I am a refugee, an immigrant, an American. I came to the United States as a young girl, and grew up in Los Angeles. My maternal grandparents were born in Cuba and were descendants of immigrants from Spain, who moved to Cuba to make a better life for themselves.
Los Angeles has been a multi-cultural, polyglot city from the earliest times. In 1781, the pobladores, a small group of racially diverse farmers from Sonora, Mexico, arrived near the banks of the Porciuncula River at a place that would later become Los Angeles.