When a family loses a mother, they also lose their way for a while. That’s what happened to Silvia Ruiz and her family in Mexico.
Silvia was 12 when her mother died. Silvia had always been the one to help in the fields, not in the kitchen. “I loved my outdoor childhood,” she says. “I didn’t know how to bake or sew. But these were suddenly my jobs.”
Her father left the next year to look for work in another city. At 13, Silvia and an older adult brother were left to care for her two younger siblings.
“My older brother was so patient with me as I tried to do all the things my mother used to do,” says Silvia. “My bread turned out like rocks. ‘That’s okay,’ he’d say. ‘Look: we’ll just grind it up like this in the molcajete and use it to bread the fish.’”
Two years later, the family missed a house payment and lost their home. That’s when her father decided to move the family to the States. “It was so hard at first,” she says. “I had an older brother and sister who, with their families, shared a small house in Inglewood. Then we moved in. Ten of us in a tiny, tiny place. I still think of those days as my time in captivity.”
Silvia never wanted to leave Mexico. It’s still hard. If they hadn’t lost their mom and home, they never would have left. She is still sad that her time in the fields with the cows and the chickens was cut short.
“But even though I was having such a hard time adapting, there was one thing I really liked about the U.S.,” says Silvia. “I was amazed by all the diversity. I was friendly with everyone when I started 10th grade at Inglewood High. It was shocking and exciting at the same time to be with people who looked different. I’d never really even been around people from other regions in Mexico.”
There was something else Silvia loved about her new life: her teachers. School was like a second home to her. She felt safe. And it’s what led her to eventually get her own teaching credential.
Today, Silvia operates a daycare out of her home in Canoga Park. She specializes in children’s social and emotional development and has helped countless toddlers in her neighborhood who otherwise would have encountered problems in school. Because of her own experience, she knows that immigrants bring immense value to a community. “Sometimes I wish I had a large child care center so that I could help even more families,” she says.
It saddens her to notice how the attacks on immigrants and people of different faiths are affecting her students. “Just two blocks down the street, someone wrote ‘whites only, go back.’ Don’t they know children are seeing this? When we were studying Martin Luther King, Jr., earlier this year, one little toddler in our circle time stood up and expressed his anger and fear about the president. There’s a lot of anxiety and it’s hurting our children.”
