In Her Own Words: A Mother Recounts Her Journey From Mexico
This Las Lomas student's mother, who crossed the border from Mexico 21 years ago, told her story to her own child.
My mom has beautiful curls, hazelnut colored hair, gorgeous green eyes, and a scar on her arm from when she was little and got burned. She tends to laugh a lot, especially when she is nervous. She’s always singing in the morning when I wake up.
In 1996, when she was 19, my mom came to the United States because her parents didn’t have a lot of money. There were no jobs that paid enough to buy food. If you ate, you can’t buy yourself shoes or clothes or even a bus ticket. The only thing that hurt her when leaving Mexico was that she was leaving her family behind.
Crossing the border, she said, “was a nightmare.” She crossed three times. “In the daytime, it’s so hot it’s a hotness you can’t even begin to comprehend,” she said. “At night, it’s so cold. It’s a cold I have never experienced. You feel like you’re dying. You feel like you’re dead. I had never felt that cold and I prayed for when it would be morning so they could come for us.”
Someone was supposed to pick them up that night, but they didn’t come until the next morning.
“Imagine from nine to six so cold. You don’t have anything— hungry and cold, everything. You’re not even scared anymore because what you care about is the coldness.”
El coyote told them to not stand still and to not lie or sit down because they would fall asleep and not wake up. They all walked in small circles, at the same time worried that U.S. immigration would flash lights on them. One girl said that she was just going to lie down for a little bit. A couple minutes later, El Coyote asked the girl, “Are you okay?” She didn’t respond. She was turning purple and was very tense. He told all of the others to form a circle around her and rub their hands on her to give her warmth, so they did.
They got as far as Phoenix, Arizona after waiting 15 days. They were told to get ready to go to San Francisco, CA and were taken to the airport. They were so close to the plane when some people came up to them and asked for their documents. They said, “You don’t have any, do you?”
She didn’t respond and they said, “It’s ok. Come with us.”
They took her to a white van and locked them up. They only got a milk carton and a little hamburger. Her brother didn’t want to eat it because he thought it was nasty, but she told him she would keep it for later, just in case they weren’t going to get more food. And they didn’t. “Around nine p.m. immigration came for us and said, “Ok, we’re ready,” she said. “We’ve filled up the van with undocumented people like you. Let’s go.”
My mom said that the immigration officials laughed and made fun of them. They were locked up they took their fingerprints and took photos of them and made them sign a paper that said that the couldn’t be in the USA. “We got to Nogales in Mexico and they just left us there,” she said. “My brother and I had no money. We had finished it in the 15 days we were waiting to cross.”
She and her brother eventually tried again and made it into the U.S. Then, in 1999, people were saying the world was ending. She wanted her last days to be with her mom, so she went back to Mexico with her son. He was about three years old. Soon, she started running out of money and realized she couldn’t live in Mexico. She decided to cross the border alone and would send for her son on a plane. She didn’t want to put her son through that journey because he had papers. She went with a backpack full of apples, water, and clothes, but she was so depressed that she couldn’t even eat. She was in so much pain, and when she started walking more, she realized she didn’t have enough strength. She was at the back of the line and she couldn’t keep up. She started dropping things from her backpack, which is dangerous because immigration could find them easily that way. When everyone paused to take a break, she decided to try to go to the bathroom. That is when El Coyote yelled for everyone to run. It was in the dark. She couldn’t see anything but had to lift up her pants and run. Sooner or later, she couldn’t run anymore. A woman and a man carried her together but they sound- ed angry because of her they could have been caught.
What is it like to end up being a fugitive just for wanting a better life for your family?
“It’s not fair,” she said. “The president thinks we’re criminals. We’re fighting for our families. That’s why when I heard the song ‘El Mojado’ by Ricardo Arjona, I thought he was right. We all have a right to eat and to look for jobs and such. We have rights. It’s not fair.We aren’t doing anything bad we’re just sending back money for our families. I feel frustrated. We aren’t criminals.”
My mom has lived in America for 20 years, and she became a legal resident a few years ago. It has been very hard for her.
“If you don’t have an ID or a social security number, you’re pretty much screwed, and so anywhere that you go they ask you for that, and it has been really hard,” she said. “It’s not as easy as many people may think. A lot of people say, ‘Oh, people from Mexico should just get a green card or visa and do everything legally, but it’s not that easy. They think it is. Well, it isn’t. Like I said, not until recently I became a United States citizen and I lived here for 20 years. That shows it isn’t easy at all.”
