Sofia
Portrait with Kat Schleicher
Description: A graphic poster shows a young woman against a background of a green hilly landscape. She stands with her arms crossed and the text on the bottom of the poster reads, “Global Citizen. The World Is Ours”.
Portrait with Nick Collura
“Freedom, for me, is when people can be who they want to be. I feel like no one should get judged because we're all different, but we're all humans. There’s some people who feel like they’re higher than others when in reality we’re all just at the same level.
One of the things that I'm proud of is that the path that I'm heading to, I see myself as my own role model just because I just kept going. I motivate myself. I’m proud of mom. She came to the United States at 15, from Mexico. Knowing that she came here for a better life for her family, I feel like that has helped me.
Being a Hispanic, especially with politics–– it makes me angry because people make assumptions about you. Everyone has their own opinions about the President. Since I work in a white community, people treat me differently because they know that I’m Hispanic and make assumptions about me. I feel like here, people are always going to see you different for literally being a different race.
When I was in middle school, there were only like three white kids or one Black kid and all the rest were all Hispanic. Then when I went to high school, there was a lot of diversity within my school. So I feel like diversity became a big thing for me for a lot of reasons.
I want diversity in my life.
To me, traveling makes me feel free. I want to see how everybody makes their own life. Let's say we're living this life here in Wisconsin, the United States, people are not living the same life as in England, Mexico, Spain or Japan. I want to see how everything works in each country and understand. I want to see every little island in the Caribbean and how they live, how happy some of them are. Even when you sometimes see the economic problems, I want to see all that. It’s important to see the difference between how I live here in the United States versus other people, and then know we are all unique. I want to understand it more and connect to it more. I feel like understanding everybody’s culture in their own way can be beautiful because I believe people should open up to more cultures to learn from each other instead of assumptions.
As an ally to people, I accept that everybody’s unique. It's sad that not all people see it like that. I want to accept everyone with open arms. Just because someone is unique, or from a different place, they're unique in their own way and that doesn't mean that you should close the door on them. You wouldn’t want somebody to close the door on you.
For me, being a global citizen is about learning and connecting to others’ lives.”
Milwaukee, 2020