Livin' the 'Murican Dream
- Renata Julia Ordóñez
- Mar 15, 2017
- 17 min read
The fear, the risks, the bravery. Giving up everything to pursue the American Dream.
Two very different people, two very different stories. But one same purpose. The story of how two illegal immigrants made it to the United States in search of opportunity and the pursuit the American Dream, and how they ended up now.
THE FOOD TRUCK LADY
*Names were changed to protect identity
The moment I saw the metallic food truck with big, blue letters painted on it that read “TORTAS-QUESADILLAS-PAPAS-PESCADO-TACOS” parked next to Jax clothing store on a day when my aunt was dropping off some shoes, I knew I wanted to know the story of the owners who made that Mexican Food Truck a success. I wondered, “what’s the story behind that quesadilla sign?”, because it looked exactly like the ones back in my hometown, Mexico City.
So the next day, after school, I drove with my mom to the exact same spot. Sure enough, there it was. Glinting in the sun, with it’s indoor kitchen, closed-off windows, and the food bar supplying fries, sauces, napkins and other condiments. On the top right of the windows there was today’s menu, all in Spanish.
At first I hesitated, because the Food Truck looked empty. But after lurking awkwardly in front of the window for a while, a short, dark-skinned woman with big, round eyes and hair pulled back into a bun slid the window open. She eyed me suspiciously, and with a heavy accent said, “Do you know what you want?” I responded that actually, I was wondering if she spoke Spanish.
From that point onward, our conversation was solely in Spanish. “Where do you come from?”, I asked. “Mexico. Mexico City. Why?”, she replied. I was so excited that she came from the same place I did, I asked which part she lived in of Mexico City she had lived in. She told me she used to live in one of the more populous areas of Mexico City, called Tlalpan. She had always lived there with her family, who is originally from the state of Oaxaca.
She agreed to be interviewed, but with heavy doubt. Apparently she didn’t trust a stranger who straight up wanted to hear her life story up until the creation of her food truck, and I guess I wouldn’t either, if I were in her position.
What I actually wanted to know, and expected to hear, was the tale of how she arrived into the United States. “What do you want to know?”, she said, “You tell me. I can tell you I’m an illegal immigrant. I came here by getting across the border. De mojada.”
“How did you travel from Mexico City to the border and make it across?”, I asked. “We took a plane to the border city, Ciudad Juárez. It was just me, my husband, and one of my daughters. We had to walk four or five hours across the desert, and then the person who passes you to the other side, called ‘Coyote’, just tells you where to go and takes you in a bus from there”, she replied, “they took us directly to Colorado.” Coyote is slang for the person “who illegally smuggles immigrants into the U.S”. However, this woman, María*, doesn’t remember much aside from that. She doesn’t even remember the Coyote’s face. “It was so long ago, about twenty years ago”, she says, “I was eighteen along with my husband, and our youngest daughter was one. I remember we were ready to leave on a Wednesday, but it wasn’t until Friday of the next week that we actually got into the United States.”
“Were you ever afraid?”, I asked. “Yes”, said María, “It was nighttime, and we couldn’t see. It was horrible, because we were always in fear of what may or may not appear, or whom. Especially ‘la migra'. It’s a fear that doesn’t go away. Ever.”
But it wasn’t easy after that. Not only had she just left all her family behind to enter a country she didn’t know, but she’d also left behind her eldest daughter under the care of her parents back in Mexico. “I wasn’t able to come back for her until five years later”, she tells me, “it was really hard. The only way we could communicate was through the telephone.” Now both of her daughters are in college and high school, and one is attending Front Range Community College. “What are your daughters’ plans for the future?”, I asked. “They don’t really care much, they’re really open-minded to opportunities. They may even end up working in this Food Truck”, she tells me.
Speaking of education, my curiosity perked when I recalled she’d left Mexico at the age of 17-18. “Did you finish high school or college when you came to the U.S.?” “No”, she said, “I only finished up to middle school and my husband only finished elementary school. That’s why it’s so important to me that my daughters value their education now that they have the opportunity to get a higher level of it. I really hope they are valuing it, and they aren’t just saying that to make me feel good.”
