My name is Cristela Alonzo, and I am part of the legacy left behind by my mother, Natalia Alonzo. She died in front of me when I was 22.

She had been sick on and off for a couple years, but it wasn’t until the last year of her life that a doctor told us that my mom had suffered numerous strokes throughout her life. Each had weakened her heart every time.

I was living in Los Angeles and had to move back to my hometown, San Juan, Texas, to take care of her. We moved in with my sister, and my mom and I shared a tiny bedroom. Sometimes she would keep me up at night because she was in pain. The last time she got sick, she knew it was different. I knew it was different. We called an ambulance and when they came, I rode with her to the hospital. She didn’t get better. I saw her take her last breath.

This story is important because today marks the end of Immigrant Heritage Month. We talk about immigrants often, but rarely do we give them a soul, a face, a name. We think about them as if they’re not real people and instead anonymous nouns. But the immigrant I’m writing about, Natalia Alonzo, had a soul, a face, a name. And she died trying to give her family a better life.

My mom was very cynical but full of hope at the same time. She lived an extremely hard life but was still so grateful for the little she had. She had a second-grade education and came from a village in Mexico that had no electricity and no running water. The men treated women like property: If a man “wanted” a woman, he would “take” her from her house, and she’d have to marry him. She was taught that she and her sisters were always second to her brothers. Her family had no food so a lot of times my mother would run around in a mountainside full of rattlesnakes and eat whatever berries and plants she could find, not knowing if they were dangerous or not—hey, it was food.

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