“Back home, there was less money, but more life”

Safiya Umrani, an undergraduate at BU, was assigned to conduct an interview with a migrant for her Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology class two years ago. Below is her essay, which documents her conversation with Roberta. 

The person I chose to interview for my paper, Roberta, is one of the residential custodians at Warren Towers. I always see her walking through the halls or cleaning the bathrooms, and I noticed one day that she has an accent. I heard her speaking on the phone, and I initially thought that she was speaking spanish, but I have taken spanish for almost seven years and her conversation was indistinguishable to me. 

I asked her one morning if she would be willing to sit down and talk with me about where she is from and how she came to this country, and she kindly accepted. She told me that she is from Belo Horizonte in Minas Gerais, Brazil, which is the southeastern region of the country. The first thing I asked her was how old she was when she moved. She told me that she migrated to the United States in 1999 when she was just 28 years old. 

Roberta had lost her job at a hospital in Belo Horizonte and was looking for work. She told me how hard it was to find a job when she had not gone to school. She came to the United States on her own to look for better job opportunities and for better pay. She had friends who had moved to the United States, and decided to do the same. Roberta’s first job in the US was working as a maid in someone’s home, and then in the cafeteria at Fisher College for fourteen years. Something that she described as different, but a pleasant surprise compared to her job in Brazil, was getting paid weekly as opposed to monthly. She said that it makes managing one’s money and saving it easier, and she found it much less stressful to pay off her car. She has been working at Boston University for five years now. 

She described one of the most difficult aspects about moving to the US as learning english, and she admits that she is not yet fluent. She also told me that she not only misses her family and friends from home, but she misses the tight-knit community feeling of her neighborhood. In her own words, she felt that back home, there was “less money, but more life.” People were friendlier and did chores or random favors for each other, like bringing over homemade dishes. Here in Boston, it’s just “work, work, work, then take care of the kids,” according to Roberta. 

Fortunately, she told me that Boston actually has a large Brazilian population and that a lot of her friends are also Brazilian migrants. She also met her husband, who is Portugese, here in the States. She has a thirteen-year-old son and a seventeen-year-old daughter (now fourteen and eighteen respectively) who is experiencing the college application process and applying to BU. Roberta said that she still calls home two to three times a day, and visits about every two to four years when she can afford it. 

For Roberta, her biggest incentive to migrate was unemployment, and the United States attracted her with high-paying jobs. She was not seeking asylum, nor did she enter the country illegally, as far as I know. However, she did come to the US because of her economic status, and may be subject to criticism from some citizens who believe that someone like Roberta is “stealing jobs'' from Americans. 

Despite her legal status, her lack of education also confines her to the kinds of jobs that she is able to find, which have all been a part of the service sector. In fact, many of the staff working in facilities at BU have migrated here from another country and probably face similar constraints with the types of jobs that they can find. 

There were more questions I would have liked to ask Roberta, but I was unsure if I would have been stepping over the line, and I did not want to make her feel uncomfortable about anything that I asked her. We hardly know each other except for the few exchanges that we have had in the hallway, and migration can be a very personal and sometimes painful experience for people. Luckily, she was very open and casual throughout our conversation, even though it was difficult at times to understand what she was saying and for her to understand what I was asking due to the language barrier. In the future, I would like to ask her more in-depth questions about what it was like when she first arrived here. I think that part of the confidence required to ask those kinds of questions comes with practice and knowing how to word those questions best for interviewees who are more comfortable speaking a different language than mine.