Life in Mexico

Sandra was born on October 2, 1991 in Chihuahua, Mexico.  She spent the next nine years of her life in her hometown until her family moved to Durango, Mexico for her dad’s job.  At the beginning of the interview, I asked Sandra to describe her hometown and what life was like in Mexico.

Sandra starts with a description of her hometown, a “very simple place.”  The school and the church were just “within a few blocks.”  She describes the park close to the church and the close feeling of community.  According to Sandra, her community was “different” because everyone in the town went to the same school and a lot of the same people went to the same church.  For the first part of her life, she attended the Centro Infantil Bilingue in Hamilton in Chihuahua, a private, bilingual school.  Her classes were about twenty students each and there were three classes per grade.  In her bilungual school, she took half of her classes in Spanish and the other half in English.  She would learn something in Spanish and then learn the same thing in English.  A lot of her English training was translating sentences from textbooks from Spanish into English.  She grew up in a self-described relatively small house with a trampoline and a swing set with her mom, her dad, her sister, and a dog.  She remembers the living room during Christmas-time filled with presents, and that her parents were always video-recording her life.  She admits that sometimes she can’t tell whether she has these memories or if she is just used to looking at the pictures and videos.

At the age of nine, Sandra moved with her family to Durango in another part of Mexico because her father, Vladamir, changed jobs.  In Chihuahua, he worked for General Electric and in Durango he got a job with Intercraft, a picture frame company.  Sandra and her sister transferred to the Colegio Americano de Durango in Durango, another private, bilingual school. However, since most of her family still lives around Chihuahua, Sandra mainly spoke about Chihuahua.

One activity that Sandra remembers fondly is going to the fair with her family.  For every major holiday, a fair would be set up in a large, empty lot.  The fairs would have rides, games, and lots of food.  Sandra describes her favorite food, chiles en nogada.  She mentions one time when she was on the Ferris Wheel with her mom, and her mom made them stop the Ferris Wheel so she could get off.  Sandra laughed as she recounted how embarrassed she and her sister were.


Recent Posts