Being an immigrant shaped her pursuit of belonging within new spaces and communities in both the US and the UK. Whether bridging realms between teachers and students or between Cambridge University and local communities, Heidy M. Pérez-Cordero's trajectory—as a school drama teacher, pre-school teacher, heritage language teacher, and more recently as a PhD candidate—is her way of navigating and claiming her own sense of belonging in the world.In this first episode of Across the Meadows, I bring my friend and peer—now at the very end of her PhD journey at the Faculty of Education, and also from Murray Edwards College—to share her educational path and life stories, including her experience of working with Brazilian Augusto Boal, creator of the Theatre of the Oppressed, inspired by Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Heidy’s PhD research focuses on the lived experiences and identities of immigrant heritage language teachers in the UK. She explores whether becoming a heritage language teacher is an ‘accidental’ outcome for immigrants like herself—an assumption she initially held, but came to question through her research—as well as the ethnic penalties they face, their resilience in the labour market, and the deeper meanings behind their professional paths.