When Melina first arrived in Nogales in 2024, she thought her stay would be temporary. She had come from the state of Guerrero, fleeing violence with her two young children and hoping to seek protection in the United States. She waited for a CBP One appointment that never came.
As the wait continued, life began to take a different shape. Melina found work to support her children and, over time, moved to the city of Magdalena de Kino, about an hour and a half from Nogales. There, she continued working and looking for ways to build stability for her family.
Still, Nogales remained part of her story. Here, she had met other mothers going through similar circumstances, found spaces where her children could play, and encountered people who accompanied them through one of the most uncertain periods of their lives.
Now, Melina has returned to Nogales. This time, in addition to her two children, she carries with her a new member of the family, a baby expected to arrive on September 10, according to her doctors. She returned in search of better housing and employment opportunities, but also excited to reconnect with a community she remembers fondly. Some of the mothers she met in 2024 still come to Kino, and seeing them again has felt, to her, like picking up a conversation that had simply been put on hold.
Her children remember Kino, too. For them, this place was part of a time when everything around them was changing, but it was also a place where they found people who made them feel accompanied. That is why Melina feels such joy watching them return and recognize some of those spaces again.
This time, though, something is different.
The Kino Melina has returned to is growing. The new Migrant Community Campus is beginning to take shape as a space designed to accompany families not only in moments of emergency, but also through the everyday process of rebuilding their lives. There are new spaces for children and places where people can gather, learn, work, and build community.
“It makes me so happy to see how Kino is growing and to think about all the children who will be able to enjoy these spaces,” Melina shares.
For her, the Migrant Community Campus represents more than a new building. It is a sign that the needs of families can also become opportunities to build something lasting. A place where children can feel safe, where mothers can reconnect, share their experiences, and support one another, and where people arriving in Nogales can find more than an answer to an immediate need: they can find community.
Melina knows her migration story did not follow the path she had imagined. The appointment she waited for never came, and her plans to cross the border had to change. But amid those changes, she has also discovered new possibilities for her family.
Today, she works, seeks better opportunities for her children, and once again walks through Kino’s spaces with a growing belly announcing the arrival of a new baby and two children who already recognize this place.
Perhaps this, too, is what it means to put down roots: not necessarily to stop hoping for something different, but to begin building a life wherever the journey has taken us.
And as Melina watches her children grow, she also watches Kino grow. The place she arrived at amid the chaos of migration is no longer quite the same. It has grown alongside the families who, like hers, have found here a place to begin again.
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