Hannie Mendoza Luna is a fourth-year student at the University of Minnesota studying economics with a minor in urban studies. Both her parents were born and raised in Mexico, while she is from the Twin Cities.
Byline: By Jack O’Connor (Editor-In-Chief)
“My dad came here at age 18, he grew up in poverty and always dreamed of pursuing better opportunities. His life in Mexico was not the best in terms of safety, financial reasons and the chance for upward mobility was basically nonexistent. So he came to the U.S. at around 18 and worked to provide for his single mom, siblings and his overall future.
(My parents) met in Mexico, and they got married, and he was like, ‘Well, I prefer my life to be in the U.S.’ So my mom basically just followed him to the U.S.
Navigating higher education, you think about your parents. You think about the reason as to why you’re here. You want to enjoy every opportunity presented to you since your parents did not have those privileges.
I feel like I grew up around a lot of white people, I just felt very disconnected from my culture. So when I came to school, I found it very important to look for that community. There’s Mi Gente on campus, and then there’s Sigma Lambda Gamma, which is a Latina sorority that I ended up joining. So I spent a lot of time in Sigma Lambda Gamma and met a lot of really cool girls with similar stories, similar ambitions and just people who can genuinely understand me. But I feel like as I’ve navigated college, my groups of people have shifted and I feel like I haven’t stuck necessarily just with people who share my same culture.
I try to make a lot of friends in a lot of different spaces, but I feel like that may be hard for some people who have grown up in predominantly Latinx communities. I’ve had conversations with other people who went to predominantly Latinx high schools and they say that they struggle to make friends in any other space than Latinx spaces on campus. And I feel like that’s something that isn’t necessarily talked about a lot.
(Being a child of immigrants) walks into every room that I’m in. You just have more of a sense of responsibility to take all the opportunities that you can because you know that the people that came before you didn’t have those opportunities. And I think that’s always in the back of my mind.
One thing I could say is having immigrant parents has definitely shaped how I handle different situations or different opportunities. I feel like for a lot of people, your parents aren’t really in the back of your mind when you’re making a huge decision or when you’re experiencing something. And I feel like having immigrant parents has made me consider them in a lot of different situations.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Interview by Jack O’Connor.