Credits: Lorie Shaull. “El Salvador Flag, A Day Without Immigrants March & Rally”. Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.
Introduction
In this source, Carlos Hidalgo shares his story of immigrating to the US from El Salvador when he was fourteen. Hidalgo explains that his family migrated to the US in order to escape the violence of the Salvadoran Civil War. To describe the dangerous situation in El Salvador during the civil war, Hidalgo recounts how he was almost drafted into the Salvadoran Army at the age of ten. Hidalgo describes how “welcomed and safe” he felt once arriving in the US and reflects that he and his siblings were lucky to have been given a chance to “have a childhood and act like kids, to dream again” after escaping from El Salvador. In the rest of his essay, Hidalgo describes his life in the US before detailing the series of events that led him to be detained in an immigrant detention center for a year and a half. Hidalgo now works to advocate as a member of the Freedom for Immigrants’ Leadership council. Through telling his story, Hidalgo hopes to bring awareness to the struggles that Latin American immigrants experience even if they live in the US legally.
Hidalgo is just one of the many people from El Salvador who have come to the US during and after the Salvadoran Civil War. According to the US Department of State website, there are over two million immigrants living in the US. Immigrants have been coming to the United States from El Salvador since around the 1930s, but the number of immigrants spiked in the 80s and 90s due to the Salvadoran Civil War. Salvadorans have continued to make up a large percentage of the people immigrants to the US even after the end of the war. Perpetual violence and economic instability have caused El Salvador to experience a mass exodus with people leaving the country to look for better opportunities elsewhere. In particular, many unaccompanied minors have been coming to the US from El Salvador leading to concerns about the county’s future. The US government and the Salvadoran government have worked together to try to solve El Salvador’s immigration problem. Yet, the Salvadoran population in the United States continues to grow and remains a lasting ramification of the Salvadoran civil war.
Source Excerpts:
“Up until I was 7 years old I recall my childhood being a happy one. My father went to America in search of a better life for us. Then the economy in El Salvador got worse, and so did the war, which forced my mother to leave for America to help my father. My parents knew things would get worse before they got better, and if both were working in America they could raise money a lot quicker and be able to send for us.”
“After 7 long weeks walking on the road, traveling on smelly buses and trains, and many sleepless nights we finally reached the Mexican border. I was 11 years old when I entered the US.”
Link to Hidalgo’s Full Story: https://imm-print.com/an-immigrants-story-escaping-el-salvador-and-building-a-life-in-the-us/
Hidalgo, Carlos A. “An Immigrant’s Story: Escaping El Salvador and Building a Life in the US.” IMM IMM Print, October 10, 2019.