Chapter 1
We Are All
Deserving of Tenderness
Tenderness, I believe, is inherent in all of us. Think of young children: sweet, earnest, wide-eyed. Naturally, some retain it more than others. Some of us are more in tune with our inborn sensitivity, our warmth, our compassion. But at our core, when we are safe and well taken care of, we are capable of and lean toward softness.
At least that's what I believe and how I've lived my life. It's when we are exposed to people and situations that demand toughness that we lose that side of ourselves. I was lucky to grow up in an environment and intergenerational home that embraced my tenderness.
I was seven when I landed in New York City in December 1989, a child-sized suitcase in tow. My mother, who I call Mamãe, had come to the United States ahead of my brother and me, and we followed soon after with Bibi, my grandmother. My mom was newly divorced from my stepfather, and Bibi explained that we would be flying on an airplane to a new land that would offer a fresh start. But what does that mean to a child? All I knew was that I was shivering, ill-prepared for the blistering cold in my canvas sneakers and summer clothes. I remember vividly that I arrived at John F. Kennedy Airport nursing a broken fingernail that had been torn off by a car door before I left Brazil. Those physical sensations-an unfamiliar chill in the air, a throbbing finger-are ever present in my memories of that time.
I did not fully understand then that we would not be going back home, in my case for a long while, and in my mom and brother's case, not at all. It had all happened so fast. Back in Rio de Janeiro, Mamãe had only said that we were going on an adventure. She had told us to pack our things, instructing us to take only what felt important. I struggled to decide what to pack, because everything felt valuable. My favorite teddy bear. My first doll. A diary. Some clothes and books. I figured I would eventually go back for what I left behind. But for decades, I would not set foot back in Brazil.
Once my mother made the decision to leave, determining this was the best path forward for our future, she quickly severed all our physical ties to Brazil. She sold our home and furniture and resigned from work. She made it so that we had no choice but to go, locking herself into the move. And after a few months in the United States, we had overstayed our tourist visas and become undocumented, which meant we had to stay if we wanted to make the United States our permanent home. Leaving would have made it difficult for us to come back.
My life in the United States was markedly different from my life in Brazil. In Rio, I had lived in a neighborhood called Tijuca, where we grew sugarcane and coconut in our junglelike backyard and sometimes saw monkeys climbing the trees outside our window. Uncles and cousins lived nearby and would visit often, and the whole family gathered weekly on Sundays. My earliest memories were of a warm, boisterous family and spending weekends and afternoons running around with my feet in the dirt or swimming and rollerblading with my cousins and friends.
In New York City, our first home was Jackson Heights in Queens. We were surrounded by neutral-colored homes, red-brick buildings, and a thundering overhead train. Under the dark, loud tracks, vendors sold food and products from the neighborhood residents' varied cultures-authentic tacos from Mexico, arepas from Colombia, pupusas from El Salvador. My family arrived at the apartment of a friend of a friend of my uncle's, a fellow Brazilian woman who lived with her husband in Queens and let us crash with her until we found an affordable rental of our own. We did not stay there for long, but for the time we were there, they fed us and never made us feel like we were intruding. That is how many newly arrived immigrants survive-through community, kindness from strangers, bonds forged over the shared experience of leaving behind the only home we knew. People we may never have met open their homes, wallets, and workplaces to help us settle into life in a new country, and then we pay it forward. Arriving in a community where schoolchildren and neighbors spoke a variety of languages and were comfortable with difference made transitioning into life in the United States a lot easier. No one in Jackson Heights looked at my family with suspicion. Our differences united us.
The transition to America must have been challenging for Mamãe, though she never let it show. In Brazil, she had been an accomplished professional woman who had earned multiple advanced degrees in education and nutrition and ran multiple hospital nutrition programs. But in the United States, her undocumented status made her educational achievements useless. She found a job as a housekeeper, working long hours to make ends meet, and sometimes I would ask her to take me with her. I'd help with small tasks like vacuuming and wiping down counters but spent most of my time roaming the halls of the big fancy homes she cleaned, in awe of American-style luxury.
Though my brother and I were too young to quite grasp our change in social standing, thinking back, I can recognize the ways in which we were treated differently compared to Brazil. I remember the way people stared at my mom when she walked around with her caddy of cleaning supplies, or when she stumbled over words while speaking English. Or, once I had mastered English, how they would direct questions at me even though she was fully capable of answering them. It was clear that some folks looked down on her for her accent and line of work. They would lose patience with her if she couldn't explain herself or raise their voices as if this would help overcome the language barrier. In Jackson Heights, we were able to blend in and be seen as equal members of the community-there were plenty of other Brazilian immigrants, and particularly in the 1990s it was very much an economically and culturally diverse part of New York City. But when we were in primarily English-speaking spaces or in neighborhoods where few people looked or sounded like us-dark featured and clearly foreign-the same did not always prove to be true.
I remember one time, on the way to the beach, my mother was pulled over. I do not recall the context of the stop-it could've been a routine check or a broken taillight-but I do remember the officer's attitude toward my mom. For context: My mother learned English quickly and was fluent. She had a heavy accent, of course, which is often the case for people who learn a new language as adults, but she had taken night classes and was an ace at Scrabble. Her vocabulary was extensive. But the officer was impatient during the entire interaction. He kept asking her to repeat herself in an annoyed tone and looking back at us kids, silently requesting that we step in as translators. I was frozen in place because I was so afraid of cops, but my mom stood her ground. She was firm and calm as she handed over her license. She did not let the officer's frustration faze her and, rather than get flustered, she worked to get her point across until the officer was satisfied.
