“Just a simple life will be enough."

Quesias Parra on Maine, Ecuadorian food, and her family's American Dream.

“When I memorized and recited ‘with liberty and justice for all,’ I believed it. Especially the ‘for all’ part,” Phuc Tran reflects in his foreword to the 2021 collection, Dear Maine: The Trials and Triumphs of Maine’s 21st Century Immigrants. Tran's personal recollections of life as an immigrant — the trials and triumphs of which you can read about in his memoir, Sigh, Gone — precede the stories of twenty inspiring men and women who have made Maine their home.

In honor of the second event in our Immigrant Solidarity Project, we highlight the testimony of Quesias Parra, a deeply principled, hard-working young Portlander whose parents' own dogged pursuit of liberty and justice in America brought her from her native Ecuador to Maine. 

The Immigrant Solidarity Project continues with a panel featuring Parra and other young immigrants, at 6:30 pm on April 16th, 2025 at Coffee by Design (1 Diamond Street, Portland). When you buy a copy of Dear Maine at this event, a portion of the proceeds benefit Furniture Friends, a nonprofit organization that benefits new immigrants in the Greater Portland area.

Quesias Parra

Ecuador 

Population: 17.64 million

Distance from Maine: 3,245 miles

When she was pregnant, Quesias’ mother spent time studying the Bible. As if she knew her daughter would become religious as an adult, she searched for inspiration in scripture. Her mother was unsatisfied with the more common names like Mary and Maria. She found her answer in the Book of Job, as one of Job’s daughters is named Quesias, or Keziah in English. According to Job 42:14: “The first daughter he named Jemimah, the second Keziah, and the third Keren-happuch . . . Nowhere in all the land were there found women as beautiful as Job’s daughters, and their father granted the man inheritance along with their brothers.” 

“I love my name. But some people have a difficult time pronouncing it,” Quesias admitted. 

In Ecuador, at least when Quesias was born, parents were not allowed to give their offspring Western or American-sounding names. When her mother was told Quesias did sound foreign, her grandmother intervened, using her contacts to get a compromise. In order to get a birth certificate issued for her newborn daughter, Quesias’ mother took a copy of the Bible to the government office charged with birth registration. 

“It became a big deal!” Quesias said. 

Quesias Parra was born in Guayaquil, formally known as Santiago de Guayaquil, which is Ecuador’s largest city and main commercial port. The city’s population in 1994, when Quesias was born, was more than 1.5 million. In 1987, the city was named the sister city to Houston, Texas. Ecuador gained fame for exporting Panama hats—straw hats that were shipped to Panama and worn by crews that worked on the Panama Canal in the early nineteenth century. 

“I was a surprise baby! I was not expected,” Quesias said. “I was so spoiled by my parents that I did not learn to speak till I was six years old!

Ecuador is a country in northwestern South America, bordered by Colombia on the north, Peru on the east and south, and the Pacific Ocean on the west. Its diverse landscape encompasses Amazon jungle, Andean highlands, and the wildlife-rich Galápagos Islands in the Pacific. The country has experienced major political and economic upheavals, including long periods of military rule. The nation of some seventeen million people suffers from disparity in wealth distribution. 

The family of five—her two older brothers and their parents—arrived in the United States on visitors’ visas in the late 1990s. Quesias was four years old and has no memories of coming to America, but she knows that they lived in Brooklyn with her aunt for five years. Quesias’ parents disliked living in New York because they preferred a rural setting. 

They left Ecuador because of the country’s financial crisis in the late 1990s. The small South American country was bankrupted by the combination of a collapse in oil prices and unusual weather conditions that affected agricultural production. Oil and bananas were Ecuador’s main exports. With revenue from oil declining and the banana crop damaged by the storms, food prices increased rapidly, causing hardship for ordinary Ecuadorians. 

To stop the hyperinflation and help the national economy recover, the government abandoned its currency, the sucre, and replaced it with the US dollar. Quesias said the exchange rate was 25,000 local currency to one dollar, which caused great losses for most Ecuadorians. National banks were unable to honor their customers’ requests for withdrawals. 