But before recuperating her daughter that was left behind in Mexico, she spent all those years working as a maid in a hotel. Her husband used to work in La Luz, a restaurant in Downtown Fort Collins. Then, with her daughter finally with them, the day came when she switched out of her hotel job and into the famous food truck. “We used to eat here all the time”, María tells me, “one day we read a sign that said ‘employees wanted’, and so I applied. After a while he sold us the food truck, and it became the family business.”
“Have you changed the recipes ever since?”, I asked. “Not at all”, she replied, “it’s as delicious as it’s ever been”, and chuckles. However, María makes these same recipes every day, for 16 to 17 hours at a time in one day, the entire time trapped in the cramped kitchen.
“If I confess the truth, I don’t believe that coming here to the United States was worth it. Even though I work, and my daughters have a higher education level; all of that has no comparison to having left my parents behind”, she says. “I left my entire family in Mexico. I can’t visit them, I can’t see them. The only way of communication we have is through the telephone, because it’s really hard to cross the border and then return. It’s easy to enter into Mexico because you only need a simple ID, but reentering into the USA is really complicated.” María continues, “Myself, and the rest of my family still don’t have residency papers, nor American nationality.”
In fact, María has the long term plan to return to Mexico. She doesn’t know when, but factors like her family, the new president of the United States and the political issues in Mexico are keeping her in an indecisive turmoil. “I don’t know what to expect from the American government”, María says, “I don’t like to listen to all the news of what’s happening with Trump because it makes me even more afraid. But that wall…It’s such a waste of money! There are so many people who live in hunger in the United States, and it would be an irrational decision that would cost the government too much. I also fear that if they build it, I won’t be able to get to my family at all.” At the same time, Mexico is suffering from an economic and political crisis that keeps diving deeper and deeper into infamy. However, Mexico isn’t just about it’s politicians and societal issues, “Mexico isn’t the government nor the situation it’s in, Mexico is it’s people”, María says. She has yet to make an official decision.
“Then what else do you miss about Mexico, aside from your family and the people who live there, that would make you want to leave the U.S.?”, I ask. “I miss the traditions- the United States is a really solitary place, people don’t have time to be with their kids because they work and study so much. But in Mexico- there was a defined ‘lunch’ hour, where everyone was together, and the weekends were always reserved for friends and family, especially family Sundays.” Not only that, but María identifies completely as a Mexican. She is very proud of her nationality, her country, and her origin. She feels that there’s values that Mexicans should never forget, and she finds it disappointing when “people start to believe they are American residents just because they now know English, but they aren’t, and they never will be. They stop helping other Mexicans like myself that still believe in their homeland. They end up losing their culture, something that is important in a person’s values”, she says. “I have taught my daughters to value Mexico no matter what, because that is where they came from and who they are. Mexico is a beautiful place no matter the conditions, and I’ll always love my country.”
María, an illegal immigrant, pursued the American dream but didn’t find all that she had desired. Perhaps in the future she’ll drive that same food truck across the border and back into Mexico, and sell sandwiches and tacos in the streets of our home city, happily reunited with her family. After all, sometimes money can’t give you true happiness, right?
THE GUATEMALAN BOY
*names were changed to protect identity
Upbeat traditional Mexican country music plays in the background. I’m sitting patiently at a booth that has purple and green Paisley patterns on it, in the corner of a restaurant. I’m right next to the large windows that make up the entire side wall, so I can see all the people passing the corner. Across from me is another wall that is half red, and half peach colored, with a big artisanal Sun ornament staring back at me. Minutes pass, until the waiter comes back from attending the clients at table one and sits down in the same booth as me, so we’re face to face from each other.
Pablo* is a 27-year-old from Guatemala, and he, too, arrived to the United States as an illegal immigrant, even though now is now legalized thanks to Obama’s government.
It all started when he was seven or eight years old. His mother and father had separated when he was four, and three years later, his mother decided to take on the journey of leaving Guatemala and taking Pablo and his older brother, Miguel*, across the border in order to obtain the ‘American Dream’. In fact, his mother had already gone to the United States illegally when Pablo was two, but she had returned even more determined to bring her family with her.
