Camila A. from Elwood John H. Glenn High School was honored this week as the grand prize winner in Optimum’s Hispanic Heritage Essay Contest.
The student won for her essay about her immigrant grandmother, and she was awarded a $3,000 prize.
In part, her essay read, “Having been the first in her family to immigrate to the United States at the age of 35, my grandmother left behind her six kids to sow the seeds of my future. Small, ragged, tense, coarse, were her hands. These very hands with which each day she carried the meals of impatient customers at the local restaurant, with which she worked on the factory line, these hands with which she scrubbed the floors of the bathrooms until the tile shined as she hoped one day my future would too .” …