Martha Lucia: Sueños
There are countless reasons why people leave their homes: poverty or disaster, economic opportunity or family circumstance. However, for many migrants, the central rationale is hope. A belief that, by departing from everything that you know, you might find a better, or at least new, start. Martha Lucia is one such dreamer. Her immigration is a love story.
Born on March 10th, 1971 in bustling Bogotá to a family of five, Martha was the youngest of three siblings, raised beside her sister and her brother, who had cerebral palsy. Her father a successful professional, Martha grew up happily, able to travel and study anywhere. She began learning English young, attending an international Catholic school with her sister. Constantly encouraged by her parents and the strong network of women in her extended family, Martha remained hardworking and driven.
However, as she grew older, something else crept into Martha’s idyllic childhood: her congenital heart defect. At ten, she was given six months left to live.
The diagnosis pulled the other tracks of her life to a standstill. Her parents, terrified, searched for hospitals that could treat her. Colombia’s surgery fatality rates were still too high and the best pediatric cardiologist was based in Boston. After dozens of calls with no answers, Martha’s father marched to the U.S. Embassy, searching their address book until he found the doctor’s contact.
Two months later, Martha received her Boston surgery.
Martha and her now husband Bill after their engagment, 2007.
Martha’s brush with death at so young an age breathed vitality into her. Life became an even more tremendous treasure. Experiencing its fragility and chance encouraged her to fully dream without limiting herself.
Though her education was conservative and she remained the top of her school, Martha’s teenage years were also filled with Colombian festivities, from dance parties to quinceañeras. She moved through coming-of-age with joy and a strong will, and carried that energy into adulthood.
At 18, Martha began studying business at Bogotá’s Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, a prestigious and longstanding Jesuit university. A few years later, when she grew a passion for diplomacy, she pursued a second degree in law. Being an attorney was a requirement for diplomats at the time.
In late 20th-century Colombia, dual degrees were rare and the system wasn’t prepared for her aspirations. Instead, Martha had to work around it, taking classes during all odd hours and on weekends in order to fulfill her credits. Though it was exhausting, her time in university opened her eyes greatly; through night and weekend classes, she had met diverse groups of people, all as equally bright as her, but coming from different backgrounds and less privilege, many having to work and pay for their own studies.
Downtown Bogotá, 2017.
Young Martha (far right) and her family travelling, year unknown.
Before graduating, Martha, still aiming to work in a multinational organization as a diplomat, studied abroad, taking a summer English course in Vermont. She grew her ambition in the classrooms of the tiny state, and hoped to intern in D.C after the course. But when she told her father, her greatest supporter, about her starry-eyed goals, even he dismissed her: “Who do you think you are, going to Washington and believing someone is going to pay attention to you?”
Martha, only 23, wasn’t sure of the answer yet, but she knew she was not a person who would give this dream up. So she sent cover letter after cover letter to different organizations and eventually received responses. After a meeting with the Free Trade Agreement Director, she connected with the Secretary of the Organization of American States. He offered her a postgraduate internship in D.C. In a year, she would have the job she had fantasized about.
But destiny had a different path for her.
In a reversal of roles, after Martha graduated, her father grew sick and needed emergency heart surgery. Since her dual degree overqualified her for entry roles in Colombia and she wanted to take care of her father, Martha did let go of her diplomacy dream. She stayed with her family instead, becoming an attorney and helping her father run his firm until he recovered. Then, she turned to financial consulting, joining a global firm. She began her role in Colombia, then transferred to Buenos Aires, Argentina, marking her first lengthy departure from her homeland.
However, during her time in Argentina, the nation was struck by a four year depression and a resulting austere economic policy known as El Corralito. Every week, Martha lined up with hundreds of others to withdraw her maximum of $250 from her Argentine account. She stashed her money in Chile banks, terrified of losing even more than she already had. Still, she felt lucky to have that option: in those years, millions’ life savings were fully destroyed.
In her work, Martha began to feel alienated. After watching locals get promotion after promotion while she was left in the same role, Martha decided to return home, to Colombia, for her career.
Outside of work, Martha, inspired by a friend, sought love in the same way many 20-somethings do: dating apps. Through them, in October 2006, she met Bill.
Though Bill lived an ocean away in Florida and Martha had been hesitant about digital and long distance relationships, she started falling for him. Martha and Bill called every night at 8:00 for 4 months, finding solace from the business of their budding careers in each other. In early March the next year, Bill flew down to Bogotá, and the two met in person for the first time. Martha met Bill outside airport gates. As she ran up to him, she knew: that’s my man.
Their romance proceeded in a flurry. A month later, in April, Martha visited Florida, spending a few days in Orlando with Bill. In a restaurant across from EPCOT Center, they began fantasizing about their future family, mosaics of Disney fireworks exploding behind them. When Martha came back up for a long weekend that spring, Bill wrote her a poem. At the end of it, he asked her whether she would like to be his wife. She said yes.
Martha returned to Colombia, to her family’s shock, with a ring on her finger. Bill joined her in Bogotá a month later and formally proposed. The two wed there in September 2007. The next day, Martha moved to America.
