Meet Nestor
"I try to tell stories that have the Latino perspective – something about living in Guatemala, say at least say one word in Spanish, say something about being undocumented. It shows people –this is who we are, this is why we came here, we are not all rapists and robbers and killers like some people like to think."
"I can’t make you see the world through my eyes. I am just going to show you what I lived through, what I know, and it’s your decision to take it any way you want. I can’t change your point of view anyway. I may see the color green and love it, you may see the color green and hate it. But I am going to do my best to show you what I know the best way possible. You have to own your own story."
“I want to write so that people see things the way undocumented people see them. It’s another way to see the world. That’s what writers do. Writers are basically telling you how they see the world, how they see life. I want to show the way that undocumented people live. Even though I have my papers, I always see myself as an undocumented person. Because there are always people out there who tell me, ‘Go back to where you came from.’ No matter how many citizenship papers I have, there are still going to be people who tell me that. I always like to see myself as undocumented first and documented later. Basically, don’t forget where you come from."
"Life was going well in Guatemala until the civil war exploded and a lot of people started to get killed. We used to sell little dolls to tourists at the airport. When the civil war broke out, tourists didn’t come to the country anymore so we didn’t have any way to make money. Things just kept getting worse and worse in Guatemala. My family saw that there wasn’t a future there, so they decided to move to Chicago for a couple of years, work, save some money and then go back to Guatemala. They had us stay with my uncle and grandmother. A couple of years later they realized, 'Even if we go back, we are going to have to come back again and make more money. It is going to be back and forth, back and forth.' So they decided it was best to just bring us to the United States instead. And that’s how the whole family moved here to Chicago. I was fifteen years old when I moved to Chicago."
"Things were different in the U.S. We had to learn a whole new language. You had to relearn life basically, relearn the way you live. Even simple things like going to a thrift store. When I was in Guatemala we didn’t have thrift stores. We were really poor in Guatemala. We only got new clothes for the first day of school. For Christmas, we didn’t get toys, we got a new outfit, and that had to last us the whole freaking year. So here in Chicago, we went to a thrift store and all of a sudden my mom was buying us a bunch of clothes for a dollar and we were like, ‘We’re rich now!’ We could buy a lot of new clothes with no money. Even though they weren’t new, they were new to us. When we first came to Chicago my mom took us to McDonalds to celebrate. You know, in the U.S McDonald's is a fast food restaurant, but to us it was like, ‘Oh, we’re going to Mcdonald’s and our mother can speak English, wow!’ She could barely manage to order a meal from McDonald’s, but to us it was fantastic. It’s little simple things like that that other people take for granted, that to us were amazing. “
"My mother is amazing. She worked three or four different jobs and saved every single penny for two to three years so she could bring us here. And even after we came here she worked nonstop. I told my mother in order to become a real man, I had to be a quarter of the strong woman she is. Because she has done things, that I see now, as an adult, and think, “How the hell did she manage to do all this on her own? How the hell did she keep working and working and working nonstop?” She did this while having problems with the family and the language. She is so strong, she’s amazing, she’s unstoppable."
Through stories we are able to know a little bit about each other. I have come to storytelling events and heard other people's stories and learned a lot from them, either how they live their lives or what made them make the decisions they did. Storytelling helps you understand other people better. That’s the reason why there’s so much hate and so much racism and intolerance in this world because we really don’t know each other. We know what we hear from other people, but we don’t really know what it’s like to sit down with another person and ask, “So how does it feel to be in jail for twenty years?” We have never been in their shoes, so we don’t know what they have lived through. Storytelling helps us learn more about people, and helps us build bridges.