The Immigrant Dream of Building a House in the Motherland

While growing up in Texas, my dad and I would eat breakfast on Saturdays and then draw blueprints on napkins for fun. Every time, he’d design the dream home he wanted to build in El Salvador someday with four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a big kitchen, a spacious living room, and windows that faced the palm trees. While drawing out his floor plans, he always told me, “If I had gone to school, I think I would have been an architect.”

After 37 years of living in the United States, my dad is finally building his own house back in the motherland. This house will be right next door to his childhood home in San Miguel, El Salvador. Everyone in town is fascinated by the construction of this house–we get WhatsApp updates from different people every week. In these videos, I can see my grandpa in the background sitting on a chair, admiring the construction. By next spring, the house will finally be complete.

During the day my dad works a maintenance job and my mom works at a tortilla factory. But their evenings are reserved for chatting with Javier, their architect. (They also call me almost every day, asking for my opinion on roof tiles, flooring, wall colors, and appliances.) I’ve never in my life seen them this giddy about anything, but it makes sense: This is the creative project they have been waiting for their entire lives.

As my parents have described it, the immigrant dream is moving to the United States, saving up money, and building a house back in your home country so that you can eventually return to it. In most Hispanic families, this is the ultimate sign of success—bonus points if one of your kids ends up becoming a doctor or entrepreneur and helps you build said house.

我问他们为什么想要建造这所房子里。We had family in El Salvador that we could stay with, so did we need a house? And after all these decades, it was finally financially possible for them, but still a bit tight, so I started sending my parents a small amount of money every month to contribute towards the construction of this house. (The eldest daughter of immigrants urge to help out the family.)

While I was obviously happy to help out, I also wanted to make sure they were making the right decision. But after speaking with them, I could tell that they had never been so sure about anything. They wanted to build this house and know that it wastheirhouse, and no one else’s. To them, the house symbolized their hard work, and aside from raising children, it was their next biggest accomplishment together. Because they hadn’t been able to pay for our college or pass down generational wealth, they felt this was their last chance to leave something behind for me and my siblings.

I started getting excited thinking about spending more time in El Salvador, in a house that had been built by my parents. This house would now be there for me, my family, and the generations to come. But more importantly, seeing my parents this happy over something was one of the most beautiful things I had ever witnessed. I had only ever seen them tired and exhausted, always working for other people, at brutal factories and physically demanding jobs. But building this house had sparked a new creative joy in them. And now what I wanted was to fast-forward to them no longer working and just spending time at their house, eating pupusas, with the view of the palm trees.