StoryCorps New Orleans: Brother and Sister Call Themselves 2 Ordinary Young Hondurans In New Orleans

Although Arteaga, like many other newly arrived Mexicans, works in construction, he has the carriage of the trained dancer and choreographer that he is. Belinda noticed that the first time she saw him with New Orleans Hispanic America, a dance group she and Ronald helped form to preserve and celebrate Honduran, Mexican and other folk dances.

He caught her eye. "And as time went on and he started to dance, I knew right then and there... oh, no, this is something else."

Belinda has spent most of her life in Metairie and New Orleans, and all her life, she thought she'd meet and fall in love with an American, perhaps someone first encountered at Grace King High School or the University of New Orleans. But when she met Julio, "it felt like home. In a weird way, it felt like home."

Suddenly, with Julio in her life, Belinda said she began to see unexpected differences between her Honduran culture and the Mexican heritage of her fiancé. And she has become aware that some Hondurans look down on him because of his heritage.

"To me, growing up here, I always saw everybody as the same -- like, Latino. We kind of have 'the hermandad,' " the brotherhood or sisterhood. But now, she said, she is seeing, and enjoying, the differences.

This is odd, Belinda's 27-year-old brother Ronald remarks, because 30 years later, in another country, Belinda is mimicking the courtship of their parents, Mauro and Clarissa, in Honduras.

Does she see it, he asks? Does she remember their parents' courtship story? And does she see the similarities?

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