Between Here & Home: Finding a Way Back to Ourselves as the Children of Immigrants

by Alx Espinosa

There is a particular kind of dissonance that comes with being raised somewhere your family isn’t from.

As a first-gen Colombian American, I’ve felt this most in conversations with outsiders who have spent time in Colombia as tourists. They often speak about my culture with a kind of ownership, as if proximity alone gives them access to the same depth of understanding that many first- and second-generation kids are still trying to reach well into adulthood. As if spending time in a place can replace ancestral ties, generational trauma, historical context, or the lived experience of what it means to exist within that culture under systems of oppression.

I notice it with people from historically dominant groups who move through these colonized places with a kind of ease that isn’t afforded to everyone. There’s a tendency to romanticize their experiences and speak with authority about cultures they encountered only briefly. In that process, they end up speaking over members of the diaspora, many of whom have complicated relationships to these places or have not had the same freedom to return. Or to return in a way that feels light, joyful, or unburdened.

There’s also a kind of grace extended to these visitors that isn’t always extended to us. Broken Spanish becomes charming, even admirable, especially when it comes with American dollars or Euros, or from the mouths of tall, blue-eyed gringos. Meanwhile, those of us trying to reconnect to our own bloodlines are labeled “no sabos” the moment our accents reveal we didn’t grow up fully inside the colonial borders of our homelands. This contrast reveals how differently belonging is granted and withheld, shaped not just by ancestry but by power, privilege, and proximity to it.

In those moments, it also becomes clear how differently culture is experienced depending on whether you are passing through it or carrying it in your bones. Cultural identity is not something you can visit. It is something you embody, even if that embodiment doesn’t always feel fully within your grasp. It’s something you unpack carefully with the hands you inherited from your grandparents. Carrying that ancestral luggage is a very different experience from being raised on the land the bags were packed on.

Pieces Without a Full Picture

I grew up in the United States, shaped by values, promises, and ideals that were not thought up with my family’s history in mind. At the same time, I was raised within a household that carried traces of another world. Colloquialisms, jokes, comfort foods, oral histories, ways of relating. Pieces of something I couldn’t reach out and touch except when I hugged my relatives, pieces of something that extended beyond where we were physically located. And those pieces did not always fit together neatly or come with context. Or the context I was given was filtered through the survival story of a relative whose relationship to this land and that land was very different from my own.

There were things I was expected to understand without ever being taught. Things I was meant to feel connected to without having fully experienced them. Over time, that creates a kind of distance that is hard to express in words. Not a complete disconnection to either side, but not a sense of true belonging anywhere either.

Ni de aquí, ni de allá. Neither from here nor there.

So I suppose I have always existed somewhere in between. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve been glad to find I’m not alone here. Those of us in the in-between have to define that space for ourselves, not allowing anyone else to define it for us, while doing what we can to reconnect to our roots and tend to the generational fracture that has occurred.

What often goes unspoken in conversations about diaspora is how the distance was created in the first place. Migration is frequently framed as a choice. As an opportunity, a reaching toward something better, rather than a fleeing from something. For many families across Latin America, our separation has been shaped by conditions completely outside our control, and at times, metaphorically or even viscerally, at the mouth of a loaded weapon. U.S. intervention, economic destabilization, military involvement, and extractive policies have played a direct role in shaping the circumstances that forced people to leave their homes.

What we inherit as distance, and the pressure to assimilate into the illusion of “American” culture, is not accidental. It is the result of histories that disrupted land and ecosystems, shattered communities, and interrupted cultural continuity in deeply violent ways for a systemic purpose. Cultural disconnection does not happen on its own.

Who would we be without colonization? This is a question I think many of us carry, whether we say it out loud or not.

And this fragmentation of identity is not just a consequence of history, but of how power sustains itself. It is part of a system that extracts from land and people while severing them from their sense of belonging.

People without roots are easier to exploit.

