When Guizella Rocabado leaves her home in Bolivia to pursue her education in the United States, her plan hits an unexpected snag.
Guizella Rocabado is a PhD student in chemistry at the University of South Florida. Her research focuses on chemistry education. She is mainly interested in uncovering the narratives of success of students from all backgrounds. Bringing diversity to STEM fields is a great focus of her work. Her current project is the development and testing of instruments for use with diverse populations to investigate the role of the affective domain in undergraduate STEM learning and persistence. In her spare time she loves to travel, try new foods and meet new people.
This story originally aired on January 18, 2019 in an episode titled “Acceptance.”
Story Transcript
I grew up in Bolivia. My parents sacrificed a great deal to put my sisters and I through a great education. I liked school, at least some subjects. I was pretty good at most subjects, only the ones I liked of course, but I was pretty good at school.
My biology teacher took this to the next level. He took us through stories of how the human body worked, how ecosystems worked together, and they were fascinating. I loved Biology. It’s my favorite subject. I even stayed back during recess to talk to him about all these awesome things. I was a nerd, I know.
But one of these times during my senior year, I asked him, “You know, I want to be a biologist, perhaps a doctor one day. Earn my PhD, cure cancer, something awesome. What are my options?”
He looked at me straight in the eye and with a very serious voice said, “You have to get out of here. You can’t do that in Bolivia. Go somewhere else.”
I was shocked but not surprised. For a while, Bolivia had been in a political climate that wasn’t conducive to science. I don’t think it had ever been conducive to science really, but this wasn’t changing anytime soon. And really, if I really wanted to be and do what I wanted to do, I also knew that I needed to get out of there.
But I didn’t have very many options. My parents did sacrifice everything they had to put us through school. That meant that we had what we needed but not much else. I wanted to come to the U.S. because this is the land of opportunity. I really wanted to come here and be here and have dreams and reach them, but as an international student that meant I had to pay international tuition.
I couldn’t apply for financial aid. I couldn’t work more than a few hours a week, and only in certain places. My parents needed to demonstrate they had I don’t know how much at that time, but basically enough to pay international tuition for four or five years and housing and food and books, and I don’t know how many things. We didn’t have that. I didn’t have that. That wasn’t an option.
Luckily for me, I had an older sister who was just passing her US citizenship test. So she said, “Hey, why don’t you come as an immigrant? That will solve all your problems. You can come here. You can go to school. You can work and do everything that you want. This is the land of opportunity.”
So I graduated on December 2001, packed my bags, packed my parents and our bags, and we came, we came to the U.S. We landed on February 16, 2002.
I was so excited. It was cold. It was in Colorado. It was snowing. I’d never seen snow in my life, but it was so exciting. I didn’t care. I didn’t care it was cold. I didn’t care it was snowing. I didn’t care my hair turned to icicles when I was outside. I was so excited.
Within three months, my parents had received these beautiful white envelopes from Homeland Security with their green cards. Mine didn’t come yet but I was hopefully waiting but it would take a couple more weeks or maybe a month or so and that was fine.
I knew that after 9/11, immigration laws were being revised, new rules and regulations put in place. Things were getting a little bit complicated, so waiting for an extra month was okay.
One month went by, two, three, four. Had they lost my file? I don’t know. Had they filed it in that round bin? I don’t know. So I began to wonder. Are they going to give me this beautiful white envelope that I’ve been waiting for?
So I called because my parents taught me that when you want something you just have to talk to someone and go get it. So I called and asked where my file was and if somebody is reviewing it and when I was going to get it approved. I needed to go to college. Well, I got tossed around between the Chicago office and the LA office and the New York office and some other offices, and this office and that office. I really thought my file was lost, but they clearly had it, just it was everywhere.
Then on my 19th birthday, after eight months of waiting, one of the attorneys said, “They seemed to not know whether you’re an adult or not.” Was 18 years old an adult? Was 21 years old an adult? Nobody knew at that point. It was kind of this limbo situation. I was 19 and who knew if I was an adult or not, I guess. They didn’t.
So because it was this ambiguous situation, somebody had decided that they were going to tuck my file in some corner labeled ‘limbo’ and really just leave it there until I was 21 and I was really an adult. Then they were going to just treat my file as this adult sister of a U.S. citizen and I would have to just wait for a long time.
