America Is My Home - and This Is Where I’ll Be Buried

I was born in Los Angeles, California, but my first understanding of America came through distance.

By the time I returned to the United States from Mexico, I had spent three years surrounded by adobe homes, dried farming fields, dry dirt, and air that seemed to carry the landscape inside it. Mexico was part of my family, my language, and my earliest understanding of where we came from. America was printed on my birth certificate, but that did not mean I understood how to be American.

That difference became obvious in fifth grade.

The other children shared an invisible language that had nothing to do with English. They understood the television shows, music, jokes, celebrities, toys, and cultural references of the moment. Their pop culture was different from the pop culture that had reached my television. They could mention something and immediately understand one another, while I stood outside the reference trying to determine why it was funny or why it mattered.

The language coming out of my mouth was perfect English. The culture surrounding it was still unfamiliar.

That was when I first understood I was different.

It would have been easier if difference had existed on only one side. Perhaps America could have felt unfamiliar while Mexico remained the place where everything made sense. Instead, growing older revealed that I occupied a space between both.

Among Americans, there were references I had missed and childhood experiences I did not share. Among Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, people could still tell that something about me was different. I am taller and slightly lighter than many of the people who ask about my background. Because I lived in Mexico, I speak Spanish fluently. Because I was born and educated in the United States, I also speak English without an accent.

Knowing both languages should have made belonging simple. It did not.

People who looked like me would ask, “Where are you from?” The question was rarely satisfied by the first answer. Something about the way I spoke, carried myself, or understood the world made them continue asking. I did not use the same slang or vernacular. American history and pop culture had become part of my language, but many of those references did not translate. I could speak perfect Spanish while still sounding culturally foreign to people who believed the language should prove I was one of them.

Somehow, they could tell.

Belonging became a test administered differently depending on who was asking. In one room, I could be too Mexican. In another, not Mexican enough. Speaking both languages did not eliminate the distance. Sometimes it only made the distance easier to describe.

For a long time, movement seemed like the answer.

California. Colima. Zacatecas. North Carolina. Florida.

Every move had its own immediate reason, but each eventually arrived at the same conclusion: this is not working; we need to pivot.

We were searching for economic stability. The next place might offer better work, lower expenses, family support, or a chance to begin again without the burdens attached to the place before it. Hope traveled with us, packed beside whatever belongings could make the journey.

Stability never seemed to arrive at the same address we did.

Moving teaches a person how to leave, but it does not teach them how to belong. Each new place requires learning its rhythms, expectations, and social rules. You discover which parts of yourself translate and which must be explained. You learn how to enter rooms without assuming you will remain in them.

After enough moves, leaving begins to feel more natural than staying.

Mexico continued to exist in my mind as the place behind us - a possible home attached to family, language, and memory. Even when I did not want to live in my parents’ hometown, part of me assumed a claim remained there. It was not necessarily a claim to land or a particular house. It was the belief that family created a permanent doorway, somewhere you could return and still be recognized.

That doorway eventually closed.

My extended family broke apart, and my grandparents abandoned my mother. They favored another daughter and her husband, who were able to send money to them in Mexico regularly. Affection, loyalty, and belonging became entangled with economic value. The daughter who could provide consistent financial support received the preference. The daughter already carrying years of struggle became easier to leave behind.

Their decision did more than damage a relationship. It ended the belief that Mexico remained a home waiting for us.

I had already lived in their hometown. I knew the adobe homes, dry fields, dirt, and air. I knew the language and the landscape. But knowing a place is not the same as belonging to it, and ancestry does not guarantee that a door will remain open.

When my grandparents abandoned my mother, something became clear: there was no longer a place in Mexico that I could honestly call home.

Mexico remained part of my history. It remained in my language, my food, my family story, and the cultural practices worth carrying forward. But it was no longer where my future existed.

America was.

That realization did not arrive as uncomplicated patriotism. America had not always made belonging easy. Returning in fifth grade had shown me how quickly a child can feel foreign in the country where he was born. Years of moving had shown me how economic instability can turn freedom into a search for the next place where survival might be more affordable.

Still, America was where possibility remained.

My understanding of Americanism begins with freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those words can sound ceremonial after being repeated for generations, but their meaning becomes more concrete when your family has experienced control, violence, economic dependence, and the closing of doors.

Freedom is not an abstraction when your mother was once forbidden from working or obtaining a driver’s license. Liberty is not decorative language when someone else once controlled where she could go. The pursuit of happiness matters when an entire family has spent years moving from place to place searching for enough stability to imagine a future.

Americanism also carries a revolutionary spirit - a resistance to fascism, tyranny, and the concentration of power in the hands of people who believe the rest of society exists to serve them. The country was born from the insistence that authority is not automatically legitimate merely because it is powerful.

That spirit matters to me.

Loving America does not require pretending it is functioning as it should. Patriotism that cannot tolerate criticism is only loyalty to an image. Real love is willing to confront what threatens the thing being loved.

