost 40 years since he first set foot on American soil. A young man who was only able to finish the first grade and as the oldest, had the task of supporting his family. Between going back and forth from Recoveco, Sinaloa, Mexico to Chicago, he met his wife, a domestic worker who had the opportunity to attend high school thanks to the people she worked with. But in search of a better future, the newlyweds decided to settle on this side of the border. After the first few years their oldest son was born, and later, their daughter Manuela Perez.
At first glance it could be a model family. But their emotional wellbeing is broken in the presence of an alcoholic and violent father; a mother with high blood pressure and psychotic episodes; a brother who suffered a brain injury that left him emotionally disabled; and Manuela, who was diagnosed at age 13 with manic depression or bipolar disorder, in her first suicide attempt. With a lack of education on the subject, her parents refused to accept her diagnosis. “These people (the doctors) are just making it up, they’re so dramatic,” recalls Perez, now 31 years old. The lack of understanding on the dormant subject in her family led her to silently cope with her illness and those traumas from her childhood. A hostile environment due to her father’s alcoholism and the clash between American culture from school and a forced culture at home with the very conventional traditions from a rural area in Mexico. “I grew up with a foot here and the other one over there, I never found myself,” Perez said. “I grew up confused; my parents didn’t understand me, not my teachers, my friends. Neither from here nor there.”
Facing adverse situations as an immigrant in the United States is part of day-to-day life. In Latin American communities, our idiosyncrasy dictates a series of moralist regimens that stifle our wellness, our mental health. We are a community that mutes the afflictions to feign a certain degree of strength; they should stay at home or even worse, should be kept to oneself.
[For more of this story, written by Stephanie Manriquez, go to http://www.thegatenewspaper.co...few-resources-exist/]
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