“Migrant women carry within them a story of survival. Their strength lies in the pain they have transformed into hope, in the resilience they forge with every step away from home.” – Isabel Allende, Paula

It is difficult to make someone understand the migration process if they have never experienced it. Migration is much more than crossing geographical borders; it’s crossing cultural and emotional boundaries. It’s leaving behind a life that you know you will never get back. For many, migration means burning bridges and diving into uncertainty, embracing an unknown world where customs and values are not always familiar, but where you must inevitably learn to navigate.

Anyone can migrate, but only those living in precarious conditions will do so in the most adverse circumstances, and in those conditions, women have everything stacked against them. Gender influences every step of the migration process: from the causes that push one to leave home, to the difficult conditions faced along the way, and the limited opportunities available upon reaching the destination. Many migrant women have already been displaced within their own countries due to violence, or have crossed more than one border to reach the end, making the journey even more dangerous.

These women migrate for many reasons—fleeing domestic and institutional violence, escaping the poverty that neocolonialism has planted in our lands, trying to outrun armed conflicts, and seeking to protect their children from urban violence. They walk alone, pregnant, with children in tow, carrying not just their belongings but also invisible scars. Some disappear in the desert, never reaching their destination. The journey can pass without incident, but for many, it is a path marked by violence and suffering.

For poor women in Latin America, migration is not a choice; it is a matter of survival, and gender greatly worsens the experience. They wear vulnerability like a second skin, exposed to the constant danger of sexual violence and are among the most affected by human trafficking networks. Yet often, there is no other choice but to move forward, hoping that at the end of the road, there will be an opportunity to change their fate.

However, that final destination may also be fraught with discrimination, constant fear of deportation, anti-immigrant hostility, economic precariousness, labor exploitation, disconnection from family, language barriers, past traumas, and loss. Yet we see these migrant women every day—they are not strangers to us. They are part of the reality around us, and nothing or no one can make them invisible. They are there, working in factories, selling sweets in the subway with a baby in their arms, cleaning houses, selling food on the street, caring for others’ children while their own are far away, and sending remittances back home. In doing so, they become an economic pillar for the family they left behind, especially for their children, improving everyone’s living conditions. Perhaps that was the destination they had in mind when they set out.

This Hispanic Heritage Month is the perfect time to celebrate the courage and resilience of all these women who one day decided to embark on a long journey full of obstacles, only to ultimately triumph through perseverance.

Every Latin American migrant woman with gender and class consciousness sees herself in them. We are one woman trying to attain the rights denied to us everywhere and for generations. We are invincible. We are sisters.

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María Eugenia Mondéjar is the Manager of the Community Engagement Program at VIP. A Venezuelan migrant, she has been living in New York for 22 years. She studied Classical Languages at the University of the Andes in Mérida, Venezuela, and worked as a filmmaker in the Film Department of the same university.

Photo Credit: Madre Campesina, 1924. David Alfaro-Siqueiros (México, 1896-1974)