Both times I moved to new cities I wanted to start from scratch. I saw myself arriving in Berlin from Colombia, feeling proud of not asking anyone for connections in the city. I thought I could make my new life without help. After my first few hours, I was homeless — the Airbnb I booked was a scam. A bit broke, a controller fined me because I rode the train without a ticket. My arrogance vanished and panic took over; I reached out to others, a taste of how important having a community would be for my migratory experience.
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Migration is a worldwide — albeit complex — phenomenon on the rise, particularly among Latin Americans. According to El País, “More than 41 million Latin Americans live outside their country of origin, making the region the one with the biggest number of migrants in the world.” Data from the World Bank shows a steady increase in migration numbers for Latin America since 2008. According to the World Migration Report from the International Organization for Migration of the UN, the United States remains the main destination for international migrants since 1970. But, in recent years, Europe and Asia have experienced a bigger influx of immigrants, with Germany the second-biggest migrant destination. And this includes migrants from Latin America.
“Germany refused to accept that it’s a migrant country for years, but there is a powerful reality that can’t be ignored anymore,” Helena Mendoza, a fellow Colombian who is a German citizen, tells Refinery29 Somos. “Before I saw a lot of insecurity in migrant women. We wanted to make ourselves little and kept our voices down. A teacher told me to avoid other Latines and integrate with Germans once in Berlin, which would improve my German.”
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"“Before I saw a lot of insecurity in migrant women. We wanted to make ourselves little and kept our voices down."
Helena Mendoza
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In the European Union, there are 24 official languages. Only one European country speaks Spanish. This poses a huge challenge for Latine immigrants to Europe. That’s what happened to me. Not knowing German made me feel profoundly alienated and vulnerable, something that Rocío Restrepo, who moved to Switzerland as a political refugee from Colombia, also experienced: “At first I was depressed, and I refused to learn the language. When I started talking French, I always apologized beforehand.”
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I had a similar experience. I arrived in Berlin six months before the Covid-19 pandemic hit. My dad died in 2020, when traveling to Colombia required a humanitarian flight, so I couldn’t attend his funeral. Even though Berlin had nothing to do with the tragedies happening in the world and my life, I blamed and resented it. I transformed my lack of mastery of the German language into a jail made of shame, fear, and anger, and I would avoid going to places where I wasn’t sure I could speak English or Spanish. Not learning German was my revenge.
Angélica Martinez, an embroiderer and transformational coach, also experienced the connection between pain and language. She went to Italy as a political refugee after she and her mom received death threats in Colombia. She knew Italian, but her migration was so traumatic that, at the beginning, she “stopped talking altogether.”
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" I transformed my lack of mastery of the German language into a jail made of shame, fear, and anger, and I would avoid going to places where I wasn’t sure I could speak English or Spanish. Not learning German was my revenge."
María Alejandra Santamaría
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“Traveling around Europe healed me, and I stopped longing so much for Colombia,” she recalls. Years later, she moved to Berlin and started working and living only in English-speaking environments. “I kept myself away from Germans, and I did something that is dangerous for migrants, which is to close yourself to the language. I was walking through life with my mouth shut and that nurtured feelings of hate,” she tells me.
These could have been my own words.
It’s easy to drown in feelings of frustration and despair when you’re so far away from home. Sometimes all it takes is a change in perspective.
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“At some point I said, ‘Why do I have to speak perfectly if this is not my mother tongue,’” Restrepo remembers. “Don’t wait to speak perfectly. The important part is that you’re able to transmit and receive messages.”
Mendoza similarly found a way to make her imperfect German into a positive. “I translated the shame I felt for not speaking perfect German into pride of speaking perfect Spanish,” she says.
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"Traveling around Europe healed me, and I stopped longing so much for Colombia."
Angélica Martinez
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Other times, you need to find people who make your new city feel more like home. Verónica Rivera is a designer and creative coach who left Venezuela because she was angry. “I was frustrated with the government,” she says. “The insulin I need for living was scarce, and my family suffered a violent robbery, so I wanted to leave.” While she also believes language makes people “feel alone in their migration experiences,” she knows connecting with other Latine immigrants can counteract that isolation.
Numerous Latine collectives across Europe — like La Parcería in Madrid — and social media groups — like Latinas en Alemania — can help answer everything from visa questions to where to find masa for arepas. For those in Berlin, Rivera also runs workshops aimed at creatives and immigrants.
For Restrepo, helping others bypass these growing pains was motivation enough to extend help to other Latine immigrants. “I thought, ‘How can I help others avoid all the difficulties I went through and make their experiences easier,’” Restrepo says. “This solidarity between Latines is the grounding reason for all these initiatives.”
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She is the founder and director of Découvrir, an association that helps qualified immigrant women establish themselves in the Swiss job market.
“I worked as a nanny and cleaning lady, and I felt I was wasting my skills as well as taking jobs from other people,” she adds. “I did a university project aiming to create a how-to brochure for arriving migrants. I needed governmental funding and to receive it; I had to create an organization. When we opened our office, women started coming and the project changed.”
After almost 17 years of work, Découvrir is in three Swiss regions and has helped 700 migrant women.
Community also played an essential role for Mendoza: “I had friends and family, but there was something missing, and that's when I ran into LAFI.” LAFI — Lateinamerikanische Frauen Initiative Neukölln e.V — is a feminist, anti-colonial, and intersectional Latine women initiative in Berlin. “The women there understood the cultural background that surrounded the toxic relationship I had at that time. Thanks to this awareness, I was able to leave it.”
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"These initiatives are changing the perception of migrants. Locals are realizing that there is wealth in our diversity, and migrants now understand that integrating into a new country doesn’t mean dissolving in it."
Helena Mendoza
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I’m also part of LAFI. In Berlin, I, by myself, have also attended creative writing workshops, cinema forums, and other events organized by immigrants. I found them on social media, something I rarely did back home. I used to think of Berlin as unattainable and inaccessible. My outlook changed because of these spaces.
“These initiatives are changing the perception of migrants,” Mendoza says. “Locals are realizing that there is wealth in our diversity, and migrants now understand that integrating into a new country doesn’t mean dissolving in it.”
These spaces are a lifeline. “I wish these spaces existed when my mom and I had to go through so much,” Martínez says. “Migration is grief and the pain that it creates is incurable. You can choose to solve it [by] feeling rejection or you can choose to heal.”
For a long time, I tried rejection. It wasn’t until I sought out the Latine community that this city opened for me. It’s in the shared experiences and the common points I have with others — regardless of how different our stories are — that I can find myself and my place here.