My Multicultural Love Story

Thank you to Jarritos and Dime Media for sponsoring this post and encouraging me to share why I think that we are #BetterTogether

I want to tell you about my multicultural love story that started WAY before my husband and I were even born. Yes, it’s your typical story of boy meets girl, but it’s also a unique story that could only happen in the United States of America because of its history of immigration.

That’s me and my husband as children. Weren’t we cute?

ALSO READ: Raising Multicultural Children in an Un-PC World

I was born in California to Mexican immigrant parents, he was born in Hawaii to mixed-race parents. We both grew up feeling very American because, after all, we were born in the United States of America, but each of us has a different “American” experience because of those who came before us.

I am the first generation to have been born in the United States. My mother and father were both born in Mexico. Work brought my father to the United States and love made my mother follow. Things happened as they often do and the love that brought my mother to the United States in the first place did not last. My parents divorced and my father went back to Mexico, but my mother stayed for love. My mother stayed because she loved me and she wanted to do right by me. She had gone to cosmetology school here and she knew that she could support me here financially better than she could in Mexico. I’ve always felt like a tree that grew in the United States with strong roots that extend to Mexico. Those roots from another country nourish me and inform the way that I flourish in this country.

ALSO READ: 13 Tweets That Perfectly Describe #GrowingUpMexican

I always say that my husband is like Obama on the down-low because he, like the 44th president, was born in Hawaii to a white mother and a black father. My husband is not the first, second or even third generation to have been born in this country. Some of his ancestors made their way here many years ago from Europe, while others were forcibly taken from their homeland and brought here to be slaves. For many years in many states, the union of the different branches of my husband’s family tree would have been illegal because of anti-miscegenation laws that prohibited marriage between races. It wasn’t until the 1967 case of Loving vs. Virginia that the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that banning interracial marriage was unconstitutional. Perhaps it was romantic destiny that brought my husband’s parents together in Hawaii, a state that never had any laws against interracial marriage.

As young adults my future husband and I made our way to San Francisco, California where we met and fell in love while walking the hilly streets of this beautiful city. On those long walks we would take, he taught me what “talk story” meant to people in Hawaii and we talked story all the time. We talked story so much that soon our stories felt intertwined and we wanted to become family. We married and now we have two beautiful daughters.

ALSO READ: Tortilla Towels, Tortilla Song and a Celebration of Accents

Without a doubt I can say that the family my husband and I have created is what we are proudest of, but we know that our multicultural love story is only possible because of the love stories that came before and resulted in the making of us. We are so very grateful for the diversity of this nation because we KNOW that we are better together.

I truly believe that the diversity of our country is not only what makes us unique, but also our greatest strength. I invite you to watch “The Journey,” a short film directed by Diego Luna that shares the challenges, triumphs and beauty of the immigrant journey. Watch the whole thing, it’s less than two minutes long, to see how we are #BetterTogether.