My name, Soledad, translates from Spanish to “loneliness” or “solitude”. I love telling others my name when I meet them for the first time, though they are sometimes not able to pronounce it. Even other Spanish speakers occasionally look at me strangely, questioning why would anyone be named Soledad. I usually grin at people when saying my name because I hold immense pride in my name, and who I am. I was 14 years old sitting at the kitchen table, listening to my Grandmother tell me about our family. Soledad Millan de Mendoza, my Grandmother's mom, was born in Chihuahua, Mexico around the 1930s. The meaning of her name comes from La Virgen De Soledad, and she took great pride in her name, just as I do now. I listen to my Grandmother as she tells me how our family arrived in the United States. The times our family had been deported, how she had been held in a police cell while pregnant with my mother. How my Grandfather was asked to lay on his stomach, the hot tarmac burning through his clothes on a 90-degree day for nothing more than a traffic stop on his way to work. I began to understand where my name came from, and all the hard work and sacrifice it took for me to be here, to bear the same name my Bisabuela once had. I hated the injustice my family had experienced, and still experienced today. I began to pay more attention to issues on immigration, and border patrol and became passionate about these issues and politics. I began to shape the idea of what I wanted to do, and my calling for immigration law. These issues not only affected me and my family but also my community, my State, my Country. I discovered my pride in being Mexican, our culture, our food, our dance, our traditions. Despite having two other brothers the same age as me, knowing it would be difficult for my family and me to pay for college for all of us, as well as deal with financial repercussions from the Pandemic, I knew I was going to continue forward with my career goals. This scholarship would be extremely beneficial to to me, as it could help pay for my university education, and allow me to go into less debt in the future, especially when I begin studying immigration law.