Most people are brought to a hospital or, if they're lucky, an old house when shown where their parents were born. Imagine, instead, that a dark-green mountain dressed in a faint cloak of mist provides the setting for your family's bittersweet stories: the grandmother and great-uncle who hiked half an hour to school and, on weekends, to the plaza in town to meet girls: the great-aunt who had eight children and watched six of them die simply because that's the way it was in poor towns back then. The mountains of Patillas, Puerto Rico, harbor many such stories for Justina Machado.

 This isn't the 31 year-old actress's first trip to the Emerald of the Southeat, as Patillas is afectionately know. But living in Los Angeles - where Justina works on Six Feet Under, the hit HBO show about a family that runs a funeral home - has made her more nostalgic for the small, oceanside town, on the island's southeast coast, where her mami and abuela were born. "I was born in Chicago, so that will always be my home. But this," she says, clearly seduced by the choppy waves pushing their way onto the stoney shore as palm tress sway precariously in a heady breeze, "this is my history."

 Patillas is a humble place, and Justina's family had similarly humble beginnings. The actress's grandfather and great-uncles all worked on sugar plantations before they left, one by one for Chicago; her grandmother was the last in the family to arrive in 1956. "Everything we needed, we grew on the mountain, but everyone had the same things, so you couldn't make any money selling them," says her great-uncle Pedro Ruiz, 70, who like many of Justina's relatives, eventually returned to Patillas in retirement. In fact, the family's loyalty to the mountain where they started out life that Justina's great-grandmother Basilia Ruiz was at the brink of starvation before her sons manage to convince her to move to the mainland. "And my grandmother didn't go to the United States until she was 36 and my mother was 3 - and only because my great-grandmother had gone. You know Latinas. We've got to follow the mamis" Justina says.

 The women's lives did improve, relatively speaking. "My grandmother ironed for a living to support three kids," Justina says. "My mother thought canned meatballs were a delicacy. And for the first ten years of my life we were on welfare. But my mother went to school and became a nurse, and I may not have come that far (by Hollywood standards), but in my family the progression has been steady. I'm sure that's what they hoped for when they left Patillas. It's a beautiful place, but they wanted a better life for future generations."

Six Feet Under's Justina Machado at the Patilla, Puerto Rico plaza where her abuelos used to hang out.  She wears a Mac Studio skirt, Rebeca Taylor at Pasarela top, and escapulario by Lisa Capalli.