“The first part of leaving to reach the United States was easy”, he said in a soft accent, “it was a piece of cake.” It took them no time or trouble to cross the rivers that divide Guatemala with Mexico- Río Suchiate and Río Usumacinta, because there are no real security measures and there’s unregulated immigration control. A year, “the UN estimates 400,000 Central Americans cross illegally into Mexico each year”, says a Daily Mail article.
“When we reached the border state of Chihuahua, we had to cross the desert for four or five hours” , Pablo says. One third of Chihuahua’s territory is desert, that means almost 31, 850 square miles. “We walked and walked, and my brother, who is three years older than I am, would play soccer with me while we went through the desert.” Thankfully, Pablo nor anybody else in his family died while crossing a desert that can reach up to more than 110 °F (43 °C). The Chihuahuan Desert has been known to take many immigrant lives before due to it’s unbearable heat and lack of water. But apparently Pablo’s family was better prepared, and made it safely across. Pablo continues, telling me, “Then we arrived at a hotel in Ciudad Juarez, which was right along the border. We stayed there for one day, and I remember the owner of that hotel was really nice. She knew where we were going- she became one of our Coyotes into the United States”, Pablo tells me excitedly.
However, it wasn’t such a piece of cake once they were supposed to cross the border. The group of illegal immigrants and Coyotes that were going to cross the border to the United States almost abandoned Pablo and Miguel in the desert. They couldn’t risk such a large group of people being seen because of two or three extra people with them, especially young kids. As Pablo explained to me, it’s not uncommon for illegal immigrants to stay in the bordering desert because they can’t find help to get across, or they become stranded there. But thanks to their mother who helped convince the Coyotes, they were able to cross the Río Bravo (or Río Grande in the USA). Mexican companions carried them on on their backs, wading through the fast moving water in the dark. They were risking their lives in deliberately crossing the river, because it’s depth is 59 feet in some areas, and 50 feet wide. Many people die just trying to cross Río Bravo because of underwater reeds or trash at the bottom of the murky, fast-current river that traps them and causes them to drown.
Thankfully, Pablo and Miguel’s destiny was not to drown. After crossing the river and getting across into federal territory of the United States, Pablo and his family were almost ‘safe’. When there were 40 minutes away from reaching the highway, they were told they’d see a truck driving by and they had to jump into it. “I made a bad decision because I was the first one to jump in, because then everyone else jumped in after me. My mom was so scared that she couldn't see me since her and my brother had gone in the front, and she thought she’d left me. But actually, I was at the very bottom of everyone. I shouldn’t have done it because it hurt my knee. To this day I still have problems and pain with it.”
However, Pablo’s knee pain was not going to stop any of them. They stayed in this truck for a long time, laying down in the trunk squeezed next to each other. It wasn’t until two or three days later that they arrived in Arizona to someone’s house. Their Coyote driver kept having to take different routes and Pablo’s family had to stay in strangers’ houses to avoid ‘migration hotspots’.
After that, they were on the road again. Pablo remembers that there were a lot of other young people in the back part of the truck with him, all piles up in the trunk. A blue plastic tarp covered the trunk to hide the people under it. Pablo remembers it being summer, so it was extremely hot and muggy, and they were constantly being joggled back and forth with the bumps in the road. They were drenched with sweat. The atmospheric heat caused by humans and weather almost unbearable. At some times, though, it wasn’t so filled with pain and discomfort. Pablo remembers peeking out and opening the tarp, letting the cool breeze touch his skin and refresh everyone else in the trunk. He told me that from his upward viewpoint he had (because he was laying down) he saw a blue blue sky- and palm trees, lots of palm trees.