Quesias remembers hearing about massive migrations, primarily to the United States and Spain, which were triggered by the financial crisis. From 1999 to 2000 approximately 400,000 Ecuadorians migrated to the United States. By doing so, they joined roughly 500,000 other Ecuadorians living in this country, making the United States home to half of the country’s diaspora. 

In the 1990s, when the family left Ecuador, Quesias said, there was hardly any work there. “People were suffering,” she said. “Some died because they had lost all their savings.” 

Faced with poverty, the Parra family considered Spain, but left Ecuador in search of better economic opportunities and more secure lives in the United States. 

Before Quesias was born, her parents had been blessed with the birth of two boys. 

“I was a surprise baby! I was not expected,” Quesias said. “I was so spoiled by my parents that I did not learn to speak till I was six years old! I never had to ask for anything by its name. All I did was to point at something, and it would be handed over to me.” 

Her family worried that she was mute. By the time she began to speak, they were living in New York and were surprised to hear her speak fluently in both Spanish and English. Quesias credits her mother for this trait. She spoke to the family in both Spanish and English, to ensure they would be bilingual. 

Despite being a spoiled child, Quesias is now a hard-working young woman. She worked while attending school, just as her parents and her siblings did. In Portland, she started as a barista at Coffee by Design, a family-owned business known for its socially responsible practices. 

“We are coffee drinkers in Ecuador. But even though we grow our own coffee, we’d rather drink the better-quality and imported Colombian coffee,” she said. 

After they arrived in New York the family made huge sacrifices to rebuild their lives. The parents worked long hours to provide for the family. 

When she was in Brooklyn, Quesias’ classmates asked her about Ecuador and where it was located on the globe. She was surprised to hear that they did not know much about Ecuador, or about the continent of South America. In Maine, she is often mistaken for Mexican, even though she does not look like someone from Mexico. 

After five years in New York, the family moved to New Hampshire. Quesias said they waited for the right time to leave Brooklyn and move closer to relatives in Nashua, New Hampshire. They spent the next fourteen years in Nashua, before moving up to Maine. In New Hampshire, Quesias missed the ocean. She remembers the family being ready for a change when they came to Maine four years ago. 

It took the family more than two decades to adjust their immigration status to become permanent residents eligible for citizenship. Thanks to Section 245(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, certain immigrants otherwise ineligible for changing their status in the United States are permitted to pay a penalty and then become eligible for permanent residency without having to leave the country. The family’s dream to become legal residents has become a reality. 

The Parra family’s immigration case took longer than usual due to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and elsewhere in America. In post-9/11 America, immigration, a formerly cherished American principle, received negative attention. In New York immigrants were targeted with suspicion. Nationally, there were widespread acts of discrimination against immigrants and their family members. Quesias said her father was challenged by Americans who disliked immigrants because they believed Hispanic immigrants were responsible for stealing jobs from Americans. 

“My father told them why we moved here, mentioning the economic hardship we faced,” Quesias said. “Frankly, if there were jobs in Ecuador, we would be working and living there.” 

In the post-9/11 era, applications for immigration status changes and the related paperwork faced major delays, in part because of new time-consuming background checks.

As if she wants to live up to her name, religion is central to Quesias’ life. In New Hampshire, the entire Parra family converted to become Jehovah’s Witnesses, a distinct Christian denomination. 

According to a 2010 story in the Seattle Times, Jehovah’s Witnesses’ membership has increased from nearly 1 million to 1.2 million over the last four years. That surge is in part due to the growth of non-English congregations. Spanish-speaking converts make up a major part of this increase. (In Ecuador, more than 90 percent of the population consider themselves Roman Catholic.) The Pew Research Center says that Jehovah’s Witnesses—less than 1 percent of US adults—are known for their door-to-door proselytism, and are “among the most racially and ethnically diverse religious groups in America.” In 2020, the group reported a worldwide membership of 8.7 million. 

Unlike other Christians, the Witnesses, as the members are known, do not believe in the Trinity. They reject the immortality of the soul and the eternal fire of hell awaiting sinners. They do not observe Christmas, Easter, birthdays, and other national holidays. 

“We don’t celebrate the usual holidays, but we do celebrate weddings, baby showers, anniversaries, graduations,” Quesias said. She added, “Sometimes we just like to get together with friends. We don’t wait for holidays to give gifts to friends or family.” 