What They Left Behind, What They Packed, and What We Are Unpacking

We are witnessing a cultural shift globally, but especially among diasporic Latin Americans, where there is finally language for things that were once only felt. Phrases like diaspora, generational trauma, cultural displacement, code-switching, assimilation, even “ni de aquí, ni de allá,” have given shape to experiences that lived in our bodies long before they were put into words. For our parents and grandparents, migration was not about self-discovery or cultural exploration or identity. It was about survival.

What do we need to preserve to hold onto our sense of humanity?
What do we have to let go of to keep moving?

These were not abstract questions. They were decisions our parents made under pressure, in the moment, in cars and on planes and buses, even on foot. With babies in tow, bags full of family heirlooms and weathered photos, across rough terrain, through bustling airports, and on roads they had never seen before, with signs in languages they didn’t understand. And all of this often without the luxury of time for reflection.

Because of this, there can be a disconnect between generations that is difficult for us to articulate. Many of our parents were taught to endure, adapt, and survive within systems that did not make space for them, much less for their emotional processing. This doesn’t mean they don’t feel the loss. Quite the opposite. It means they know the value of what they held onto. Their knowledge was carried in the meals they prepared without recipes, in the stories told in fragments, in the ways they protected us without always having the language to explain what they were protecting us from. It lives in the traditions our families held onto, and even in what they could not pass down at all.

So when we begin to speak about our sense of disconnection, about identity, about mental health, it can feel unfamiliar or exhausting to our elders. Not because they do not care, but because they had to let go of so much they cared for.

At the same time, for those of us raised in the diaspora, this lack of understanding can create its own kind of grief. There is something painful about feeling unseen or misunderstood by the very people who gave you your cultural inheritance. There is confusion in trying to articulate an experience that does not fully exist in their frame of reference.

And so we find ourselves here, in between.

Trying to understand them, while also trying to understand ourselves. Holding compassion for what they survived, while also acknowledging what could not be given to us. What we have been searching for our whole lives. Being raised in the global north as the child of immigrants from the global south means constantly navigating systems that were not built for you, while also carrying expectations tied to a culture you did not fully grow up in. You learn how to move between worlds early. How to code-switch. How to interpret. How to translate not just language, but experiences that weren’t exactly yours. Over time, that kind of adjustment becomes internalized. You begin to question who you are at every level. You may feel out of place in environments that expect assimilation, but also uncertain in spaces that expect cultural fluency. You question your right to claim what is yours. And this isn’t a personal failure. It’s structural and deliberate.

People without roots are easier to exploit.

Returning Without Repeating Harm

Across Latin America, colonization did not end with independence, with flags sewn by our ancestors’ hands and nations declared free. Through economic control, political intervention, and cultural erasure, systems of power continue to shape what is possible for entire regions. The result has been not only the displacement of our people. It has also left its imprint on the land itself, in mountains carved open for mineral extraction, deforestation, and rivers that have been redirected or poisoned, remapping entire landscapes in ways that make it harder for communities to remain in relationship with the earth that once sustained them. The land is not separate from us. When it is wounded, something in us is displaced too, severing connections that once held entire ways of life in place.

In recent years, more people in the diaspora have begun moving back to Latin America after growing up in places like the United States, Canada, and Europe. While these lands share a history of colonization and land destruction, the process of repair for those indigenous to them is not the same as our own. And for those “remigrating”, much like their parents and grandparents, what once felt like an impossible dream has become a reality for some. A feeling many of us have known at some point, gazing longingly at photos of our families’ pueblos, standing on a mountainside or a beach or a farm during a brief visit back home, or even in dreams where our sleeping bodies remember something we have not fully lived.

Many content creators have documented their reverse migration journeys on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, sharing glimpses of what it looks like to rebuild a life in a place that feels both familiar and unfamiliar. Their content often captures the beauty of reconnecting to the landscapes, the language, the slower rhythms of daily life, while also revealing the disorientation, the bureaucratic challenges, the cultural gaps, and the quiet moments of realizing that returning does not mean feeling like you totally belong.

