I am a seventeen year old Mexican-Guatemalan kid from the city of Chicago. Where I’m from we give our area a nickname. It’s a nickname is “The Land of Capone”. I am from the Midway area on the South West side of Chicago. I come from Chicago Lawn. I was a kid that was very troubled in my youth. A big factor for why I am the way I am is because I see parents together everywhere and I never had that. My parents were together for about a year and then split. This was before they had me.

My mother, Sindy, and my father, Miguel, never saw eye to eye. They would always argue whenever they saw each other. I did not know who my father was for about three years. I even had my mother's last name for those three years. I never understood why they could not make it work. How do you fix something that is not in your control? It is something that most angered me in my life and has had me in and out of question about doing things.

My decision to pick who to live with came about when I was 8. My two brothers and sister had come back from their grandparents house. I got along with my brother Cristian and with my sister Perla pretty well. But my brother Jose and I had a rivalry. And I’m not talking about sibling rivalry, I am talking about a rivalry that was not healthy. As a kid he never accepted me because I had a different father and was the youngest and therefore my moms “bebe”, which is her “baby”. We would fist fight everyday until someone bled and it was scaring my mom because I always wanted to fight.

I had gotten in an argument with my brother on September 2, 2009 at around 7PM. I remember distinctly what we were arguing about. We had been arguing about who got the last piece of pizza from Caesars pizza. So as the kids we were, pushing and shoving and he said something that stuck in my mind. He said “you’re not even part of our family, you don’t look like us and you don't even have the same last name so leave our family alone and go live with someone else and destroy their family.” I thought to myself, ‘do I really not belong?’. At that moment I was crying on the inside, but I was angry. I grabbed a hammer and chased him around swinging at his head. I was angry, confused, hurt, I felt a lot of things, but most importantly I did not know what I was doing, I let my anger get the best of me. I stopped chasing him and swung at the stove and broke the glass and it shattered. I told my mom that I don’t feel like I belong here and wanted to leave and never see them again.

She called my dad on the phone while packing my clothes and told him “Saul can’t be here, he almost hit Jose in the head with a hammer, he could’ve killed him. Come pick your son up.” That day I thought to myself, why would I want to live with my mom if that is what I would be living with?

I moved in with my dad and we lived in an area that was okay, but it was still shady. I never let the things that I saw and heard get to me. If anything, seeing the harsh reality of life helped me. I saw homeless people, druggies, illegal immigrants selling corn on the cob, and many other things. It was something that I had only seen in movies and not witnessed with my own eyes. It made me want to be different, and not a statistic.
In my eyes at the time I hit rock bottom in my life (even though I was only 8 years old). I felt alone. I had no one. I had no family. No friends. Nothing. It was hard for me to move past this, and to be quite honest I still have not fully accepted it, but I feel like it helped me become who I am. Nobody showed me how to be a man. I handled myself and it’s why I find it hard to listen to people. I do things my own way because I never really had guidance. I learned to defend myself, I learned spanish by myself, I learned sports by myself, I learned everything I know because I taught myself.

One major thing life has taught me is, I don’t have anyone but myself, but at that same time, it taught me family means everything. I may not have the best relationship with my family, but we all love each other at the end of the day. I come to realize maybe it was for the best that I moved away. I know what it is like to be alone, what it's like to be making the wrong choices. Sometimes it puts us on the right path so we know what not to do. I now have a good relationship with my brother now that we are older and we understand family is not forever. I stopped being resentful towards my mother because I understand being on section 8, welfare, and having W.I.C. support for four kids is hard. So I have decided to put that behind me. My father is my father. Regardless I love him, even if we had a rocky relationship for 14 years. I understand he is only human. Was I supposed to hold hate for someone who was trying to fix things? We are still working on it, and I have matured over the years.
I have went through many hardships in my life. Physical, emotional, and mentally. I have experienced bullying, and I have also been the bully. Being on the Southside changed me as a person. I don’t want to say that it was good, nor that it was bad.  That is where I’ve learned many things. From my first girlfriend, my first heartbreak, my first fight, my first soccer goal, my first school project. I have very special memories of that place. Some awful, and some I would not give up for anything.

My life was determined by where I lived. My personality was formed by my environment. I got bits of my personality from here and some from there.

I was always a black sheep in my family, but my location made me who I am. Because of where I lived, I speak my mind. I am me. There is no one like me.

When I moved to Norridge I did not like it here at first.  When I started going to high school in Park Ridge, a lot of people gave me bad vibes, some dirty looks, and some even said things. It was hard for me to keep calm and just ignore it. But I did meet some people along the way who were open minded. Like my best friends Dominique, and Billy. They actually made me feel welcomed and made me feel “accepted” in a way I guess you can say.

Even though my friend Nica kept her distance at first, she was still my friend. I get along with her very well because she is very much like me, she is funny, and has a sense of humor very similar to mine. She was very welcoming to me.

My friend Billy took a bit of getting used to. He is serious most of the time, just like I am. He grew up in a position like me and his personality is like mine. He gots humor like me and we can tell jokes people from this area would not really understand. I see Billy like a brother because he is really close to me. When I don’t have money for food he pays, and when he doesn’t have money I pay. Me and him are really close and I tell him almost everything. He’s my brother and I never had someone as close as him. If my brother throw down I throw down and I know he would do the same for me.

I did not like it at first here and I still kind of don’t like it here but I feel a bit more comfortable now that I have people that I can talk to. If I had never chose to live with my father, and instead chose to stay with my mom and take therapy or something to work on my anger, I honestly think I would be completely different. I would be filled with anger. Hate. And most importantly I would not let anyone get close to me. I still do not let many get close to me, but it is a lot easier to do than it was before. My hometown is everything to me. To be born and raised somewhere your whole life and to just move somewhere where everything is different is hard. When you move it doesn’t change you as a person, it just adds on to you. I feel like I have now seen both sides of life, and no one can take that away from me.