Nostalgia packed in one box

 Hi everyone, this is Yanitsa, the graduate student that is part of ISAB. Lots of our latest posts in International Vistas have had to do with the pandemic and how our lives were shaken and changed suddenly. And with good reason! Especially for international students, the 2020-2021 coronavirus pandemic has affected how we conduct our academic affairs and our relationships with family and friends in our home country. 

From the start of the pandemic, I saw most of my international friends at UCSB flying back to their home countries, packing big suitcases, selling furniture, arranging new housing accommodations. Many graduate international students experience this as a family exodus with their partners, kids, and pets. And then, there were a few of us that decided to stay… Since my husband is an American citizen and has a full-time job in the U.S. I did not feel comfortable going back to Mexico and leaving him in the States. I was also fearful of how immigration laws could change and risk my entry into the U.S. Like many of us, after several years of living in this country I felt divided between here and there. 

Although I never doubted where my nuclear family was and where I belonged, after several months, and especially after spending both summer and Winter break without seeing my family from Mexico I started feeling very homesick. My family and I decided that it was not worth it for them to come and put themselves at risk while the pandemic is still going so we had to conform with video calls every other week. I missed them and I missed other things about Mexico. 

Nostalgia is a feeling we have all felt at some point. Janelle Lynn Wilson explains that nostalgia is a lot more complex than just feeling “sad” about the past. This emotion is connected to past, present, future, and not limited to our understanding of time, but also connected to a sense of place. For us, international students, this makes total sense. Nostalgia is not just about missing a time, but about missing our place of origin. In my case nostalgia came in weird cravings and “needs”, it was the imagination of the tiny actions I do with my mom when I go visit her, and the preparation for me to come back to the U.S. So instead of missing tacos I was missing the type of food I buy to bring back in my suitcase… Another crazy thing, I felt “the need” of having again the type of sunscreen I always buy in Mexico and the one I have been using since I was 16.

So I asked my mom if she could send me some of these things. But we are Mexican, and Mexicans rarely use mail, instead we usually ask friends and family to be our own mail delivery system. We, as a community, work creating a net of favors and saving money by not using a service that someone else can do as a favor. So “sending” my stuff was not always sending my stuff, but finding someone that would travel from Mexico to the U.S. This practice of transporting Mexican and U.S. goods from one side to the border to the other is one that lives in the hearts and imaginations of many people with immigrant families, including mine. As a kid, I remember always getting my cousins used clothes from the States (which felt super fancy and new!) and other goods that either my dad or a relative would send my way. As an international student I also was part of this practice. One time a friend of mine, who was not traveling to Mexico, asked me if I could bring to Mexico a huge snow-jacket she had bought for her mom; another time I packed with me another friend's application for a fellowship that needed to be shipped from Mexico. But this time we had little luck. The few people we knew coming and going had schedules that were not comfortable, plus coronavirus makes everything harder. 

Then I asked my mom the craziest thing ever: “could you send it by mail?”. And after months (literally months!) of resisting and trying to find someone that would cross the border my mom gave up and embarked into the adventure of sending a package through mail. And after a couple of hours and the patience and help of the employee in the delivery shop she was able to send me what I needed to heal my nostalgia and a couple of surprises. 

“Sale más caro el caldo que las albóndigas” (the broth is more expensive than the meatloaf) she told me without guilt or shame. “Next time it will be your cousin’s suitcase”, she joked. We laughed and talked for an hour about her adventure sending me all the things she wanted me to have in the smallest package. It had been like a Tetris game, trying to fit everything while saving as much money as possible. But she did it and for several days the package full of nostalgia made us feel closer. She would check with me every single day: has it arrived yet? And joking aside, this experience made my mother be more interested in the system of shipping internationally and she is still doing some research to find the best and cheapest way to send things from Mexico to the U.S.… in case nostalgia attacks again. 

After only four days the package was home and with it, I felt closer to home, that home that I still have back in Mexico. My incredible mom packed not only the things I asked for but also a couple of very cool surprises for me and my husband. Among them was a typical Mexican shirt that had held my mom’s smell after all the travel. Sensing her smell after all those months apart was the most perfect and unique present, something that brought me back to my childhood and my home country in seconds and something that made me more resilient as well, to keep myself strong and independent, despite the crazy time and the physical distance. 

References: 

Wilson, Janelle Lynn. “Here and Now, There and Then: Nostalgia as a Time and Space Phenomenon”,  Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction 30, no. 4 (2015): 478-492.