A trip to Brazil changed the perspective of a Windham High School student who is about to graduate.

A traumatic visit to Brazil in the summer of 2011 helped Aiyanna Maciel, one of 243 Windham High School graduating seniors to receive their diploma on Sunday, both reconcile her own cultural identity and figure out what she wanted to do with her life.

Maciel, 18, was raised in Raymond by her mother, Elizabeth Bubier, a Windham High School Spanish teacher. By the time Maciel enrolled at the high school, she had not seen her father, a Brazilian named Vicente Maciel, since she was 3 years old.

Bubier had met Vicente Maciel while touring Portugal during her college years. But he had not been able to obtain a visa to move to the United States, and shortly after Aiyanna Maciel was born, their relationship ended.

In 2011, Aiyanna Maciel’s large Brazilian family suddenly volunteered to pay for her to visit them. That summer, she flew into Brazil, and traveled to the impoverished, rural town of Abaetetuba to visit her father, as well as his new wife and kids.

“There had always been that curiosity of, ‘What if he’d been here, how would my life be different?’” Maciel said. “I had no idea what to expect.”

The visit did not go well.

“He, being a Brazilian, expected me to immediately want to be a part of the family and do everything with the family and love my little siblings and love his wife like she was my mother,” Maciel recalled. “I couldn’t do that. I was not immediately falling in love with them and it was hard for me to watch him get so frustrated that I could not grasp onto the fact of having that second family.”

The experience plunged Maciel into a state of confusion about her family identity, she said.

“In that time that I spent with my dad I spent a lot of time being really confused about our relationship and what that meant, and I was lost for a long time,” she said. “I didn’t know how that was going to fit into my life. I didn’t want to feel excluded. I wanted to be included in my Brazilian family. I didn’t want to feel like I didn’t belong, but at the same time I couldn’t help but feel like that.”

After spending a week with her father’s family in Abaetetuba, she traveled to the city of Belem at the mouth of the Amazon to stay with an aunt for the final five weeks of the trip. According to Maciel, her decision to leave Abaetetuba deeply hurt her father – and his new wife, Eliane.

“When I got home from Brazil I got a message from my dad’s wife on Facebook that basically told me I was a disgrace to the family for not staying with them the entire time. That hit me hard for a while.”

Back home in Raymond, Maciel reflected on the trip with her mother, a multi-lingual world traveler.

“I sat down with my mom and she basically just encouraged me to look at the cultural differences – that getting out and experiencing is fine because we’re from Raymond, Maine,” Maciel said. “We look forward to getting out and doing stuff. All (Eliane) knows having grown up in that area is Abaetetuba. That’s all she gets. Because she’s too poor to travel to other places and she has kids and she’s stuck and she doesn’t know me.”

In particular, Maciel had noticed strong cultural differences between American and Brazilian family structures. Maciel felt a need to reconcile the two, she said.

“The family culture in Brazil is very inclusive and everyone’s part of the family and everyone loves each other the same way,” she said. “Here it’s more like, it’s more reserved in a family setting. You’re very close with your close family – you get together with your cousins and your aunts and uncles every once in a while – but in Brazil everyone’s together all the time no matter what. That helps me understand the differences between families here and there. I just I had an epiphany in Brazil that somehow I wanted to link the two and be able to help people be half-Brazilian and half-American, like I am.”

Before going to Brazil, Maciel was sure she wanted to be a biomedical engineer. But after coming home, she realized she wanted to do something different. A year after her trip to Brazil, she set upon the idea of becoming an immigration attorney.

“The differences in culture and the differences in circumstance really had me thinking I’m not cut out to be a biomedical engineer, but what I can do is help people,” she said.

“I can sit here all I want and be sad that everyone’s so poor but I could also try to do something and I could try to help them experience that American dream.”

Maciel is planning to major in international relations and pre-law when she attends Stetson University in Deland, Fla., next year. She also interned at the Jewell & Bulger law firm in Portland last summer and will intern there again this summer, in the hopes of improving her chances of becoming an immigration attorney. In her view, even though the visit with her dad didn’t go well, she still wants to fix the system that prevented him from coming to the United States when she was a child.

“It’s, in my opinion, a flaw in the system,” she said. “Even though I don’t necessarily have a good relationship with him, he’s not a criminal, he’s not smuggling drugs, he just wanted to come visit. He wanted to come see his daughter, and he couldn’t. I want to change that. I want to fight for people like him. It’s not that uncommon for this kind of a situation to happen.”

Maciel, who served as the student representative to the Regional School Unit 14 School Board, will graduate with the other members of the Windham class of 2015 on Sunday at 1:30 p.m. at the Cross Insurance Arena in Portland.

Windham High School Principal Chris Howell praised Maciel’s strong work ethic and sense of purpose.

“She’s one of those students that has given back tremendously to our building and our student body,” he said. “A neat kid, a hard worker, and even though she may not have everything in this world she does recognize that she is pretty blessed with what she does have.”

Aiyanna Maciel, 18, a graduating senior at Windham High School, figured out what she wanted to do with her life after a traumatic visit to her father’s town in Brazil her freshman year.Staff photo by Ezra Silk