“I think the biggest thing is having people care, show that they care. Having people there when even you might not feel the most welcome, just having someone be there for you.”
— Luis
“For you to belong in a place, I think it's more about the people that make it feel that sense..”
“I was born in Mexico city, but my family and I migrated to DeKalb when I was three. I consider this my home. My dad actually had family here that was working at NIU. He knew people in the area and obviously came to the US to get a better future for my sister and me. I remember when I was little, we would have conversations like, "Oh, one day we're going to go back and stuff." And me and my sister, we already had friends here and we were like, "Oh no, we want to stay here, finish school here."
And I think growing through that and eventually coming up, ourselves with reasons to stay here is because of our friends that we made here, the connections that we made here.
I think back and how my school, elementary and grade school was, and I was in the ESL program, so all our classmates were the same from pre-K until sixth grade. And so once I got out of the ESL program in middle school, it kind of made me realize that those friends were my friends and they were my community and they were mostly Hispanic. And so it was interesting to see that the Hispanic community here in DeKalb felt really close knit. When I was outside of the ESL program, it was hard for me to connect with people. And it was me just not allowing myself to connect.
And so once I hit high school, I started joining more clubs and I started seeing that it wasn't really that scary. And in high school, it hit differently because you started having different cliques and different groups of friends, intermingle in that way. For me, something that I was like, "Oh, I like this. I like having people be friendly. I like being friendly with people."
I see my friends become more open, building relationships at work and at school and we have the feeling of belonging.”
“There's people all around town that would like you to be a part of it.
I think one thing that really stood out to me in high school was that for a long time I was like, "Oh, no student council or joining clubs, key club and stuff. Those are for white, smart kids.” And so it was really scary for me to push myself to be involved in that.
And so I'm hoping that, hopefully people see my picture and see that it's not that scary. There's people all around town that would like you to be a part of it. We want to feel like a community.”
Without addressing the problems, things won't change.
“Having conversations is important for belonging. Like I said, there's always going to be people that are going to make it seem like it's not a welcoming place. And if those issues aren't addressed, then it's just going to continue. And I'm thankful for the campaign that you guys are doing because it helps humanize the situation and it helps it become more of a thing that you can talk about, that you can express your feelings about.
I know there is a lot of feeling that sometimes there's people in this town that have these bad views, and without addressing those problems, things won't change.”
