The migration of my family has been wildly different on my paternal and maternal sides. I’ll begin with my mother’s side as I know less about it. My great-grandparents on her side were from India, part of the Marajh caste. At some unknown point to me, they moved to Trinidad and Tobago and had my grandmother. She then married some higher-up in Texaco Oil and had my mother. She lived in Trinidad for her early years, going to a vocational school for the end of high school for an electricians certificate. She moved to Canada under a work visa, living with one of her friends and working at a Tim Hortons, making a resumé for herself. She then was hired to KFC in Canada as a shift manager, then a general manager, before moving back to Trinidad for an arranged marriage which she did not go through with. Some years passed and then she met my dad, then later moving back to the States with him.
I know more about my dad’s side’s history, which the earliest I know of begins in Europe. My grandfather was born in 1895 in Yugoslavia, and for reasons that I can only assume to be finding a job during the Industrial Revolution in Cleveland, immigrated to the United States via the Lusitania. He worked in Cleveland and at age thirty-four, with his wife Olga being twenty-one, had my dad in Cleveland. Born in 1929, the Great Depression had just begun to strike the United States. They then moved to the land where my house sits today and farmed fifty acres of land and cared for livestock to make a living, scraping by as the Great Depression left them without coins to rub together.
My mom, after meeting my dad and sailing back to the U.S. on his boat, went through the last immigration my family experienced, coming on a green card, then a marriage visa, then the long and expensive process to become a citizen of the United States of America. All of these migrations by my mother and my grandfather showed an attempt to find some economic solace in a foreign place, trying to make a life for themselves and other people in their lives, which seeing as I am now attending college as a first-generation student, seems to have worked wonderfully.