My family immigrated to the United States on December 18, 1998 after years of socioeconomic hardships. In Dallas, my father found employment in a moving company, often working over sixteen hours every day of the week while my sister and I attended school and our mother helped the family settle. Eventually, my mother found employment as a babysitter. In Peru, my father owned a company and my mother worked as a television producer, for the Department of Education, and for Defensa Civil, the equivalent of FEMA in the United States. Both were successful individuals, but thanks to the instability of the Fujimori regime, my parents lost everything. Both of them held university degrees, but as is the case with many professional immigrants, Mom and Dad saw themselves relegated to unfulfilling work once settled in America.

On the day of our arrival, my sister and I spoke no English, and over the next several months, we would learn how to ask permission to go to the bathroom, how to tell a stranger where we had come from, and how to ask for directions so that we would not get lost. From the beginning, Mom and Dad placed significant emphasis on our education, and we quickly learned that the quality of schools depended on the geographical area where we lived. Armed with this knowledge, my father asked me to research better school districts in the Dallas area so that we could relocate.

Years passed and I excelled in my studies, got accepted to the Academy of Biomedical Professions at R.L. Turner High School in Carrollton, TX, and, in 2006, I enrolled at Harvard College where I graduated with honors after completing my major in Social Anthropology, a minor in Ethnic Studies, and a Certificate of Language Proficiency in Portuguese.

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