Somewhere Between Home

I was born in Mexico and grew up in the United States. Years later, coming back made me realize that where you grow up and where you feel at home aren’t always the same place.

The U.S. shaped a huge part of who I am. It’s where I went to school, learned English, made friends, worked, and became an adult. But somehow, Mexico still feels more like home.

But getting here wasn’t simple.

I was born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, about 30 minutes from the U.S. border. Mexico was home for the first eleven years of my life, although even then, my life went back and forth between the two countries.

Before we permanently moved to the United States, my mom tried a few times to make a life for my sister and me in Texas. She would take us across the border without my dad, but supporting two kids on her own was hard, and after a few months we would end up back in Mexico.

I don’t remember the exact timeline anymore. My elementary school years are a blur of different schools on both sides of the border. I remember going to school in Mexico, then Texas, then Mexico again. By fourth and fifth grade, I was back in Reynosa. Then, in August 2008, everything changed. We moved to Dallas permanently, and I started sixth grade.

I remember the version of myself who lived in Mexico as almost fearless. I was always outside, playing with the neighbors, wandering around, doing whatever kids do when they don’t spend much time thinking about how they’re being perceived.

Then we moved, and somehow I became a completely different person.

In the U.S., I was painfully shy. I became embarrassed by my accent. I gained weight and started thinking constantly about how other people saw me. Instead of being outside all the time, I stayed inside. Making friends felt harder. Keeping them felt harder.

No one was particularly cruel to me. I wasn’t bullied. There isn’t one person I can point to and blame for how I felt.

I just stopped feeling comfortable being myself.

That’s probably the strangest part to explain. I had moved to a country where I would eventually spend most of my life, but for years I felt like I was taking up space in a place I didn’t quite know how to exist in.

Trying to Build a Life That Never Quite Fit

Things got a little better during my senior year of high school. For the first time in a long time, I had close friends, and I remember how good it felt to believe that people genuinely liked having me around.

But after graduation, everyone went their separate ways. My mom remarried, we moved to the other side of the city, and suddenly I was starting over again.

My twenties became a cycle I didn’t know how to break.

I wanted desperately to feel like I belonged somewhere. When I couldn’t find that in my career or in the life I was building, I looked for it in other people. I put too much of my self-worth into relationships. When one ended, it didn’t just feel like losing a person. It felt like losing whatever version of my future I had attached to them.

So I would isolate myself, get depressed, eventually try again, and repeat the whole thing.

Work wasn’t much more stable. I bounced between jobs and struggled to imagine any of them leading somewhere. There were periods when things seemed to be getting better, but I always seemed to end up back at the same question:

What exactly am I building here?

By 2025, I didn’t have a good answer anymore.

I was undocumented. Finding work had become increasingly difficult. College had always felt out of reach. International travel felt impossible too, even though it was something I had dreamed about for years.

I had spent so much time waiting for something to change that eventually I had to confront the possibility that nothing would unless I changed it myself.

Eventually, I started asking myself a question that would have sounded ridiculous to me a few years earlier:

What if I just went back to Mexico?

Going Back

At first, it was just an idea.

For years, going back to Mexico wasn’t something I seriously considered. Mexico was where I was from, but the United States was where almost my entire life had happened. My family was there. My friends were there. Everything familiar was there.

But by 2025, staying because it was familiar stopped feeling like a good enough reason to stay.

I started wondering what my life could look like somewhere else. Not someday, when everything magically worked itself out. Now.

Going back to Reynosa didn’t feel right. I loved where I came from, but I didn’t want to recreate the life I’d left when I was eleven. If I was going to do this, I wanted it to actually feel like a new beginning.

That’s how I found Querétaro.

I researched cities where I could realistically live on my own, and eventually Querétaro kept coming up. Before I committed to anything, my mom and stepdad even flew down for a few days to see it for me.

Suddenly, this ridiculous idea I’d been carrying around in my head didn’t seem so ridiculous anymore.

In March 2026, I packed up my life and moved to Mexico.

There was no perfect plan waiting for me when I arrived. I didn’t have a job lined up or know exactly how I was going to build the life I wanted. I was leaving my family, my friends, and the country where I had spent most of my life.

But staying had started to scare me more than leaving did.

For so long, I had been waiting for my circumstances to change so that my life could finally begin.

This time, I was the one changing them.

The World Got Bigger

One of the biggest reasons I was excited to move was that things I had wanted for years suddenly felt possible.

I could finally go back to school. I enrolled in university to study computer science. And I could finally travel.

Traveling had been one of those dreams that always felt just out of reach when I lived in the U.S. Then, a couple of months after moving to Mexico, my mom and I traveled to Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and China.

I remember thinking about how absurd that would have sounded to an earlier version of me.

For years, the world had felt enormous and inaccessible. Like It was something I could only look at online, save pictures of, and tell myself I’d see ‘someday.’ Then suddenly I was standing in places that had once existed only on a screen.

It wasn’t really about checking countries off a list. It was the realization that my life could actually be bigger than the boundaries I had gotten used to.

The world hadn’t suddenly opened up. I had.

It sounds dramatic, but seeing those places changed something in me.

I had spent so much of my life feeling trapped by circumstances I couldn’t completely control. Suddenly I was standing on the other side of the world thinking, I actually made it here.

And I wanted more of that.

More countries. More cities. More experiences. More of the world I had spent years imagining from the same place.

That’s when I realized that leaving everything behind had been worth it. Not because my life in Mexico suddenly became perfect, but because for the first time, it felt like my life could actually go somewhere.

So, Where Is Home Now?

Mexico feels more like home to me than the United States ever did.

It’s strange to say that because I spent most of my life in the U.S. So much of who I am was shaped there. And yet, coming back to Mexico felt less like returning to a place I had left and more like getting back a part of myself I hadn’t realized I’d been missing.

That doesn’t mean everything suddenly became easy.

I miss the people I left behind. Finding work has been harder than I expected. I’m still figuring out how to build the kind of life I want, and there are plenty of days when I have no idea how I’m going to make all of it work.

But I don’t regret leaving.

If anything, I wish I had realized sooner that my life didn’t have to look the way I thought it did.

I used to think I needed everything to fall into place before I could start living. The right job, more money, more confidence, someone to share my life with. I kept waiting to become some future version of myself who would finally be ready.

I’m still not that person.

I still overthink things. I’m still figuring out my career. I still don’t know where I’ll be five years from now. Maybe I’ll stay in Mexico. Maybe life will take me somewhere I haven’t even thought of yet.

But I don’t feel like I’m waiting anymore.

I want to see as much of the world as I can. I want work that gives me the freedom to live instead of a life built entirely around work. I want to keep going places that once felt impossible to reach and finding out who I become along the way.

Maybe that’s what home means to me now.

Not having everything figured out. Not even necessarily knowing where I’ll end up.

Just finally feeling like my life belongs to me.