My Family’s Immigration Stories

Today,  at a long red light, I’m scrolling Facebook and I see the headline, “Woman Ran Over Girl Because She was ‘A Mexican’, in the New York Times. I was coming back from picking up a Christmas present for my husband, listening to the Holly station on the radio, singing along to the music. But one stop light later I’m fighting tears. Why would someone try to kill a girl just because she’s brown, like me? Next red light, I’m trying to speed read the article, trying to find something that makes it better. Some clue, or some turn that makes it less horrible than the headline. But no. The woman drove up on the sidewalk to try and kill a teenager because she thought the girl was ‘a Mexican’. The fight flight response sets in and my hands get clammy, my heart is beating. Is this country safe for my children anymore? Could something like this happen to them? I turn off the radio and spend the rest of the ride home trying to reason through how it was just one crazy person. One act of hate. One story. But I’m not believing myself.

I am an American born citizen, daughter of two naturalized citizens who came to the US in the 1960’s. My mother had completed 6^thgrade in Guatemala before becoming a laundress, then worked in a coffee factory in her teen years. Raised by my grandmother and great aunt, my mother worked to pay their bills and tried to save for her own future. But there wasn’t anything left over. Wages were so low. My grandmother and great aunt did odd jobs that they could find, but there was never enough work. One of my mother’s best friends at the coffee factory had left for America to be an au pair, taking care of an American family’s home and children near Washington, DC. Her friend painted a picture of freedom and great pay in her letters to my mom. So when her friend found my mom a family to work for in Virginia, my mother said ‘yes’, and left for the US at age 17. My mother worked for this family for five years. She learned to cook from the “Mrs.” recipes, raised two boys like they were her own, and learned to speak English watching American soap operas. Her favorite was “All My Children” hence my name, Erika, after the main character, Erica Cane.

She met a good man. He was an American. They married and had a daughter, my oldest sister. Sadly, he passed away from diabetes after having lost his sight. Widowed and a single mother at 28, my mom later met and married my father. He was an immigrant from Brazil, and they had my sister and me. All this time, my mom sent money back to my Abuelita and Tia, supporting them from afar. And every other summer, she would take us girls to visit them. I grew up going to an all-white Catholic school in Virginia, and running through the paths on my mother’s friend’s coffee farm in Guatemala every other summer.

As a girl, visiting Guatemala was an adventure. We’d go during summer break which was the rainy season there. It was hot and steamy. It was beautiful and terrible. But even my young eyes could see the brutality of the poverty there. I’d cry at night because I didn’t know what to do with the feelings- the feelings of guilt for having so much at home while people in Guatemala had so little. The fear that accompanied us every time we left the house of being robbed or having our bus, our camioneta, held up at gunpoint by gangs. We knew to never wear purses, but instead tucked bills into our shoes, the waistline of our pants, spread out so that if we were robbed, we still might have one or two bills tucked away between us to make it home on the bus. Children covered head to toe in dirt and mud with calluses and sores fully open to the elements were a common sight- everywhere. If we ever went downtown, my mom would buy bags of McDonalds food for the street children who would sit outside and look through the window at the people inside. Hair matted, faces pressed against the window.  We knew many of them were “working” for men nearby that would make them beg. But my mom would take the chance that some of the food might get to the children.

The neighborhood where my mom had bought a little house for my Abuelita and Tia in Guatemala City had been taken over by the “cancer” of the marketplace. Stepping outside the metal door, there would be someone selling oil-covered car parts on her front stoop, next to someone selling screws and bolts, then furnace parts and on and on. A few streets over, walking through muddy streets and broken sidewalks, we’d find the fresh fruits and vegetable stands and the grains in sacks. A few steps past was the tortilla hut where ten indigenous women sat around a wood fire all day in a windowless hut making flour tortillas. “Un quetzal por veinte.” The equivalent of 20 American cents for 20 hot tortillas. You’d bring your own towel and one of them would scoop the tortillas right off the huge metal griddle with her bare hands with no emotion or expression. Hands that had been totally blackened from the work she’s done for years. I’d be holding my breath to not inhale the black smoke that filled the hut and made my throat hurt. The smoke they sat in day after day, year after year. Finally, she’d hand over tortillas so hot that I could hardly hold them through the doubled up towel.

Every visit, my mom would take us to Antigua. Possibly the most beautiful city in the world, this colonial city was once the capital of Guatemala, but tragically situated next to a still active volcano, the city had been destroyed more than once. We would visit the big yellow church in the main square, La Iglesia de la Merced, The Church of Mercy. Afterwards, we would go to the market and my mom would buy huge bags of rice and beans and hail a taxi. Arriving at the orphanage,  she’d ask the driver to help us carry the food to where they kept the most marginalized in a country of extreme poverty. Here were the children that were born without an arm, or with a club foot, or a cleft palette. Issues that might have been operable had the children been lucky enough to be born in the US, but here left them fated to a life of suffering.

