Common Threads

From the Islands to the Big City: My Immigration Story by Jahkwaun Budhai

[Editor's note: This is the first installment in a series of blog posts written by students in Professor Sandra Castro's First Year Seminar, "New Immigrant New York." Thank you to Prof. Castro and her wonderful students for sharing their stories!]   

I was originally born in Kingston, Jamaica and like much of my family I knew nothing about the world outside the confines of white sands and clear waters and gloriously comforting foods I can never resist. Large in part of economic reasons many natives of Jamaica make the conscious decision to migrate to the United States and my family was no different. From my earliest memories, my grandmother had already lived in New York City and so it was natural that my parents sought about making the transition as well.

For centuries the allure of bettering one's socioeconomic status has been the major pull for immigrants, including my family. People of Jamaica can attest to the frustration of unemployment and poverty, as many other nations can, and as a small nation it becomes increasingly difficult to specialize resources as population increases. Although fortunate my family has been in not facing unemployment, there is nothing comparable to the security one expects to experience in the U.S. Therefore, at the age of six years old, I had no choice but to follow along the journey my parents and much of my family, who’ve dispersed between the U.S. and Canada, have taken.

July 2006, would eventually become the moment my life and that of my parents would change forever. At such a young age, I was impressionable. In the eyes of a six year old boy it was nothing more than my very first plane ride. One can imagine the sheer look of excitement and zeal in the eyes of a child so ready to see the world and knew nothing about what the grown ups were worrying about. On my parents’ end it becomes a question of how will I survive? That very night I skipped my way off the plane at John F. Kennedy Airport to see the grandmother I only had the fortune of seeing every now and then, reality kicked in. The reality was that I was here in an unknown place with my father, and my mother was thousands of miles away back on the island. And thus began the very first shared experience of immigrants: separation.

My father’s first job was a mall security guard and years later in 2010 when my mother had the opportunity to come she pursued her education to secure herself in a healthcare profession in a nursing home. Prior to 2010, I spent years living with family I had never met, and for an immigrant child the experience is different. It’s difficult to speak on the issues my parents dealt with when they first arrived in regards to racism or discrimination, and so I can only assume that they felt what any immigrant feels: uncertainty and immense amounts of stress.

For a child, on the other hand, this kind of transition is most certainly not an easy one. At the ripe age of six I hadn’t fully built a relationship with my home culture and so by the time I came to New York City I quickly lost whatever accent I may have had and fully immersed myself in American culture. Although my family continued to have me visit Jamaica every summer and cooked the foods I grew up loving, I felt incredibly detached. Every visit seemed more foreign than the last and the faces I may have recognized at six years old became vague memories and ultimately strangers.

Both immigrant children and adults face the reality of having to forcibly lose whatever accent they have for social acceptance or upward mobility and for many discarding their native language, foods, or cultural wear, was a price they were willing to pay. Most immigrants experience this in some way, some more than others, and for children there is often a question of identity. When asked, where are you from?, do I say Brooklyn, because I spent most of my life there or do I say Jamaica? Do I know enough about my own country to qualify myself as a downright native? Eventually, I learned to embrace both the fact that part of my early life was spent in Jamaica and that since then I’ve had the fortune of experiencing people of other cultures in New York City.