Housing, Love and Guilt: An Immigrant’s Reflection on Moving Out of His Undocumented Parents’ Home

As I approach half a year since I left my family’s household, I reflect on a feeling I have constantly — guilt.

I lived with my parents for 25 years. We endured many financial lows that resulted in moving from a house to an apartment and back to a house a couple of times as rent and inflation rose.

As a new Guatemalan immigrant family of five coming to West Oakland in 2001, we first lived in a single bedroom of a three-bedroom duplex apartment. The rest of the rooms were occupied by other immigrant families. We had the smallest room, and most of it was taken up by the bed that all five of us slept on. We were like a pack of pups cuddling together for warmth. Read more at Richmond Pulse.