Meet Nicole Cohen
Latino staffers at NPR share their family stories of perseverance, sacrifice, and hard work to achieve the American Dream. These stories are defined by universal values of pride, hope, and an endless determination to help shape the new American landscape.
When my parents moved to the U.S. from Argentina in 1982, they never planned to stay. (It wasn’t until I was in middle school that my dad stopped talking about moving back.) My dad, a neurologist, had gotten a research fellowship in California, and my mom, then a pediatric hematologist, was ready for a change. So they moved for a short time to Costa Mesa (which my mother remembers as “un horror”) and then found an apartment in Laguna Beach. There, my mom — who could read English but didn’t speak it — got a job as a lab technician and started studying for the American medical boards. She took the last of her medical board exams three years and one child later, when she was six months pregnant with me.
Not long after, the Cohens packed up their lime green VW minivan and left Laguna Beach for the suburbs of Washington, D.C. My dad had a job waiting for him at the NIH but my mom had decided on a career change — to psychiatry. Their Argentine residencies weren’t recognized in the U.S., so they took turns re-doing them: first my mom, who started when I was 1 and my brother was 3, then my dad. For my mom, it was the beginning of a long career in public mental health; for my dad, it was a short break in a decades-long career at the NIH.
“Their Argentine residencies weren’t recognized in the U.S., so they took turns re-doing them.”
My brother and I were lucky. Our parents were able to continue in their chosen professions, and they could afford to bring us back to Argentina once a year. Maybe that’s why they sometimes talked about moving back, an idea I was stubbornly against. (What kid wants to move away from her friends?) And we were lucky that they always insisted on speaking Spanish, even when we kids refused to. Because of them, not only am I fluent (with a strong Argentine accent), but the sounds, tastes, and smells of Argentina conjure home almost as much as the U.S. does.