Despite some isolated incidents like this, our lives never once felt sad or tragic. On weekends when she wasn't working, Mamãe, my brother, and I would "get lost" across the city, getting off at random train stops to explore our new surroundings. We wandered around parks and crashed parties (once at a fire station, which would prove prophetic); we window-shopped or popped into thrift stores. Mamãe always used language that made any activity feel exciting. Dumpster diving or curb shopping was going on a "treasure hunt"; getting lost was a "game." We were not undocumented migrants stumbling through the unfamiliar and often forbidding city. We were adventurers exploring a new land.
We learned quickly that the United States did not suffer the same lack that we had witnessed in Rio. On garbage days, the streets would fill with furniture discarded in near-mint condition. Coming from a country where many people lived in extreme poverty and kids often didn't have shoes to wear, my mother struggled with how wasteful it felt to toss things that still had life in them. So once we finally got our own place, it was not uncommon for us to pick up some of these discarded items off the street to furnish our apartment. All our furniture was worn and mismatched or, as some politely commented when they visited, eclectic. But it was clean (or at least, we could make it so with a little elbow grease), and as Mamãe reminded us, it was the right price-free.
About a year after relocating to the United States, we moved again, this time to Harrison, New Jersey-a working-class immigrant community just over the Hudson River, less than an hour's drive from Queens but seemingly a world away from the busy city. We were just starting to get the hang of living in Jackson Heights, but Mamãe had heard from a Brazilian couple that the Garden State was better than New York City for raising kids, so once again we packed up and settled somewhere new. That's how, the summer before I started third grade, my brother and I landed in a new school and town, living in a railroad apartment above a Peruvian restaurant. In old pictures, my brother and I are seated at our dining room table, folding newspapers that my mom would sometimes deliver around the neighborhood as a part-time job.
On my first day at my new elementary school, my grandmother Bibi and I walked there hand in hand. Mamãe was typically out of the house early, so Bibi was usually the one who got us up and ready for school. She fed me breakfast and fresh-squeezed orange juice and helped me pack my book bag. I was a bundle of nerves and excitement during the ten-minute walk to school. I worried about what could go wrong and wondered whether I'd make new friends. My English was still rudimentary at best. My clothes weren't cool. I also didn't look like a lot of the other kids-at nine years old, I had a unibrow and long hair that had never been cut, because Bibi wanted to maintain the loose curls that formed at its end. "If you cut it, you'll lose them forever," she'd often say.
Bibi played an oversized role in my life, always protective and doting. She did not like the idea of me walking anywhere alone, so she would insist on walking me to friends' houses or anywhere I needed to go, even if it was close by. Once we arrived, she'd go inside to meet my friends' parents and make sure I would be in a safe environment. Bibi was a sucker for a good laugh, and she would often tell jokes or play pranks on us, like taking out her dentures to embarrass us in public or tease other kids. I remember her always dancing around the house to old Brazilian music, which I loved.
She was also incredibly generous, both with us and with everyone she knew. With what little she had saved for retirement, she sent money back to her godson in Brazil, who had special needs. She did this all her life. Bibi was super creative and always saved random containers, scraps of fabric, buttons, and even the plastic fasteners used to secure bags of bread, for art projects or other functional uses. Her expectations of us were high-I still hear her voice in my head snapping at me to correct my posture-but she was also generous with compliments and words of affirmation. She often told me I was beautiful and sweet and loved.
Even to my young mind, our new town of Harrison was very different from New York City. There was no subway and the streets were wider. Like Jackson Heights, Harrison had a significant immigrant community, but most transplants had arrived from Europe-Ireland, Poland, and Portugal. I don't remember seeing any Black people, and though there were Latinos from Peru, Brazil, and other parts of Latin America, they were represented in much smaller numbers compared to Jackson Heights. On the way to school, rather than bodegas and apartment buildings, we passed houses, churches, and lots of bars.
Once we arrived, the principal helped me register and gave us a tour before guiding me to a classroom. Handing me off to my new teacher, Mrs. Barnhill, he introduced me saying, "This is Gisele. She's from Brazil." I said hello and took my seat.
That's when Mrs. Barnhill faced me and said something I've never forgotten: "Wherever you came from, however you got here, I'm so glad to see you." That simple phrase-an open-handed welcome-melted away any nervousness or stress, making me realize I was at home in that classroom and school.
Over the next year, I excelled in math but struggled for a bit with other subjects that required English fluency. My classmate Sandra, whose family was Portuguese, sat with me and helped me translate when I was having a tough time understanding lessons or directions and would get discouraged. I remember being frustrated that I couldn't figure out what the teachers wanted from me, but I was also reluctant to admit my confusion. To betray that I was struggling felt like a weakness. I hadn't yet learned about the power of vulnerability.
But Sandra understood instinctively what I needed. She, too, was living in an intergenerational home and being raised by a strong mother and grandmother. "It's OK that you don't understand right now," she said to me. "This isn't forever." Sandra was my accomplice in "faking it until you make it." We regularly drew the Keds logo on our off-brand canvas shoes, making do with whatever our parents could afford for us. I've never forgotten her simple kindness, and we're still friends to this day. She was one of my first guides in the art of tenderness.
The Safety to Be Soft
That welcoming environment at Lincoln Elementary extended beyond just Sandra and Mrs. Barnhill, and I thrived there. The school had English as a second language classes and buddy programs for non-English speaking students, and there were even some signs in Portuguese. In my head as a kid, these accommodations were just for me. Soon, I joined the color guard and, in addition to Sandra, made other friends who remain in my life to this day. I loved school. It was from being so thoroughly accepted there-and particularly from internalizing Mrs. Barnhill's words on that first day of school-that I learned to be a welcomer in my later years. It is a skill that I would carry with me, almost obsessively, for the rest of my life. I never wanted someone to feel as isolated and frustrated as I'd felt in those early days.
Copyright © 2025 by Gisele Barreto Fetterman. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.