CEDAR FALLS - Miryam Antunez de Mayolo counts 1991, her first year in the U.S., as the most difficult of her life.

She recalls punching timecards at Sam's Club after working as a lawyer in her native Peru. She remembers the shock of a new language, culture, even the abundance of green grass and trees, inducing panic attacks. Still, she said what made her most miserable is being away from her family.

"I lived with my parents until I married, it's very common (in Latin America). I could have moved out - I was a lawyer - but it would have killed my parents," she said.

Helping people survive those first months and years in the U.S. served as a powerful motivator in her becoming an immigration attorney. As far as she knows, she's still the only one in eastern Iowa.

"My experience I went through, the immigrant experience, I know how hard it is. And I had a husband, I did this by choice," she said.

She remembers going to the Ellis Island museum. Her husband's grandfather came through Ellis Island from Sicily, Italy.

"To see that, (today's immigrants) are coming for the same reasons, they have the same courage."

Antunez de Mayolo, 42, is one of many professional class immigrants in the Cedar Valley. Though more immigrants come from impoverished backgrounds and work unskilled jobs, many immigrant doctors, lawyers and businessmen also call eastern Iowa home.

Antunez de Mayolo is one of the lucky ones - she was able to continue working in her chosen profession after immigrating. Even though she went to college at 17 to become a lawyer, she had to start over after arriving in the U.S. She graduated from University of Iowa's law school in 1998.

"The tool of a lawyer is the language. I never thought I'd be able to speak English well enough to do it," she said.

Antunez de Mayolo refined her English while in Connecticut, where she and her husband, Phil Mauceri, who heads University of Northern Iowa's political science department, lived for several years in the early 1990s. It helped that she's been a voracious reader all her life. She keeps a postcard of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel Peace Prize for literature, in her Cedar Falls office.

"I always had my nose in a book," she said of her childhood.

To build her vocabulary, she read the New York Times everyday with a dictionary in her lap. She even re-read classics by Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemmingway in their original English language.

Antunez de Mayolo grew up in an upper middle class home in Lima, the capital of Peru, where politics and religion were discussed at the dinner table. Her father was a dentist and professor of perodontics, and her mother was a teacher. Her extended family includes priests, doctors and military leaders. Her happiest memories are afternoons swimming in a pool at a country club in the Andes mountains. Attending a public university for her six-year law degree opened Antunez de Mayolo's eyes to how the rest of the world lives.

"I lived such a sheltered life. I had never seen poverty up that close. I sat next to someone who was very, very poor who lived in a shanty town, but who could attend class because the university is free," she said.

Living a comfortable life in Peru, she never considered leaving until she fell in love with Mauceri. Economic and political forces played a role in their decision to call the U.S. home. Mauceri couldn't find a job in Peru with his doctorate in political science, and in the early 1990s, the country was engulfed in political chaos.

Shortly before moving, her uncle, who headed Peru's military at the time, lost his son to a car bomb meant for him. Not long after that, a bomb detonated outside of her father's dental office. Yet another hit a building around the corner from her house, exploding all the windows. She remembers the blood streaming down her face into her eyes so profusely it temporarily blinded her.

"I had shards of glass in my eyes, in my eyelashes and in my nostrils. I told my mom 'just get out!' I was not wearing shoes, so all my feet were bloodied," she said.

Shortly thereafter, she and her husband moved to Connecticut, where she took her first job at Sam's Club. She lasted three months.

"You had this social position in Peru. Then you come to the U.S. and you're just another Hispanic woman who speaks broken English," she said.

Contact Jens Manuel Krogstad at (319) 291-1580 or jens.krogstad@wcfcourier.com.