Today, on the final day of Hispanic Heritage Month 2025, we offer a capstone of personal testimony from an individual who, like many Americans, was born in a South American nation, adopted as an infant, and became a U.S. citizen several decades ago. Despite the protections of citizenship, she and others like her in her community now fear they could be deported. She agreed to share her thoughts on the condition that she remains anonymous. The Groundwork Board Equity Committee and Executive Director agreed to that condition. The narrative below is an edited transcript of thoughts shared with Jeff Smith. (To read all of the equity series interviews click here.)

As a baby, I was adopted from South America by an American Caucasian family. They felt a duty to make me feel as part of the family as possible. So growing up there wasn’t really any exposure to my native culture at all. I was raised in the South, I was definitely bullied for how I looked with my brown skin. Where I lived there was such limited diversity, there were times when I actually was mistaken for being Asian. So I was not only bullied for being South American, I was also at times bullied as being Asian. So there was an additional layer of bullying.

I was such a shy child, I didn’t really fight back, didn’t stand up for myself. I didn’t even tell my parents. I didn’t like talking about being different, so I avoided it.

I don’t really know how I carried it all by myself, but eventually I found something that helped when I became very good at a sport. I excelled, and my identity went from being this brown adopted kid to being someone who excelled at a sport. It became my identity.

But even so, when I went to college and also excelled there, when my coach suggested I compete in the World University Games, it’s like the Olympics for colleges, I said no because I was ashamed of being on that big of a stage and being Latin American, so I was in my early 20s and I still had those feelings.

I just couldn’t put myself out there like that. It was not wanting to embrace who I was, and also it was feeling like I didn’t really belong in that sense of representing my country.

It wasn’t until after I graduated from college and I moved to a major metropolitan area that had more diversity—the West Coast, in my mid 20s, that’s really when I started to be more interested in my heritage.

I think a lot of it began when so many people tried to talk to me in Spanish, and I couldn’t understand it. And a lot of it was the environment and my social surroundings. I was no longer ashamed of who I was. I was surrounded by so many people who didn’t fit the stereotypes that exist for my people. There’s so much diversity, it’s not a big deal to be different, because it’s just how it is.

My self esteem was so affected by my looks that I felt like I was “less than” in so many different ways. When I was little, I literally used to go to bed and pray that I would wake up with blonde hair and blue eyes.

I started to embrace my heritage when I met my peers who were also adopted from my country, and we all had similar experiences.

They actually are the ones that helped expose me to my actual culture, traveling to New York City and parts of the East Coast that have a lot of people from my country and learning about things and eating the food, and now I know a little bit of Spanish.

I learned through my experience to see all of the wasted time that I had where I didn’t embrace my heritage, I didn’t learn my language. Later on I was a camp counselor for kids adopted from other countries, and I had an opportunity to share my experience and help them embrace their cultures, go visit their birth country.

Now I’ve been back to my country many times. I got married in my birth country, and now I have a child of my own. Helping her get the cultural exposure that I didn’t have is a big deal to me.

But to be honest, right now I am too afraid to visit my birth country. And it really makes me mad, because my daughter’s getting older, and she’s gone back with me once when she was younger, and she has vague memories of it, but I feel like right now it’s such a key time to go, and I am legitimately afraid that if I go I won’t get back in, even though I am a United States citizen. I’ve never felt that way in all my years.

I know stories of adoptees who were U.S. citizens who have gotten deported. Now, in those situations, the adoptees had had some trouble with the law, and the immigration authorities said they found out that their adoption paperwork wasn’t perfectly correct, so they got deported.

Imagine that you find out in your 30s or 40s that your adoption paperwork had some kind of flaw and you were deported into a country where you do not know language or anything else.

So it made me wonder, do I really know if my adoption papers from when I was an infant several decades ago are perfect or not? I came from a very corrupt orphanage, so who really knows. You just don’t know. Because I feel like the feeling out there in my circles is, at the border, in airports, they will do whatever they want now and ask questions later.

I am in friend groups on social media and a large majority of us grew up being victims of extreme bullying and racial discrimination, and that is making the current political climate extremely triggering. Sometimes, someone looks at me a certain way, and I worry if that’s what they’re thinking, am I illegal or if they think I should go back to my country. And what will they do?

I never thought decades later past my southern childhood, I would feel the same type of anxiety and fear as I did as a child about looking the way I look. It’s not a good thing, not a good feeling, and it’s not okay. I shouldn’t feel afraid, and neither should anyone else. I mean, I know that there are a lot of families out there that are afraid.

I just feel like people have been given permission to think in ways that encourage deep division, discrimination. People like me are afraid. People like me are incredibly sad. And quite honestly it is traumatic. It is very traumatic. And it’s traumatic to know that our friends and people in our community either hold these viewpoints in high regard or turn a blind eye to the cruelty. It’s sad but I hope there is a day when I can again not think about or worry about whether or not I or my peers or my fellow Latin American citizens of our country have to worry about being deported or being mistreated or treated as less than in society as a whole. Not worry about the color of my skin! I’m waiting for the super hero. What I have learned about my culture is Latin American people are hard-working, passionate, family-oriented loving people.

I would ask and encourage others, when you see someone who looks different than you or who speaks another language, or has an accent, say hello or smile, especially children. Let’s combat the fear, the terror and the stereotypes.

NOTE: If you or someone you know needs help with an immigration issue, assistance and resources can be found through the help hotline of the Michigan branch of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) 313.578.6806 and Northern Michigan E3, northernmichigane3.com, admin@northernmichigane3.com. Please consider supporting them with your donations.