Their traveling finally reached an end when they arrived in Los Angeles, California, where Pablo started junior high. In fact, Los Angeles County has the largest illegal immigrant population, with 1,062,000 people, according to the Los Angeles Almanac, that in that moment also included Pablo and his family. He didn’t know how to speak English well enough, and he was in a new country, with new people and a different education. Can you imagine not being able to communicate as well as the rest, and maybe even failing your classes because you didn’t understand what the teacher was saying? Imagine panicking because you can’t even tell what others are saying to you, and you just have to nod your head in an attempt to show you agree. Language and social barriers make it hard to get through school, and it was the same for Pablo, too. “It was hard in high school and junior high because in our country they did show us english, but it’s not a good english, not like the kind here. You come here thinking ‘oh, I already know english’ and then you arrive at school and it’s not the same they showed you and they’re speaking much faster.” Interestingly enough, Pablo made many latin friends that also came from Mexico, Guatemala and other parts of Latin America, but he still suffered discrimination by the same immigrants that had once been in his place. “Racism happened to me in school when I was still learning english. It was so mean that the latin kids themselves made fun of me and told me that I should ‘go back to where I came from’. How horrible it was that your own people would say this to you. Just because some of them knew more english didn't mean they had the right to make themselves greater than me.” Oddly enough, sometimes it was the people you’d most expect to accept you that were the ones that excluded you the most.
Contrarily, sometimes it’s the people you least expect to care for you that end up by your side. Pablo grew up alongside some Mexicans in school, but he was mainly part of the African American group of kids. “Most of my friends were Afroamerican”, he says, “so I caught the Afroamerican english more than the Mexican english”, he continues jokingly. He happily recounts a story that happened to him in high school that made him even closer to the African American group. “There was one time when I got along so well with [African Americans], that I had an Afroamerican friend whom I had classes with, and one time we got out of school and two ‘morenos’ (dark-skinned people) wanted to rob me. I had my bag and my phone with me and my friend said ‘Nonono, what is wrong with you? Don’t touch him, he’s my friend. Don’t do anything to him’”, he tells me. “Since that moment I started to get along with them more because they protected me.” As Pablo puts it, sometimes it’s hard to believe that once you become part of a certain group of friends that you never thought you would, they are actually really nice and may even take care of you. “Many latino friends saw me that day and they didn’t say or do anything, it was only my African American friend that stood up for me.”
However, Pablo still got along with a lot of Mexicans, it wasn’t as if his only friend group consisted of African Americans. In fact, he married a Mexican woman in high school, whom was also an illegal immigrant. But because they married when they were seventeen, he decided to drop out and have a family. In 2010, only 71.4 percent of Latinos graduated high school, so there’s almost a 30 percent dropout rate. “…Dropping out of high school I told my mom, ‘ma, you know what? I’m going to be with my girlfriend and let’s see how it goes for us.’ She supported me in everything, even though she said I shouldn’t leave school, but she was always by my side.” Today, Pablo wishes he hadn’t dropped out of high school. He didn’t graduate even though he had the opportunity to do it. “I wish I could have gone to university, and I hear a lot of young kids saying that they ‘hate high school’ and they leave it, and then there’s me who wants to go back there but I can’t anymore”, he says.
Dropping out of high school, getting married and having a family implied getting a job. Pablo, at age seventeen, started working in a factory that processed meat, ham, and hotdogs. He got in with the help of his brother’s friend, because otherwise, he explained, it’s hard to find work in California as an illegal immigrant. “There may be a lot of cultural diversity in California, but if you actually find a job it’s because you know someone or because of sheer luck.” The factory Pablo worked in accepted him, but it didn’t have the best working conditions. It was extremely hot all the time, there was vapor everywhere and there was dangerous machinery that could potentially harm you. A study even shows that the meat packaging industry is the most hazardous of all the food industries. It has an injury rate of 7.5 cases per 100 full-time workers, especially in badly-treated Mexican immigrants. “While this may not seem that much higher than the other averages, it is about 21 percent higher than the food manufacturing industry as a whole and a whopping 50 percent higher than the manufacturing industry as a whole”, writes researcher Sameer Farooq. The heat, Pablo remembers, was insufferable. As an illegal immigrant, it’s common that work places such as factories abuse of their employees. Companies take advantage of the fact that workers don’t have documents to overwork them or pay them ridiculously low wages. “They don’t pay you the way they should”, Pablo says. “Sometimes if they saw that you were a really hard worker, they’d give you even more hours.” In the end, Pablo only worked at the meat processing factory for two and a half years. But if he hadn’t left school, he would have liked to have studied to become a vet. “I love animals”, he says, “my friend has a ranch and I love going there- he has horses, cows, goats…the only thing he’s missing are the pigs.”
