My family, my background, and my history is something that I have always cherished and has always been an impactful part of my identity. My mother, up until the age of five, lived in Mexico with her family. They lived on a ranch where her family owned acres of land where they farmed and owned livestock. At the age of 5, my mother, as well as the rest of her family, packed up their belongings and traveled across the border in pursuit of a better life. My mother, making the most of her newly given opportunities, became the first in her entire family to graduate high school and the first to pursue a higher education. My father, also from Mexico, lived with his grandmother while his mother worked tirelessly in the states to provide for her family. At around the age of seven, my father crossed the border with his uncle to reunite with his mother. In the midst of my parents' adolescence, both of their families had settled in Colorado; there they met and began dating. My parents left their home country at a young age, so when they married and had three children, they were determined to pass on their identity and their heritage to us. As far back as I can remember, my parents have always been intentional about incorporating our culture and history into our life. Because they left Mexico so young, they always emphasized our heritage and taught us to cherish and practice it. They taught us Spanish by solely speaking the language at home and made sure to correct our speech and pronunciation when me and my siblings were younger. They would also tell us stories from their hometown and how differently they had lived in Mexico compared to the US. My father specifically would often express to us how he wanted us to visit and experience his hometown and wanted to relive many of his childhood memories. They made sure to express that we should have pride in where we were from and emphasized how their culture was important to their identity: the language, the food, and the customs were all things that my parents never wanted us to be ashamed of. They believed that their experience and background had become an asset and was useful to their jobs and believed it helped with being able to empathize with others that experienced something similar. My childhood consisted of recurrently being surrounded by people that looked like me, spoke the language I spoke, and had similar customs to me. I was constantly surrounded by my culture, my language, and my customs, and being surrounded by it is something that I would consider to be lucky, especially with Latinx/ Hispanic being a part of the minority group in Colorado as a whole. It wasn’t until I was much later in life that I realized that what I had experienced wasn’t a part of the norm in Colorado and that I practically lived in a bubble of cultural diversity for the majority of my life. In my last year of elementary school, my family had decided to take a trip to Mexico. We would be going for a week and we would be visiting both sides of my family; this would be the first time since my baptism when I was 6 months old, the entire family would be visiting Mexico and we would be visiting my dads side of the family first during the September festivities. When I arrived, it felt completely different from being in America: I arrived and people were much friendlier, much closer to each other, and more community based; the culture and customs I had grown up with had only been a small fragment of what experiencing Mexico was like. After recovering from jet-lag, I walked through my fathers’ hometown where every other person we came across would stop us to reminisce with my dad about the times when my father was still little and living there or when me and my sister were newborns getting baptized in the town church. Every morning we went out to eat at a different restaurant in town where the food was flavorful and often spicy. The morning was slow, the food was fresh, the sun shone brightly, and the atmosphere was very calm; it was peaceful. In contrast to the calm mornings, nightlife in Mexico was extremely lively. It was almost like the village woke up at night and rested during the day. On every corner and crevice of the town, there was someone selling something from bracelets to snacks to clothes. There were bright lights flashing from the rides in the plaza, beautiful fireworks with intricate designs were lit up, and live music was everywhere and could be heard from a mile away. There was dancing, singing, and everyone was enjoying themselves to the fullest. Weekday or weekend, for the entirety of this week in specific, everyone: elderly, adults, and children all showed up at night to celebrate the different people that made up the community. There were even many families that wouldn’t end celebrations after the plaza closed but instead would move the festivities to their homes. Ours was one of them; we would bring a band from the plaza and contract them to play in front of our house until the sun rose and everyone would return to their daily routine. When visiting my mothers side, we didn’t stay long. My great-grandma lived in the main house and showed us the different houses on the land- including my mothers and my grandparents. My mothers side was much more like a getaway from everyone and everything. My mother’s hometown was a completely different environment compared to my father’s hometown that was much more animated, my mother’s side was tranquil and serene. It was much calmer, more isolated, and had a slow way of living. We never really explored my mom’s hometown in depth and instead listened to the stories my great grandma and aunt had about my grandparents, my mother, and her siblings back in the day, such as who helped my grandpa tend to the animals, who lived in what rooms, what they would eat, and what my mom’s older siblings did while they lived in Mexico. When I came back from Mexico, I had a deeper appreciation for my background and its value to my life. It was never that I was ashamed and then learned to be proud of my identity- no- what I learned during my first memorable trip to Mexico was the reason why my parents believed it was important for me to know and experience this part of my identity. I know now why they cherished their memories and their time there so much, and I now know why they wanted to visit with us. I feel like learning about my background not just through my parents but from everyone who knew them in the past is something that I still think very fondly of, and is something that I now actively seek out. Now I want to further my understanding of their past, my own history, and more about my family.