When I Realized I was an Immigrant

Raul Dorantes is an immigrant. It is an identity he wears proudly at the end result of a long, emotional journey.

When Dorantes came to Chicago in 1989, he was only 21 years old. The plan was to join his uncle for two years to learn English and to work. When two years was up, he hadn't learned any English, hadn't saved any money and wasn't going back.

The first time Dorantes returned to his hometown of Tequisquiapan, Mexico to visit his parents, six brothers and two sisters, they were astounded by how much he had changed.

"I could see in the eyes of my brothers and sisters and my parents that they looked at me in a different way," Dorantes said. "They asked my why I had changed my accent, why I had changed the way I spoke to them and even my movements." It was at that moment, January 1991, when he realized he had become an immigrant.

"It seems like it would be very obvious, but no. It's something that you realize after a while because the first two or three years I was [in Chicago], I was more Mexican."

The philosophical question of self-identity is something every immigrant experiences, Dorantes said. "At a certain point immigrants ask themselves, 'Who am I? Am I the same person that lives in that town over there in the homeland? Have I changed? How much have I changed?'"

The answers are never easy. "It is not easy to feel depressed, to feel sad, to feel that you don't have a place, that you don't belong," he said. "The feeling of not belonging is very present."

In the beginning, Dorantes found himself so homesick that, without planning to, he twice went to the Greyhound station and took a bus back to his hometown.

"Of course it was crazy," he laughed, "but I had to go. I didn't feel connected over here." Yet strangely enough, he found he had become nostalgic for Chicago.

"Homesick over there and over here. That's when I think the immigrant starts to appear. However, if you accept that you are an immigrant, somehow that is over. If you're an immigrant, you belong here and you belong over there."

Dorantes thinks that if he had stayed in his hometown, he may never have asked himself the existential question. For Dorantes, his identity holds much hope.

"In a way, it connects me with people from all over the world. If I'm an immigrant, somehow I'm closer to the Africans who live in France and Spain and the Turkish who live in Germany."

A U.S. citizen through marriage, Dorantes teaches Spanish and grammar to Mexican immigrants and studies Latino literature at Northeastern Illinois University. His 17-year-old daughter also lives in Chicago. Every year he tries to go back to Tequisquiapan to visit his 20 nieces and nephews.

"I'm very thankful to this land that I consider mine also. These are feelings that most of the immigrants feel."