At the same time, return is not simply picking up and changing locations. The same systems that shaped migration to the global north are very much ongoing, and for many countries in Latin America, the conditions our families left continue to harm our people. The ability to return is not equally accessible to everyone, so what feels possible for some remains a dream for others.

Return also asks a lot of us.

In many parts of Latin America, the presence of foreigners and diaspora communities with access to U.S. income is reshaping local economies in harmful ways. Housing has become increasingly scarce and unaffordable, and limited access to jobs and education has left many with little choice but to serve those relocating from the West, in ways that echo how our ancestors were made to serve conquistadors. Without awareness, return can unintentionally mirror the same patterns of extraction that led to our displacement. And because of that, our reconnection cannot only be about personal fulfillment. It requires relationship. It asks us to invest in the communities we are entering, to learn rather than consume, to listen more than we speak. To recognize that even with ancestral ties, we are not exempt from accountability.

We can hold multiple truths at once. We can acknowledge the privileges that come with living in the global north while grieving what was lost. We can recognize unequal access while still longing for connection. Learning to hold the tension between our realities without simplifying either of them is part of what it means to live in a diaspora.

A Sense of Home in the In-Between

Across Latin America and throughout the diaspora, there is a growing recognition of how colonialism and imperialism have shaped our identities. This process is not linear. It can take generations to repair what was damaged, just as it took generations to create that distance in the first place. But this work does not begin with having all the answers. It begins in the quiet moments where something does not quite make sense, in the questions our families may not have had the space or the language to ask. Most importantly, it begins with paying attention and allowing ourselves to sit with the uncomfortable truths we once pushed aside in the name of survival.

Reconnection is often much more subtle and intentional than we expect. Colonized people don’t tend to wake up one day and feel whole. Rebuilding our identities can be painstaking and take our entire lives without ever fully feeling complete. Our effort shows up in our attempts to speak the languages we were not fully taught, even when the words come out imperfectly. In asking our elders about their first day in the United States and their lives before we arrived, even when the answers come in fragments or hesitation, or when hearing them breaks our hearts. In the ways we choose to show up for our communities, both here and back home. In the ways we catch ourselves before perpetuating cycles that harmed us.

And maybe that is just how we find our way back. One little action at a time.

Further Reading & Listening

For those who want to explore what it means to be a member of a diaspora, healing generational trauma, and the historical forces that shaped migration patterns in and out of Latin America, here are some resources:

Books

• Decolonizing Therapy – Dr. Jennifer Mullan
  Reframes mental health by connecting personal healing to colonial systems, cultural disconnection, and intergenerational trauma.

• The Open Veins of Latin America – Eduardo Galeano
  Traces centuries of colonial extraction and U.S. intervention that shaped economic instability and displacement across Latin America.

• Harvest of Empire – Juan González
  Explains how U.S. foreign policy directly contributed to migration patterns from Latin America to the United States.

• The Latinx Guide to Liberation – Vanessa Pezo
  Explores generational trauma and identity within Latinx communities while offering pathways toward healing and reclamation.

• Finding Latinx – Paola Ramos
  Documents the evolving identities of Latinx communities in the U.S. through a framework of political awareness.

Podcasts & Content Creators

·       • Latinx Therapy Podcast
Centers mental health in Latinx communities, addressing stigma, family dynamics, and culturally grounded approaches to healing.

·       • How to Survive the End of the World – adrienne maree brown & Autumn Brown
Explores survival, grief, and collective liberation while navigating systemic harm and imagining new ways of being.

·       • @casabolanos on Instagram
Shares the lived reality of relocating from the United States to Colombia as a diasporic family, documenting what it means to raise children closer to their cultural roots while navigating the emotional, cultural, and practical complexities of returning.

·       • @andres.on.earth on Instagram
Reflects on life in Colombia through the perspective of someone raised in New York, capturing the tension between familiarity and distance while reconnecting to place, identity, and belonging.

·       • @annigrcx / @deported_influencer on Instagram
Documents life in Mexico after deportation from the United States, offering an unfiltered look at rebuilding stability, identity, and purpose after forced displacement.