We made this pilgrimage to the orphanage every time we went to Guatemala. My mom, who left this country of beauty and poverty to build a new life, never abandoned it. She worked so hard in the US. After her marriage to my father turned very, very bad, she went back to cleaning houses, then caring for children, her love in life. She nannied and worked in child care centers. Her hands were always rough, but her heart soft and huge. Despite the hardships of her own life, living on a barely livable wage to raise three daughters without child support or alimony, she gave relentlessly. She gave in the US to the families she worked for, to American charities, to her church, and she gave in her home country. She never abandoned Guatemala and she left both places, both countries better for the life she lived. She died two years ago from pancreatic cancer at the age of 74.

And while my mother was able to achieve her dream- study for the naturalization exam and became an American citizen in her lifetime, our family also had a very different experience with the American immigration system. One that devastated our family.

When my great aunt passed away, my grandmother was left living alone in Guatemala.  In her late 80’s and walking with a cane after a bus accident left one leg slightly shorter than the other, we feared for her safety every day. It was hard for her to walk to the stores to get food or visit the doctor or even just bathe herself.  Coupled with the crumbled sidewalks or no sidewalks at all, lack of reliable transportation and general safety in Guatemala, my family lived in fear that something terrible would happen to my Grandmother and we might not even know until it was too late. In a time before cell phones, an unanswered phone call to my grandmother would leave my mom in shaking anxiety. Only when my grandmother would finally answer the phone could my mom breathe again. My mom did everything she could to care for her from the US, but couldn’t do enough.

Eventually she was able to bring my grandmother to stay with her in Virginia on a temporary visa. My mom worked long days out of the house, but was relieved to be able to take care of my grandmother every morning and evening. They were both so happy to be together and my grandmother lapped up all the love and attention of our family after being alone for so long.

But her temporary stay went quickly and when we reapplied for her to stay in the US, our request for my grandmother to stay permanently was denied. We tried again, but in the aftermath of 9/11, and the chaos of the Immigration Department being turned into the Department of Homeland Security, parts of our application were misplaced.  Despite having confirmation from the post office of delivery, they claimed they never received information they had requested and they denied her application again. My sister, a Notre Dame graduate and an attorney, and I, at the University of Virginia, weren’t able to help my mother successfully navigate the immigration system for our grandmother. At the age of 92, they rejected my grandmother’s request and informed my mother that my grandmother was now in the country illegally and had one month to return to Guatemala. They also imposed a three year ban on her returning to the US. It broke my mother’s heart. And it broke mine as I felt partly responsible.

For three years, my mother anguished over my grandmother’s well-being every day. She called her every morning and night to check on how she was. She called in favors from family and friends in Guatemala to visit with her, bring her things she needed. Mami and I visited when we could, making sure we did all of her doctor’s visits, stocking up on food, and setting up care with local women. But my mom, who took care of people her entire life, just wanted to care for her mom in her old age. Finally, when the ban lifted, my mother was able to bring my abuelita back on a three year visa. My grandmother died in bed at my mom’s house in Virginia of natural causes at the beautiful, ripe age of 98. While my mom never forgave herself for not being able to have her mother here during those three years that she was banned, she was so grateful to be able to care for her in the end.

This is a part of my family’s immigration story. Every American family has their own immigration story. My mother came to the US at a time when she was able to get a permanent residency and work towards citizenship. But that dream is gone for many Latin Americans. The quotas for Latinos has been met and now too often the only way to come to the US from these neighboring countries is to come illegally and dangerously. I know that there are limits to resources. I realize that it’s complicated. But what I don’t understand is why there is so much animosity and villainization of immigrants from Latin countries right now.

Immigrants like my mom did not have the good fortune to be born an American citizen just by being born in the ‘right place’. She had to leave everything and everyone she knew behind to start over. People may say, “but your family did it the ‘right’ way, ‘These people’ are just raiding our borders”. But my own grandmother for a brief time, would have been called an “illegal” while we were awaiting final word about the extension on her residency. ICE (Immigration Customs Enforcement) could have, and might have been able to, ship her off to a detention center and deport her back to Guatemala, had my mom been pulled over for something as simple as a broken tail light and asked for my grandmother’s papers. My wrinkled, beautiful abuelita, who had never had a drink or a cigarette in her nine decades of life, an “illegal”. I shudder to think how she and my mom would have felt hearing and seeing the way that immigrants are being treated in today’s America. That a girl would be run over on purpose for being ‘a Mexican’.

In honor of my mamicita and abuelita, and all of the other immigrants that came to this country since its beginnings to build a better life, let’s reject any logic that tells us that it’s as easy as legals vs. illegals. Us against them. I can only share my family’s story and hope that in the arguing and anger, we can see that behind all of this is just people. People, families, and their stories born out of humanity’s innate desire to do better for your children. To build a better life.

When we admit this commonality and see each other as people first, legal status much later, then we all might live up to the American Dream.