Princeton Alumni Find Home in Unexpected Places

These days, Flora Thomson-DeVeaux ’13 lives and works in Brazil, over 5,000 miles away from her hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia. A decade on from graduation, she produces podcasts and translations in a language she was convinced to pick up at an open house her freshman year.        

“Here feels like my center of gravity for the foreseeable future,” the Spanish and Portuguese concentrator says of Rio de Janeiro, her adopted home since 2017. Having arrived at Princeton speaking Spanish but no Portuguese, she fell in love with Rio as a freshman taking a Brazilian cinema course and an extracurricular translation project on the singer and actress Carmen Miranda. “I’d do all my homework and then stay up late doing the translation stuff, almost like a treat,” she recalls of the experience. It led her to set foot in Rio for a semester abroad her junior year and realize: “Oh, this is my place.”

Thomson-DeVeaux is now married to a Brazilian, serves on the advisory board of Princeton’s Brazil LAB, and has translated two of Brazil’s most notable classics for Penguin: Machado de Assis’s Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (2020), which developed out of her doctoral thesis at Brown, and Mário de Andrade’s The Apprentice Tourist (2023).        

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Escadaria Selaron, the colorful stairs in Rio de Janeiro, is one of the area's most popular attractions. 

Adobe

As much in life as in translation, Thomson-DeVeaux likes “occupying the space of feeling at home whilst knowing I’m not from here,” she remarks. “And that friction, that slight difference, is what I enjoy about being here.”

For many Princetonians like Thomson-DeVeaux, college can be a great experiment in mobility. Beyond the more obvious need to move across a state, the country, or the world to arrive on a shared campus, a place such as Princeton offers opportunities to study abroad, research overseas, and explore disciplines that take students into worlds distinct from what they’ve known.

For Ricardo Mayo ’14, this year will mark seven years living in his adopted home of Shanghai, China, where he runs a college consulting business.

“I never imagined myself living here,” Mayo says. Born in Mexico and raised in Los Angeles by Cuban parents, Mayo — a comparative literature concentrator — jokes that his real Princeton major was in “coming to terms with myself.”

His time at Princeton reflects his pursuit of a sense of place. As a sophomore, he joined a program run by the School of Public and International Affairs in Cuba, where he had the opportunity to immerse himself in the world of his parents’ upbringing. A year later, he studied abroad in Paris, where he decided to stay for a gap year auditing classes at Paris Diderot University, teaching English, and “living like a local.” These experiences culminated in a senior thesis on two writers, one Franco-Algerian and the other Cuban American, who, like Mayo, grapple with how their hybrid identities color how they move through the world.

Post-graduation, Mayo came to China on a chance invitation from his freshman year roommate, Victor Li ’13, who was working in Shanghai at the time and believed that China could be “an interesting adventure” for the comparative literature graduate.

“I’ve worked really hard to live functionally here, and it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” Mayo says. But his desire to learn more about the country’s culture — in addition to a strong local demand for education-related businesses, Mayo’s area of professional expertise — has kept him tethered in place for almost a decade.

The country poses an exciting challenge for Mayo, who now speaks Chinese and has found a robust community among fellow expatriates from Indonesia, Germany, and Italy. In creating such a life, he adds, “I broke the idea that my identity is tied to a particular culture. I care more about the commonalities we find among ourselves.”

There is a funny paradox to both Thomson-DeVeaux’s and Mayo’s stories: The feeling of difference evoked by a new home is, in part, what makes them feel settled.

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Jorge Pereira ’21 proposes to Diana Sandoval Simán ’20 on campus. 

Courtesy of Diana Sandoval Simán ’20

Having arrived at Princeton as an international student from El Salvador, Diana Sandoval Simán ’20 — who now lives in Chicago with her husband, Jorge Pereira ’21 — is no stranger to life in this kind of borderland. Informed by her personal experiences, her research as a sociology Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago concerns the experience of being a Latino immigrant in the United States.

“Ever since I realized that this is going to be my home for the foreseeable future, I’ve become more interested in being part of this country in the way that immigrants are, versus students,” says Sandoval Simán, who only felt truly settled in the U.S. after marrying Pereira, a Florida native with Cuban ancestry. They met through their shared membership in the Cap and Gown eating club, as well as a fateful Latin night party hosted by Quadrangle Club in early 2020. After several dances, Pereira asked Sandoval Simán on a date the following day; a year and a half later, he proposed under an arch at Whitman College after his Commencement ceremony.

For Sandoval Simán, rootedness is “about feeling you have a community around you.” In the U.S., she feels most at home in Miami — home to one of country’s highest proportions of Spanish speakers — not only because she gets to speak her native language, but because she finds her strongest sense of community among Pereira’s friends and family. In Miami — the only place in the world outside El Salvador she can navigate without the use of Google Maps, she quips — Sandoval Simán likes to frequent a café she refers to as “la Latin American,” where each member of her family has a regular dish whenever they visit. (“My sister, for example, loves the rice and beans and the maduros,” she explains.)

During our conversation, Sandoval Simán asks me what I think about rootedness. There is a glint of recognition in her eye when I mention the French philosopher Simone Weil (Sandoval Simán attended a French school growing up, which makes her decision to settle in America that much more unexpected) and her views on rootedness as a process not only defined by place, but by time. A rooted person, Weil argues in her 1949 book The Need for Roots, participates in a community that “keeps alive treasures of the past and has aspirations for the future.” In other words, they are concerned for the past, present, and future of a particular locale.

Though four years — the standard length of a Princeton undergraduate degree — are enough to establish strong communities, it isn’t a long time at all in the grand scheme of life. There is a transient quality to moving in and out of the Orange Bubble, as there is to work or research opportunities that require graduates to settle not here nor there for good, but to be in many different places for now.

When I first moved to England in 2021, I tell Sandoval Simán, I had no intention of settling. Oxford was my temporary home, one where I’d complete my requisite two years under the auspices of the Sachs Scholarship. But something about the magic of the place, the way stories are embedded in Oxford’s street names and landmarks, convinced me to remain long enough to establish a story of my own. It was here that I began writing a novel on rootedness and, now having finished my time on the Sachs, it is here that I remain; I ride my bicycle through town, call by friends’ houses, and feel amazed by the fact that had it not been for a chance opportunity, I may not have found this home at all. 

What brought each of us to where we are now were not necessarily concerted life plans, but happy accidents, if you will.

Recently, Thomson-DeVeaux, her partner, and two friends began reforesting a patch of the Atlantic Forest on the foothills of the Bocaina mountains, which stretch across the Brazilian states of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

“We’re invested in literally making seedlings root themselves in soil that has been devastated after generations of coffee plantations and cattle farming,” Thomson-DeVeaux explains. When I ask whether she has plans to leave Brazil at any point, she matter-of-factly points out: Why would she leave before getting to see what comes of these seedlings, and what their growth will say about her own sense of place in Brazil?

The metaphor is familiar and apt for a reason. “Like mature seedlings, we can always be transplanted,” she offers. “The most important thing is for us to be able to nourish ourselves wherever we are.”

Jimin Kang ’21 is a freelance writer and recent Sachs scholar based in Oxford, England.