Personal essay: A return home
Every holiday season, when I head to see my family in Hayward, California, I know that I can always pack lightly. After all, I’m heading home. In a small closet near the living room at home, I have left a pair of jeans, a few dress shirts and T-shirts, and a pair of sneakers, just enough for my short visits and enough to reassure me that there will always be room for me in the house where I grew up, even if I left five years ago to go to college.
But at our annual Christmas Eve dinner two years ago, my parents, Ignacio Torres, 61, and Maria Torres, 57, married for 33 years, announced they were moving back home – to a town called Huisquilco, in the Mexican state of Jalisco. They are planning to leave as soon as my younger sister, Cristina, leaves for college in the fall of 2011.
My four siblings and I saw it coming all along.
From the moment my family moved to California from Mexico in 1995, to join my father when I was 10 years old, my parents constantly reminded us that they would one day go back. Their wish to return is not atypical. Immigration experts estimate that most immigrants, upon arrival, announce that they would one day head back home. But many find themselves so caught with work or entangled by family responsibilities, that eventually, the urge to return home fades.
My parents’ promise to themselves long ago was aided by more recent and prosaic events: my father lost his job when the GMC-Toyota automobile plant, where he had worked for more than a decade, closed in 2009. He took it as a sign that it was time to return. In this decision, too, my parents are not alone. They join a growing group of immigrants who, worried about the economy in the U.S. and their prospects for holding on to good-paying jobs, are going home to retire.
My father gathered his savings from four decades of working in the United States, filed for early retirement, and began planning his return to the house in Mexico that he built soon after getting married in 1978.
Over the past year and half, the house in Mexico has slowly transformed from a one story, three bedroom home into a two story, five bedroom, three-bathroom home. While my parents eagerly try to finish remodeling before their move back, I can’t help but think about what will happen to the place where I grew up? The place where I learned to read and spent countless hours playing with my childhood friends. How long until I can no longer go back to this place?
As I count down the months, weeks and days until the day my parents move back to Mexico, I find myself realizing that, as soon as they leave, I will have to find room in my apartment for those T-shirts and boxes of books and memories that for years have allowed me to feel at home. In a year, visiting my parents will require a more expensive ticket, a heavier travel bag and an extra hour in travel time.
But I don’t think it matters for I know that waiting for me at the door will be what truly makes me feel at home – my parents.
