Given the family I was born into, you might expect me to be called María, Águeda, Lucía, Carmen, Rosa, or Catalina, but my name is Sara.
I am a Catalan charnega; a charnega is an immigrant from outside Catalonia, usually from the poorer regions of southern Spain who typically doesn't speak Catalan - in other words, an outsider, the daughter of immigrants from southern Spain, with a father from Murcia and a mother from Extremadura, although I grew up bilingual or trilingual, because I learned to switch languages depending on the people I was speaking to, or the situation I was in. I have the gift of being able to speak the same language in different codes: from the version used by the workers on the carnation plantations to the “tertulia” version of the Ateneo de Madrid.
But my name is Sara, despite the fact it was not an obvious name to give me. And the fact that my name is so unusual probably made me very different from some of my family. Sara comes from Hebrew and means princess; a dignified, noble person; a guide. It's difficult to be a princess in a poor family, but I do think I have been worthy of the name: a noble person and a leader.

As a child, I heard myself saying that I didn't want to be born and die in the same place and that I didn't want to be a housewife. My ancestors are nomads so I consider the entire planet my home, and I need to visit every corner of that home from time to time because I like seeing it and taking care of it. I enjoy winter and summer, desert landscapes and snow, green tones and shades of brown, tropical palm trees, maple trees, cherry trees, fig trees, and olive trees— and alpine maples. They all comfort me.
I feel good here, there and everywhere. I didn't want to be a housewife, and I haven't been one professionally, but the patriarchal mark has made me clean and take care of many houses.
I have traveled all over the world. How did that happen? I don't even know myself. Until I was eighteen, I never left home: my parents never went on trips or vacations, and when the school organized an outing, there was no money to pay for it. I only knew the worlds of my home, my grandparents' house, my uncles' house, the houses my father built as a bricklayer... Some weekends or during vacations, he would take me to those beautiful houses so I could see them.
The summer I turned eighteen, I was a cheerful, dreamy young woman, and I went to France with my friend Encarnita. I spent the summer working in a recycling plant, and my world opened up to other worlds. Even then, I dreamed of becoming a war reporter. I wanted to see the world. And not only that, but to go where no one else could go, perhaps because I had never been able to go anywhere myself.
I have been privileged; or maybe I have simply been a nomad. I have returned to France several times; I have had the pleasure of living in Switzerland, Morocco, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, the Philippines, the United States, Canada, and a for a little while in India and for another little while in Guatemala. I never went on vacation or went sightseeing. I had to apply for a residence permit for every country I lived in, which made me an immigrant: sometimes admired because I was a single mother with a child in tow, at other times despised because I was seen as just another person coming to a land so desirable that it was hard to share. I have had the good fortune to be able to get to know this planet from the inside out, having learned to communicate in six and a half languages, and to have felt the suffocation of cities and the need to go see trees, hug them, and let them shelter me.

In all those places, I met other immigrants who told me about their countries, those magical and most beautiful places in the world. And with all of them, I dreamed that one day we would visit each other so we would never forget to share, to think of each other, to not leave each other alone; and to know in the end that we were welcome, because travelers bring a different perspective and open our hearts to new memories.
As Sara Carmona Benito, growing up in a family prone to fighting, I took refuge in school. Its knowledge and openness transported me to dream of that ideal world that was not inside my home. I was a “good student,” quiet, submissive, studious, the daughter of an illiterate mother and a father who could read and write a little. Trusting in the refuge of school that amazed and fascinated me, I got into university on a scholarship.
School was both liberating and oppressive because, although I liked learning, I needed to isolate myself in order to create a study environment that did not exist in my family or around me. And when I entered university, I didn't feel part of that elite: I simply didn't belong there and I wasn't sure of myself. The world of abstract ideas and epistemology was too highbrow for me, and the professors evaluated me and I evaluated myself, and I felt inferior and stupid.
In the fall of my eighteenth year, I had my first bout of depression, because I couldn't adapt to college and because I attacked myself with what mattered most to me: being intelligent and learning. I didn't become a war reporter either, because I lost my passion that first fall in college. I studied journalism for a while and later sociology; I thus developed as a sociologist, a special kind of sociologist. Luckily, it's a field of science that accepts a lot of innovation. Because I liked the sociology of everyday life, observation, in-depth interviews, images, the interplay between art and science, the diversity of expression... and sometimes academia has a hard time understanding how knowledge becomes science.