Living in limbo
Richard Aguilar was born a U.S. citizen in 1991. His parents had fled a 12-year civil war in El Salvador, fueled heavily by U.S. funding, that killed 75,000 people. His father was in the army and felt the war was wrong. He heard there was opportunity in the U.S., so he took his family north and became a day laborer.
When Aguilar was 3 years old, the family moved across the country to Charlottesville and, alongside many other undocumented families, they landed in Southwood.
“People don’t realize that if you’re undocumented, buying a house or signing a lease requires having a social security number, whereas in a mobile home park you don’t,” Aguilar said. “People would rather buy a trailer than live in a neighborhood where a neighbor could report them.”
His mother didn’t make it past second grade in El Salvador and his father had only finished ninth grade. Neither one of them spoke English when they arrived. Today, Southwood’s children are supported by a community center run by Habitat for Humanity—which purchased the park in 2007 with the intent of redeveloping it—that offers health resources funded by UVA, outreach services from Albemarle County Public Schools, and programming from the Boys & Girls Club. When Richard was young, none of that existed. He was the only Latino kid in a seven person after school group at the community center.
Southwood underwent a watershed change through the ’90s, and by middle school Aguilar said his part of the neighborhood was mostly undocumented Mexicans, Salvadorians, and Hondurans.
Gloria Rockhold, community engagement coordinator for Albemarle County Schools, is in charge of interfacing with Latino families, and she says the situation facing immigrant children makes dealing with the school system challenging.
“When they’re interpreting for their parents they become the gatekeepers of knowledge. They become the ones who control the information that comes into the home,” Rockhold said. “Then when they get to school, all of a sudden they’re treated like children. There’s this huge misunderstanding of the responsibilities of the immigrant child.”
Rockhold recounted a story of a second grader who stayed home alone to take care of her 3-year-old sister. The girl told Rockhold that when someone knocked on the door, she took her little sister and hid under the bed, because she was afraid they would be taken away.
“When you get a child that grows up with that culture it’s very difficult as an adult for that child to delete the fear,” Rockhold said.
Southwood has a reputation for gangs, drugs, and prostitution. But as Aguilar and I walked the streets on a hot, summer day, there was little evidence of that. A group of men sat at the bus stop waiting to get a ride into town for a late shift.
“Most of these people are hardworking Latinos. My father goes to work at five in the morning. I know a lot of people who live that way,” Aguilar said.
But, he said, the secret lives of the undocumented are fertile ground for illegal activity. Aguilar’s best friend growing up became a member of MS-13, a notorious Latin gang with Salvadorian roots that is aligned with the Sinaloa drug cartel. His mother forbid them from seeing each other and they took different paths through high school.
“I talk to people in my neighborhood and they’re too scared to go to the police because they’re afraid they’re going to deport them,” Aguilar said. “You go to a mostly white neighborhood and they’re quick to call the cops. There’s something wrong there. That’s why there’s such high gang activity. Such high drug activity. I hate to admit that. I wish I had the answer. If I did, I would do something about it. We’re just not addressed.”
Like many children of immigrants, Richard and his sister grew up working, babysitting, and translating. His father worked construction. His mother cleaned houses in Ivy, Keswick, and Lake Monticello.
“I was robbed of childhood and adolescence. My father and mother were always working. If I wasn’t a babysitter then I had a job,” Aguilar said. “I worked illegally when I was 12 in an apple orchard in Lovingston. I never had the picturesque American childhood, never got to go to Chuck E. Cheese’s and all that. So for me my outlet was my education.”
His sister, Vicky, just graduated from Liberty University. Aguilar plans to study law when he finishes college next spring. His parents finally won their permanent residency status in court last month with help from students at the Immigration Clinic.
Aguilar’s story is remarkable, and he knows it. He credits Headstart and his teachers at Cale Elementary School for making sure he learned English well, but meeting him in person, you get the sense that he would have made it no matter where he was born.
“I would just bury myself in books and the more I read the more I realized there was more to the world than this place. I just told myself I wanted out,” he said.
Aguilar’s bedroom sits at the front end of his family’s trailer. It’s not much more than a bed and a television with a window. There are books everywhere. Catcher in the Rye, On the Road, Moneyball, Harry Potter books, Chicken Soup for the Soul, even Patti Smith’s autobiography. He counts Steinbeck as one of his favorite authors, and there was a stack of hardbound library books in a pile, left over from an anthropology term paper on Afro-Cuban identity.
“If I could somehow instill that in people now… I have friends who are dead. Friends who are in jail,” Aguilar said. “Friends who have already had kids with multiple people. I always tell people you can come from dirt, but you don’t have to be dirty.”
At Monticello High School, Aguilar was class president for three years, a member of five honor societies, an all-district lacrosse player, a state football champion.
I asked him what the kids he grew up with think of him now.
“It’s almost like they think I’m better than them. Or that I have some higher status. But in reality I relate to them. I’m still the same person,” Aguilar said. “I have friends who are dealing drugs and smoking pot and all that, and they’re kind of iffy about me because I want to be a lawyer. But there are a lot of people who are proud of me. That’s why I feel so much pressure at school.”
For now, he’s content trying to get straight A’s and pushing for the Dream Act, legislation that would grant a path to citizenship for the same cohort of unauthorized immigrants addressed in President Obama’s new enforcement policy. Aguilar is already involved in organizing Dreamer workshops that will educate people about what they need to qualify for deferred status, the legal category ICE uses to close cases and grant work authorization. It’s a loophole that could vanish with a new administration in place, not a permanent solution.
“These are people’s lives you’re dealing with that you’re messing with,” Aguilar said. “I know people who have been class valedictorians and been three-sport standouts in high school and they can’t go to college. They can’t pursue higher education. To me that’s a problem.”
Another recent enforcement development would have directly impacted Aguilar growing up. Last year, the Obama administration issued a memo to ICE setting the parameters for the use of “prosecutorial discretion” in its cases. The Morton memo essentially laid out a list of factors that would affect ICE officers decision to pursue deportation proceedings.
Ford: “If mom and dad got caught up in immigration detention, there’s a whole series of positive factors—and its basically a soft type of character test—where if you’ve got U.S. citizen kids, you’ve got work history, you can get community letters of support, you don’t have a criminal history, then there’s the possibility to get what they call prosecutorial discretion.”
In a community where English is not the dominant language, where literacy rates are low, and where fear is paramount, the notion of understanding the ins and outs of U.S. immigration law and policy is remote. Instead, the law exists as a malevolent force, not as a clear set of guidelines.
“You just have to experience it. That’s all I can say about it,” Aguilar said. “Once you’ve been undocumented and experienced living in fear, living in poverty, the gangs, and all that stuff. Once you’ve lived that, maybe you’ll have an understanding. It’s the cliche: walk in someone’s shoes.”