I am frustrated by what I see as the transfer of wealth from ordinary Americans and future generations into an increasingly powerful oligarchic class. Inflation, declining purchasing power, inaccessible housing, growing debt, and the consolidation of industries are not academic subjects for families trying to build stable lives. They determine whether a paycheck creates progress or merely postpones crisis.

As wealth becomes more concentrated, it purchases access. Access influences elections, public policy, media, institutions, and the boundaries of what citizens are told is politically possible. The people extracting the greatest value from the country gain more power to shape its future, while the public is asked to accept fewer choices and greater insecurity.

That is not the America I believe in.

My frustration does not weaken my Americanism. It comes from it. A revolutionary tradition should make us suspicious of concentrated power, whether that power sits in government, corporations, financial institutions, or a class wealthy enough to move between all three.

Freedom cannot belong only to those who can afford it. Liberty cannot mean choosing among systems already purchased by someone else. The pursuit of happiness cannot remain credible if future generations are required to surrender more of their labor simply to obtain less security than their parents had.

America’s promises have never been perfectly distributed. That is precisely why they must be defended, expanded, and made more real.

The country is not only its government or economy. It is also the people who decide what kind of neighbors they will be, what they will build, and whether they will create room for someone else to belong.

My life changed because people chose to open doors. Books gave me access to worlds no one around me could explain. Faith gave me clarity and strength. Mentors taught me how businesses, networks, and opportunities worked. The Milwaukee Athletic Club showed me an economy I had never seen from the inside and encouraged me to become a bridge between cultures, communities, and ways of thinking.

Those experiences were also America.

America was the possibility of entering a room without having inherited access to it. It was discovering that a career could be built, a business could be created, and knowledge could cross boundaries. It was the freedom to learn from one world without surrendering the other.

Being a bridge did not require me to become less Mexican. It required me to understand that identity could be larger than the categories other people were using to measure it.

I do not have to use particular slang to prove my heritage. I do not have to misunderstand American history or popular culture to make someone else comfortable with my Spanish. Fluency is not diminished because it exists in two languages. Belonging to America does not erase the years I lived in Mexico, and honoring Mexican culture does not make my American home conditional.

No one else gets to administer that test anymore.

Marriage and fatherhood changed my understanding of home because I was no longer searching only for a place that would accept me. I became responsible for creating a place where my wife and children could feel secure.

Home became less about where someone might allow us to return and more about what we were willing to build.

Middle Tennessee is where we are choosing to put down roots. It is where I want to build relationships, contribute locally, become known by my community, raise my children, grow a business, gather people around a table, and create the stability that movement never gave us.

My family gave me a reason to stop moving.

For most of my life, every place carried the possibility of another departure. If work failed, family relationships changed, or the economics stopped making sense, the answer was to pivot again. Movement was survival. Staying now requires a different kind of courage - the willingness to invest in a place before it has fully proven that it will hold you.

Roots do not appear because someone announces they belong. They grow through repetition. The same roads. The same stores. The same neighbors. The same table filled over time. Children who recognize the landscape as the background of their childhood. People who know your name because you remained long enough to become part of their lives.

That is what I want in Middle Tennessee.

I want my children to understand that they do not have to choose between being Mexican and being American. They are allowed to inherit both without asking either culture for permission.

They should know the language, the food, the history, and the sacrifices that brought their family here. They should understand why meals matter, why gathering around a table means we have won, and why culture survives through ordinary repetition inside a home.

But they should also know that America is their home.

They belong here completely.

Their heritage should give them roots, not create a test they must continually pass for other people. Being American does not require abandoning where their family came from. It gives them the freedom to decide what continues, what changes, and what they will build next.

I want them to inherit cultural pride without cultural confinement and American opportunity without forgetting the responsibility to protect it.

They are still young. Their understanding of home is simple. Home is where their parents are. It is where they are fed, held, changed, kissed, and told they are loved. It is the place we return after weekly family activities and the place where their father talks about futures they are too young to understand.

That simplicity is something worth preserving.

Someday they will encounter the questions that followed me. Someone may ask where they are really from. Someone may decide they are too Mexican for one room or not Mexican enough for another. They may discover that people use language, skin, names, politics, food, and family history as evidence in trials no one agreed to attend.

When that happens, I want them to know the verdict has already been decided.

They belong.

They will not need an extended family’s approval in Mexico to prove their heritage. They will not need another American’s permission to claim their country. They will know where home is because we will have built one around them.

That is why the statement matters so much to me:

America is my home, and this is where I will be buried.

It is not a rejection of Mexico. Mexico is present in my language, blood, memory, food, and understanding of family. It gave me part of who I am.

But history and home are not always the same place.

Home is where the future is being built. Home is where my children will grow. Home is where I intend to work, contribute, struggle, worship, build community, resist tyranny, defend liberty, and pursue a life that once seemed to require another move.

Home is where I have decided to stay.

For years, the question was whether America or Mexico would fully claim me. The answer is that belonging was never something either side had the authority to grant.

I was born here. I returned here. I built my life here. I am raising my family here. This is the country whose promises I intend to defend and whose failures I refuse to ignore.

This is the land where my children will inherit more than I did. This is the land where we are building our village. This is the land where, when my work is finally complete, I will remain.