A Winnie the Pooh journal and the promise of a trip to Disney World—those are the almost two-decade-old memories that stand out in Camila Cabello‘s mind when she thinks about her and mom Sinuhe immigrating from Mexico City to Miami when she was just 6 years old.
For nearly seven years of her life, the future Fifth Harmony standout turned solo pop star had split her time between her birthplace of Havana, Cuba, and dad Alejandro‘s native Mexico City when suddenly one day her grandmother wrapped her in a tight embrace, her mom handed her a backpack with her doll and that cartoon-covered notebook, and told her that they were going to Disney.
Together they crossed the border from Mexico to the United States, leaving behind her father, who wouldn’t be able to join them for a year and a half, she wrote in a poignant 2017 essay for PopSugar, “literally risking his life for his family to physically make it here.”
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I didn’t realize it then, but, boy, does
“I didn’t realize it then, but, boy, does it hit me now,” she shared. “I realize how scary it must have been for them. For my mom to leave the streets of Havana where our neighbors were our friends, where we gathered every holiday to eat pork and my grandma’s rice and beans, to not hear the malecón and the heartbeat of her city pulsing with every crash of the wave.”
Meanwhile, her father left behind four siblings, “the memory of his parents, the street vendors selling the elotes con mayonesa that I would beg him to get in the mornings before school, the best friends he’d grown up with…everything. To decide to start from the ground up.”
Which is what they did, her mom abandoning a career as an architect to stack shoes at a Marshalls near where they settled in Miami.
They had no family in the United States,
They had no family in the United States, Cabello noted, no clue of what was to come next, just a couple hundred dollars, the clothes on their backs and the hope of something better.
“Like my mom said, ‘I don’t know where I’m going, but I can’t stay here,'” Cabello wrote. “And that was enough.”
And Cabello is just one of millions with a story to tell of the strength and perseverance it takes to risk everything you have for the slimmest promise of something better.
In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month—also known as Latinx Heritage Month, it comes to a close Oct. 15—we’ve rounded up more stories from stars whose families put it all on the line to add to the beautifully blended melting pot that is America.
(Originally published Oct. 8, 2021, at 6 a.m. PT)