While modesty in dress is emphasized, the religion forbids excessive use of alcohol, as well as illegal drugs, tobacco, and gambling. New members must be baptized. 

Quesias was baptized when she was thirteen.

“I was in high school, and some kids were talking about religion,” she said. “They mentioned the Jehovah’s Witnesses and said they knocked on people’s doors at three a.m. I smiled and said I was a Witness, and we did not do that. They stayed quiet and did not say anything more. After the class, one of them came up to me and said she was sorry.” 

Witnesses meet to worship and study at Kingdom Halls, functional buildings that lack religious symbols. Quesias worships twice a week, on Wednesdays and on Sundays. 

“We believe in the Bible. God has made a promise: If you follow the rules, you will have a happy life,” Quesias said.

Quesias misses the family she has left behind in Ecuador, the love they reserve for one another, and the sense of togetherness. She yearns to be with her maternal grandmother, who is ninety-four and suffers

from dementia. 

After gaining legal status and getting documents in place so they would be able to come back to the United States, Quesias and her family returned to Ecuador for a visit. At the time, they had been away for fourteen years. During a conversation with her grandmother, she mentioned a daughter who was “skinny and with long hair, who had a daughter of her own.” 

Quesias realized the skinny daughter that her grandmother remembered was her own mother. And the daughter was no one other than Quesias herself. She tried to persuade her grandmother that she was the same granddaughter. The elderly woman did not budge. Even when Quesias’s mother explained that she was the skinny daughter, her grandmother dismissed their argument, saying, “You do resemble my daughter, but you cannot be her. She was skinny, while you are somewhat chubby.” 

“My mother was heartbroken. After coming all the way to see her mother, she did not even recognize her. It was hard for her to accept,” Quesias said. 

Her mother had been sending money back to Ecuador to help with the grandmother’s living expenses—a common practice among immigrant families. Migrants often provide financial support for the family members left behind. 

“Despite sending money, my mother feels she is not doing enough,” Quesias said. “Sometimes she feels she has abandoned her elderly parent by coming to America.” 

While visiting Ecuador, Quesias was teased for acting “white” by cousins around her age, but it hardly bothered her that they thought she was more American than Ecuadorian. She said she decided to ignore the jokes. 

Her mother, however, teases her about being single at twenty-six. 

“My mother tells me, ‘When I was twenty-three, I was already married, and I had a child by the time I was twenty-five years old,’” Quesias said.

Quesias associates missing home with her longing for Ecuadorian food. In Maine, no stores or restaurants offer Ecuadorian food, so she makes simple dishes that do not require hard-to-get ingredients. Ecuador is famous for its bananas, and green plantains are plentiful and cheap. A typical Ecuadorian breakfast is bolon, a fried plantain mashed with cheese and then shaped into a ball. 

“For snacks, we cut a plantain in half, put cheese on it and then grill it,” Quesias said. 

Quesias hopes to marry and own a house one day. She became a naturalized citizen, a personal goal, in 2018. Other members of the family had already become citizens, but the COVID-19 pandemic delayed her father’s case. It has slowed down immigration processes across the United States. 

Quesias dislikes the current anti-immigrant sentiment in America and the name-calling that targets Spanish-speaking migrant workers. She is uninterested in national politics, but defends hard-working, law-abiding immigrants. 

“Immigrants come here to work,” she said. “Trust me—nobody would leave their countries to come here if their countries were doing better.” 

She believes there are good and bad people everywhere, including in the immigrant communities. She added, “Our first country is the one we left. This is our second home. We should be respectful toward America.” 

According to the Book of Job, Keziah, Quesias’s namesake, was a symbol for female equality in ancient times, as she and her sisters received an inheritance from their father—an unusual practice at a time when men and women were not seen as equals. 

Quesias, however, strives for a life of spirituality and purity. She does not ask for much in her new life in the United States.

“I do not want to be rich, or famous,” she said. “Just a simple life will be enough.”

Read more powerful stories from Maine’s immigrant community in Dear Maine: The Trials and Triumphs of Maine’s 21st Century Immigrants.