Martha and Bill's Bogotá wedding, 2007.
Merritt Island, where Bill and now Martha lived, is a peninsula that sits along the Space Coast of Florida, known for its JFK Space Center. Martha, though filled with excitement at the idea of her new life there, left much behind in Colombia. Before she was engaged to Bill, a consulting company, then expanding to Bogotá, had offered her a CEO role. After working for promotions to no avail, the opportunity was exactly what she had wished for. But she knew that she wouldn’t have the time to balance such a large position and a serious relationship with Bill. She declined the offer and chose her love. Martha said goodbye to her family and began her future with Bill in a town with a fitting motto: “Where dreams are launched.”
Martha’s new American dream was family. After marrying Bill, she left her old job. In February 2009, once her first child, Christine, was born, she became a full-time mother. Though Merritt Island was far smaller than the big cities she had grown up in and she no longer had work to distract her, Martha’s life was plenty fulfilled through Christine. She found her own Floridian community in her husband's family friends and a group of moms living there, who were immigrants from around the world just like her, searching for a new life along the coast.
But beneath her newfound joys, Martha was lonely. Life in the States was jarringly different from life in Colombia. Martha had friends, her husband, and her daughter, but support didn’t come as naturally as it had back home. When she was sick, it was so difficult to find someone to take care of her, or to just bring her a glass of water; Bill had to work, people were just too busy, and she didn’t have as large a circle as she once did. She felt like a perpetual foreigner, islanded away from the family and customs she had always known in Colombia, but not quite integrated into the panhandle.
When her family of three relocated to Seattle for Bill’s work, Martha had her second child, a son named David. After building up her community in Merritt for over a year, she had to start all over. During her pregnancy, she experienced that unaccustomed isolation native to the States once more. Martha didn’t even have a baby shower. Nobody knew her.
Christine (left) and David (right), 2017.
But, as always, things changed. After David was born, Martha joined a Latin rosary group, made up of women just like her. They became some of her closest friends. As time passed, her loneliness began to fade, but Martha realized that her ambition for a career never had.
When Christine was six and David was three, she began searching for a job — the longer she stayed away, the harder it would be to get back into work. She got an offer surprisingly quickly: another multinational management position at a global company, a role that matched her previous global experience. Martha loved motherhood, but she had missed the intellectual stimulation that her new projects provided her with. Through bridging together diverse people and their ideas from around the world, Martha reunited with a side of herself that had been hidden for eight years again.
Five years after she began her job, during the pandemic, her family of four relocated again, this time to southeastern suburban Pennsylvania for Martha’s work: the eastern time zone fit her team’s schedule. Bill supported her through it all and Martha still loved her job, but the two couldn’t control her company’s restructuring. As her workplace changed, Martha felt othered again by an administration she had spent nearly a decade with. Her identity as a perpetual foreigner resurfaced. Martha did not want to be discriminated against or molded into someone she wasn’t by anyone, let alone an enterprise, so she left.
Martha took another career break, pursuing her Masters of Law at Temple University in Philadelphia. Though a small part of her felt it was too late to return to the legal field, Martha studied anyway. Her father had become an attorney in his fifties — why couldn’t she be one now? Ten months later, she had her degree and began preparing for the bar.
Martha (back, left) and her family cooking Colombian food in the US, year unknown.
Beyond her career, Martha found it difficult to settle in Pennsylvania. Despite loving the area and feeling that the people around her were more welcoming and open than anywhere else she had been in the States, the pandemic prevented her and her family from connecting with those around them. But little by little, she found her people. She resonated especially with the fellow immigrant mothers she met at Christine’s ballet studio. They all had different homes, yet united through their children and their journeys to America.
Still, Martha misses what she used to have. She misses her communities. She misses her rosary group, though they did manage to fly out to Pennsylvania to celebrate Christine’s fifteen birthday. She misses her family, like she always has. After her parents passed recently, she regretted not keeping them closer after her immigration, whether by visiting Colombia more or moving them to the States. They had gotten approval to move to her before, but Martha’s brother, due to his cerebral palsy, still needed them and their care, so the plan never came to fruition. By the time her parents got older and sick, it was too late.
Of course, Martha misses her birthplace in all its aspects. She misses the folk dances that she used to always partake in while growing up. She misses the uniquely wild and free humor that only exists at Colombian dinner tables. She misses having Spanish as her “home language.” Though Christine and David both spoke and read it often when they were younger, their schools and their father, Bill, didn’t, so their knowledge of it faded and she remained its only full native speaker in their household.
But, as they’ve grown older, her children’s interest in Spanish has grown. Martha couldn’t take Bogotá with her to Pennsylvania, her new and perhaps permanent home, but she could keep it with her through food, language, and stories. Even though she left Colombia and all its familiarity behind, she never lost it completely. After all, no matter how wild her dreams, no matter how far she went, no matter who or what she could not bring, nothing was worth more than retaining her identity, her customs, and her culture. As Martha learned, things — careers, new homes, love, hope — are truly worth pursuing if they allow you to be who you are. Her life in America has given her a chance to be just that.
Martha (right) and Christine (left) at Martha's Temple LLM Graduation, 2026.
