A graduate’s story: ‘I cannot just give up’

Ivan Castillo-Serrano shares his journey from his hometown in the Mexican state of Puebla to FLCC and a career in nursing.

Ivan Castillo-Serrano ’20 defied the odds and the doubters to become an FLCC graduate and emergency room nurse.

After high school, Ivan Castillo-Serrano planned to pay his way through a veterinarian program. He did not want to burden his dad, who already worked long hours. 

Since good jobs were hard to find in his hometown in the Mexican state of Puebla, the solution seemed simple: Go to the U.S., work for a year, and bank some cash.

“My mom was heartbroken,” he said. “My dad said, ‘OK, if you want to go, I support you, but it’s hard, it’s dangerous.’”

A year became two, then four, then six, and instead of going back, he met his wife, Erin, became a U.S. citizen and graduated from FLCC’s registered nursing program. Now an emergency room nurse at Newark-Wayne Community Hospital, he can tell you his plan turned out to be anything but simple.

Ivan remembers the day and time, Jan. 7, 2006, 8 p.m., when he arrived in Nogales, Mexico, hiding in a dump truck with nine others, his heart beating so fast he could barely breathe. Someone gave the signal and, “We jumped the wall and we ran,” he said. Ivan rode in cars, lying flat on the floor, until meeting up in Mesa, Ariz., with his uncle, who got him a construction job. 

He learned to apply stucco and worked long hours, his homesickness exacerbated by the poor American substitutions for traditional Mexican foods like manudo.

“Mom always used to make food for all of us. I was tired of not eating comfortable food. I told my uncle, ‘I don’t want to eat this food, it’s garbage.’ He said, ‘Ivan, there’s no other choice.’”

Read more about FLCC news and alumni in the fall 2021 edition of the Laker magazine.

He thought of the man he met the day the coyote, or smuggler, helped him cross the border. “A guy told me, ‘I give you a month and you will be back home because you are too young and you don’t know what is out there.’ He was almost right. I thought, ‘No, I’m here. I came here to do better for myself and my mom and my dad because they had a hope that I would do good.’”

After a few years, he was laid off and moved to New Mexico where he found work at hotels and restaurants, often working two full-time jobs at once. Though he had taken some English classes at a community college in Santa Fe, he was no closer to his goal of an education and found it hard to advance.

“One time the owner of one restaurant told me, ‘Get out of my place because you don’t know how to speak English. I cannot give you a job. You cannot communicate with the customers,’” he said. “I called my mom and she said, ‘You see? Go back to school, put more hours in school.’”

He redoubled his efforts to save money with plans to return to the veterinarian program. Then, while out with friends, he met Erin. He laughs today about his initial clumsy efforts to talk to her.

“I thought, ‘Oh, that girl is beautiful,’ but I didn’t want to say anything. What am I going to say? I was able to speak a little bit of English. I was a bartender and waiter. I know how to serve food, how to ask you what you want, what are you allergic to, but I didn’t know how to invite you to go out.”

He persisted. They later married in Las Vegas, and he began the process to become a U.S. citizen. It meant going back to Mexico for an interview at the U.S. embassy in Juarez. He waited seven months. Meanwhile, Erin was expecting their first child, Jeanavesa, and returned to her hometown of Marion in Wayne County.

Ivan remembers the day he took a plane as a U.S. citizen to join Erin in upstate New York: Sept. 7, 2012. Their daughter was born a month later.

“My mom said again, ‘Go to school, go to school’ and my wife, ‘Go to school.’” He still struggled with English but thought, “I did have a family now. I cannot just give up.”

He got a job as a patient care technician, and Erin encouraged him to study nursing. He started taking his prerequisites at the FLCC Newark Campus Center. Another student who had dropped out of the nursing program warned him against it. “She said, ‘Ivan, don’t get in the program. You will not make it.’ I’ve been told so many times I cannot do it.”

One of his professors, Lisa McAnn, noticed his struggles with the language, learned his life story and encouraged him to talk to someone in Academic Success and Access Programs. Staff agreed with his wife, a mental health worker, that anxiety was hindering his progress. A doctor confirmed the diagnosis. It surprised him at the time that what was “normal life,” as he put it, for an immigrant could be seen as trauma. He was granted more time to take tests, and he redoubled his efforts, studying with a friend so they could talk through concepts.

Ivan completed the program in 2020 and began to study for the NCLEX, the National Council Licensure Examination for nurses. He traveled to Ohio to take the test but failed. A few months later, he drove to Pennsylvania to take it again. He did not pass. In December 2020, he took the test again in Rochester without success. He dreaded calling his mother, who at this point had been diagnosed with COVID-19.

“I was embarrassed to tell her I failed again. And my mom was sick and said, ‘You can do it, you will be OK.’”

As his mother’s condition worsened, Erin encouraged him to go see her. Now working again as a patient care technician, he completed his COVID-19 vaccine sequence in early January and flew to Mexico with medical supplies. His mother passed away a day later, on her birthday.

“Then I came back to the United States and I needed to do it. I needed to pass the test because my mom wanted me to,” he said. He took the test for the fourth time in March and passed.

“It is hard to get there but it is not impossible,” he said, wryly adding, “Sorry to disappoint the girl who told me I cannot make it. Maybe I will say thank you to her because it made me stronger.” 

In addition to unwavering support from his mother and wife, Ivan credits the faculty and staff at FLCC. “They give you the attention, they give you what you need,” he said.

He would like to earn a bachelor’s in nursing and possibly work toward becoming a nurse practitioner. He thinks about doing something for people in his hometown, something to stress what his mother told him over and over: “Everything is possible with hard work, education, struggle, and never giving up on school because it is the key.”