Ray G
Major: Structural Biology & Biophysics, Human Rights
Hometown: Danbury, Connecticut
Age: 21
Parents' Home Country: Dominican Republic
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"I think it was really cool walking the trail my mother used to take to go to school every day and the abandoned shacks where my family used to live up in the mountains. As odd as it sounds, I think it helped me know my parents more because I was at the scene where they were raised.
Otherwise, the Dominican Republic today is a very different Dominican Republic than the one my family left. When my mother was growing up in a small agricultural town called Las Placetas, they still used kerosene lamps and candles to light their home, vaccinations were done by Mormon and Catholic missionaries, and they still used wooden animal-drawn tools to farming. Today if I go to the same town, everyone has electricity, wifi, and cell phones. Santiago, the nearest city, used to be mostly suburbs when my grandfather grew up there but today is a proper metropolitan city about the size of Boston. So I think it’s a little hard to gauge this from what my family has told me.
My family always reminds me that if they had stayed in the small farmer town they’re from that I’d likely already be a father with multiple children and a wife, but since the country is a lot different now I don’t really know how life is there now relative. I have cousins my age that are going to law school and some that actually are parents already working.
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I think the American Dream is something that is taken very seriously in immigrant households since social/economic mobility is much more possible here in this country than in a lot of other places. Of course there are many paths in obtaining economic stability, but education has always been the most reliable way of achieving that and it’s something that no one can take away from you.
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It’s definitely been impactful to my experiences growing up and just how I see/interact with other people and other cultures. It also helps that almost all my friends were also second-generation Americans back in Danbury. Looking back, it was definitely very interesting being part of two cultures at the same time with friends on the same boat but with different backgrounds like Indian, Jamaican, Yemeni, Cambodian, Salvadoran, and Brazilian."