After working at a factory he was able to get a job at a small company that made industrial, commercial, and house lamps. He and his brother got in because of his mother, whom became a manager. “That job was different from the start”, Pablo tells me. “It paid well, and our boss- who, by the way, it’s hard to find someone like him, was the owner and a very good person- and was Brazilian. He’s one of the best bosses I’ve ever had.” In other jobs he had not been as lucky, and he’d been discriminated as well for being a latino.
Right now Pablo works at a restaurant that has a great Mexican owner. He has built up his life until now and overcame so many struggles, so many sacrifices. Now, his only fears have to do with the government, because even though he’s now a legal citizen, Pablo is afraid of deportation. “They’ve even started detaining residents”, he says. “They’ve started to ask for all your documents. Because my boss is Mexican they stopped him in the airport. If they saw a latino, and it doesn’t matter from where, they’d put you to one side. It’s horrible because they’re basing themselves on your face and your race.”
In general, he notices that there’s a growing fear, no matter people’s situation. Not only is there the danger that he may lose his job or be deported because he was once an illegal immigrant, but there has been an increase in racism and discrimination. “Since Trump’s presidential campaign, many Americans have turned out to be racist. I think there’s always been racism but now it has started to come out more, along with the desire to deport people.” In November 2016, just days after the presidential election, “The Southern Poverty Law Center has counted more than 200 complaints of hate crimes since Election Day”, USA Today published. How many complaints must there be by now? “Police officers in California stopped my brother because he looked Mexican and took his car away”, Pablo tells me.
So what about the wall? Many latinos like Pablo fear being deported or discriminated, but the wall is an incarnated form of racism and humiliation to them. “It’s a bad decision because it’s not going to stop people coming to the United States. It’s now going to be more than 15 billion dollars to create a wall when in other states there’s things that need repair; creating a wall won’t help the country. There’s states where the water isn’t clean and I don’t know how many billions it would take to fix that, but why not use that money for something that will work?” The way Pablo feels is that even though there’s a rise in racism and due to it he may even lose his job as a waiter, who will take the jobs of the latinos? Pablo worked in a food processing factory with very low-quality workplace environment, yet still many Latin Americans like himself take those jobs. How will white American supremacists want to take those low-paying jobs? “We are a huge part of this country, and because of us the United States has been able to rise, because we do the jobs an American doesn’t want to do. An American doesn’t want to earn what a latino earns picking fruit”, Pablo says.
Besides, many latinos don’t consider themselves to be of their original nationality- to be Mexicans or Guatemalans anymore, and facing deportation would mean starting from less than zero like before, and going back to a place they don’t think of as home, perhaps having to find a job that pays even less than the ones in the United States. Pablo is one of those people, and one to have already settled in Colorado. “I don’t consider Guatemala to be my country. This is my country now. I grew up here. America has given me everything.” He met his friends here, he made a family, he found a job, he discovered who he could be. Like himself, he says he’s met with “people who also got the opportunity to obtain their documents and they change their personality for someone who they want to be.” “In the United States I found many people who helped me, like my boss. On the other hand, it angers you that people of your own country didn’t help you when you were there, but then there’s people like my Brazilian boss would even help you with money, if you needed it. Sometimes people who aren’t from your country help you more.” That’s what makes the United States special for him, and for many others. He wants people and the government to understand that the USA has become home to many people, and that this country is characterized for being diverse, and that’s what makes it the distinguished amongst other countries of the world. There is no need to be racist, or to attack others. And that everyone has their own story. For him “it was an adventure”, because he was too young to feel the danger, but for most, it was a sacrifice that almost cost them their lives. Everyone’s story needs to be heard instead of silencing them with fear. “After a while”, Pablo says, “I said to myself, ‘I already suffered, now it’s time to build my life the way I want it to be.’” Because for many, the American dream of freedom and finding a better life should always exist.
