Youth, with its voracity, fire, spontaneity and liberty is usually driven by a search for belonging, meaning, purpose, self-discovery and even adventure. To pursue this search, it is important to have a guiding force in one’s voyage. In my case, I found myself searching for a new home in the United States during my teenage years.

 This search for a home – which can also be interpreted as a search for belonging – marks the immigrant experience in the U.S. All of us who have been forced to leave behind our homes in the pursuit of liberty, dignity and progress, we come to face the challenge of neglecting our past and having to adapt to a place that often rejects our culture. We can also opt to preserve our identity and build a home for ourselves and our families in this “concrete jungle.”

I recently realized that being with my family in Florida feels like home. This feeling started during my freshman year of college at Hofstra University, when I often traveled between Miami and New York. After years of searching for a place and facing challenges, I found in Florida a safe haven that reminded me of my childhood in my hometown: Matagalpa, Nicaragua. 

In Florida, I tasted the familiar flavor of freshly toasted coffee beans, my mom cooked the same recipes from Nicaragua and the family gathered to go to church on Sunday. After, we would prepare a huge dinner for family and friends, which would require some effort from all of us. Together, we worked, chatted and laughed. 

Unfortunately, this beautiful fantasy, this primordial place of grace, shattered when, in Nov. 2025, my grandfather – who had worked in this country for over 30 years – was captured by Immigration and Customs Enforcement outside our home. This not only threatened to separate our family, but it also deprived me of that safe haven I had longed for during my semesters in college and that I had been able to establish in Florida. 

This unexpected and dramatic event also acted as a catalyst that triggered a need to reinvent myself as a student, as an activist-historian, as a writer and as a chronicler of what Pope Francis described as “existential peripheries.” I sought a future where my refuge and my professional career would be intertwined.

It has already been seven years since I originally departed from my hometown of Matagalpa. As I reflect upon my last visit to Nicaragua this past January, which was necessary to visit my now-deported grandfather, I can’t stop thinking about how everything suddenly seemed very unfamiliar and strange there. As I was talking to my old local friends, I recognized they treated me differently, not just as a distant figure of the past, but also as a tourist – disconnected from the reality of our country and from the Latin American experience as a whole.

From this recent visit to Nicaragua, there is a specific image that now haunts me: I’m looking back through the bus window, the wind is blowing in my face and in the distance the mountains of my city, that familiar landscape that was once my source of inspiration growing up in Matagalpa, are saying goodbye again. This was the last thing I saw from my city this past January, as it was banished to the horizon. It was the very same last heartbreaking memory from the first time I went back home in 2023 and the same image before I began my voyage to a distant land the first time I left. After this departure, I found myself in the dilemma of not belonging anywhere. 

In the U.S., I am constantly identified as “other” due to my accent, my ethnicity and even my race, which is perceived in a completely different way in this country than it is in Latin America. I am condemned to be seen as a foreign individual, under the threat of the uncomfortable question, “Where are you really from?” 

In Nicaragua, I was drowning in survival remorse after witnessing how the nation had stopped progressing and how my friends, neighbors and relatives had become used to believing in a better future while the government intended to control every aspect of their lives. I am constantly reminded of my acquisition power by using U.S. dollars, but I am also reminded of how “Americanized” I have become. 

Many immigrants in the U.S., specifically immigrant college students, face this reality: a persistent feeling of loss and an ongoing longing to belong to a society that has marginalized them to existential edges. They experience internal exile caused by war, dictatorships, repression, poverty and external exile provoked by ongoing discrimination and dehumanization. Still, beyond these existential peripheries, I find peace in knowing – as many of you surely do – that yearning, searching for meaning and experiencing loss are universal aspects of our human journey. So, the journey – here in college and beyond – shall continue!