The number 12 and the word ‘years’ were thrown in the same sentence and I just couldn’t handle it so I took my 19-year-old crushed soul down to the basement and cried. I cried that day. I cried that night. I cried the next day, continued crying the next night.
But then I was determined. My parents had taught me that if I wanted something, I had to work for it. So I said, “Okay, I’m going to do everything I can. I will leave no stone unturned.”
So I called Immigration. I checked online. I called all of the attorneys I could find in that book. I called them all. I called the representatives, the senators, all of them. I went to their offices. I wrote essays, I wrote letters.
I had no response, only, “Oh, yeah, you just wait. It’s in limbo. It’s fine. It’s just sitting there. No worries. It will get approved eventually.”
Well, some months passed. I kept myself busy. I volunteered every place I could. I took all the random online classes I could find. I learned how to play piano. That was exciting. Nothing to do with biology at this point, but I learned to play the harp. Who can say that? Yup, yup. I couldn’t play the violin, though. That’s just not a thing that I could do. That whole neck thing, I don’t know. It wasn’t working for me.
But I kept myself busy. I had some friends. Although it was kind of a rollercoaster situation, some days were good, some days were bad, some weeks were good, some months were bad, a lot of months were bad. At this point, it had been five years. Five years of playing the piano. That was good, but not much else.
At this point, all of my high school classmates were graduating from college. They were going to grad schools or getting awesome jobs, moving on with their lives, getting a second degree while I was just sitting there. I had been the high school valedictorian and the only one of my friends who had never stepped on a campus, on a college campus, to take a class for credit ever.
The dream of becoming this biologist, this doctor, was very, very distant at this point. I got a phone call one day when I was at a church activity. It was a call from home. My father had had a stroke. He was at the hospital. My mom came to pick me up. We went to the hospital. We had no idea how this was going to change our lives.
His massive stroke had left him with the whole right side of his body paralyzed, sped up a reaction where he would go blind, and the doctors didn’t know how to stop that. After two months of being in the hospital, going through therapy, trying to reverse the effects of the stroke, he came back home in a wheelchair and couldn’t work. So my mom at 65 had to go find a second and third job to try to keep the house, try to pay for medical bills, while I just sat there.
At this point, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I felt useless. I felt like I was a burden to my parents. I couldn’t even drive. I couldn’t even drive myself anywhere. It was illegal. So I decided that I would think really, really hard about going back home and living my life and trying to help from a distance. But this was a very hard choice if I made it. Why? Because if I step one foot outside of the United States at this point, I could never come back with an active petition on immigration.
If you leave, they retract it. They don’t care. They’re like, “Oh, she didn’t want it anyways so we’re going to forget about this petition and the fact that she had waited 5 years.” And then Homeland Security would flag my name because I had overstayed my initial visa and then not allow me entrance again.
So I couldn’t go. Or could I? I wasn’t sure what to do. Should I stay and still live in limbo for who knows how long? Should I go and never see my parents again, especially my dad? Well, I had to make a decision. I thought long and hard and started tying up loose ends. I didn’t have very many loose ends but I had to tie them.
I had volunteered at one of my friend’s offices for a while and decided to go and finish filing some paperwork. I was filing some paperwork, not very exciting, but I was doing it. It was something to do while I thought. And I received this phone call from home. It was my mom. I picked up the phone, a little worried, a little jittery. I know what this call is about.
She says, “Oh, I have an envelope here for you. It’s white. It’s from Homeland Security.”
I was shocked. What do they want? So I was just thinking, feeling. Was I allowed to think and feel? I wasn’t sure. So I just sat there quiet.
My mom broke the silence and she said, “It looks a whole lot like the one I got six years ago when I got my green card.”
And I said, “Well, open it. Read it.”
So I heard the longest two seconds of my life. (Sound of ripping paper.) It said, “Welcome to the United States of America.”
Sweeter words were never spoken. I had waited six years for those words. And the first thought in my mind after crying, because I'm a crier, was to run home and hold that piece of paper in my hands, run to the first community college which was only a few blocks away, go to the first open window. It didn’t matter if that lady was frowning or smiling, I didn’t care. I put down that paper and said, “I want to be a biologist. Please enroll me in classes for credit this time.”
Thank you.