The Immigration Institute of the Bay Area (IIBA) has launched a new campaign – called I’M IIBA – uplifting what we know to be the true character and positive contributions of immigrants in the Bay Area.
This week we highlight the inspirational story of Valentina
I’M VALENTINA
One of my earliest memories is the Christmas morning I visited my grandparents in the Bay Area when I was 5 years old. There was an obscene amount of presents under a real live tree. This was a big deal, because we use faux trees in Colombia. I was so excited to see a huge Barbie house among the presents. Every year after, I compared my gift haul relative to that day. Alas, it was never as good as that time!
My happiest memories involve playing with my cousins. I remember this super fun afternoon over a holiday when all the cousins were together. We were all playing “La Mano Peluda,” an excellent game where everyone hides in a dark room and the seeker has to find you in pitch dark. We did the weirdest kids things to confuse the seeker like squeeze ourselves between mattresses and curling ourselves into baskets.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the hardest part of immigrating to the U.S. was leaving my huge family behind. When I was 12, I was glad to leave my sleepy hot town with pockmarked roads, children begging in the streets, and fear of guerrilla attacks. I was just excited for the cleanliness and safety of suburbia, and didn’t understand what I was losing.
I’M AN IMMIGRANT
I immigrated to the United States when I was 12 when my parents got divorced. I had been to the U.S. many times to visit my maternal grandparents, including a brief stint in Miami when I was 9 while my mother, an actress,took a role on “Sábado Gigante.”
I am an immigrant, and my children are first generation, but given my family’s history in the U.S., I feel like I’m third generation. My Russian grandfather immigrated to Los Angeles after World War II. His family didn’t have much money, but my grandfather was smart and hard working, and was able to put himself through school at UCLA and later business school, subsisting on bags of apples that he kept next to his desk. After business school, he entered the textile business and traveled all over the world. On one of his trips to Latin America, his plane was grounded in Bucaramanga, Colombia. As he wandered the streets of the city, he ran into a parade featuring my gorgeous grandmother, a white-gloved debutante and Miss Norte de Santander.
My grandfather thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and followed her to her hotel, asking the concierge if he could leave her a note asking to write her letters. He taught himself Spanish to be able to write to her. My grandfather visited her in Cucuta, and two weeks later they got married. My grandfather spirited my grandmother away from a life of privilege and ease to walk in the freezing cold streets of Chicago so she could save a dime on bus fare. I find their story so epic and inspiring, and love the notion that their hard work and passion resulted in their granddaughter becoming an attorney devoted to helping other immigrants live their own epic immigration stories.
I’M A YOGA ENTHUSIAST
During law school, I took up yoga to manage the stress of the experience, and after taking the bar, I became a certified yoga teacher while I waited for my bar results. I met my husband at Stanford, who was an international student from Istanbul, Turkey. An immigrant like myself, we bonded over our shared love of theater and the fact that Turkish and Colombian family dynamics are surprisingly similar. I have two children, Mateo (2) and Lara (9).
I’M AN IIBA ATTORNEY
I’m the Director of Pro Bono and an attorney at IIBA. My mother raised me with a strong sense of justice, and there was something about the contrast between the poverty I witnessed in Colombia and the shiny suburbia of the Bay Area that made me hyperconscious of my relative privilege and want to advocate for others. Also, to be frank, “attorney” is just one of those jobs that Colombians believe guarantees success and financial stability. I worked hard to get into top schools, and received full scholarships to both Stanford and Berkeley Law, which is something that is simply not available in Colombia, and is at the root of my love for this country. After law school, I worked as an associate at DLA Piper, where I learned the dynamics of pro bono within law firms. After the 2016 election, I decided to take action on behalf of immigrants and began practicing nonprofit immigration law.