Divided families
As a full time United Way employee and the face of Creciendo Juntos, a nonprofit network that serves Latinos in Charlottesville, Trujillo Trujillo is, in many ways, the local voice of the Mexican-American community. Because she dresses professionally and speaks good English, it’s easy to assume that Trujillo’s story is different from the undocumented immigrants she works with. But it’s not that different.
In 1999, her husband, Ruben Trujillo was working in customs and immigration in Mexico when he was tipped off that his life was in immediate danger from colleagues in his own department because of his role policing corruption. He literally had to run for his life, leaving his wife and their brand new home in downtown Mexico City behind.
Ruben came to the United States, thinking he could make his way to Alaska, but he had a friend in Charlottesville and this is where he ended up. Trujillo came six months later on a tourist visa.
“I had to follow my heart,” she said.
The couple applied for asylum status, but their application was denied. They got a company to sponsor them and eventually obtained work permits and legal resident status. Trujillo will become a citizen next year, she hopes at Monticello’s July 4 naturalization ceremony. In the meantime, she solves problems for Latino immigrants, many of them Mexican.
“I have succeeded on a personal level. As a family and as a member of the community, even if the economy is bad, I’m in a position to help people,” she said.
For the first time in history, the net migration from Mexico to the U.S. is at a standstill, but Mexicans still account for close to 60 percent of unauthorized immigrants in this country. Over the last decade, Mexican-American U.S. births outpaced the number of Mexican immigrants who arrived in the country. The Mexican-American community straddles the physical border, with family members on either side, but it’s also divided by an invisible border separating family members in this community.
Ford: “A split status household often intensifies mistrust because of the difference in treatment and future options for the two groups. While most come here to work hard and uphold the rule of law—countless times I have clients tell me some variation of this—they may not use the courts to resolve dissolving marriages or call the police when victims of crimes out of mistrust.”
Wendy Miranda, one of Trujillo’s clients, came to the U.S. when she was 5 years old, with her parents, legal residents from El Salvador, after the family had spent stints in Maryland and Washington D.C., a main port of entry for Latino immigrants.
“I grew up in Charlottesville. This is the only place I know,” Miranda said.
Miranda was one of only a handful of Latinos when she started out in the local school system, but the number had grown significantly by the time she graduated from Charlottesville High School. Her parents are citizens now, and her problem is essentially personal, cultural maybe.
When Miranda was 18 she met Eduardo Hernandez, an undocumented Mexican who worked in restaurant kitchens. They had a daughter, now 6 years old. Eduardo disappeared, and Wendy is not sure whether he was deported or left of his own accord. Either way, she can’t get any child support from him, because he doesn’t exist.
“He left and there’s basically nothing I can do,” Miranda said. “Maybe he was obligated to leave. I don’t think he would have wanted to up and leave his daughter.”
Trujillo is trying to help Miranda locate Hernandez and file a claim for child support, but she is also documenting the myriad family problems that our immigration system creates.
In June, I met Trujillo and another of her clients, Alicia, at the United Way office. Trujillo was helping Alicia, a U.S. citizen who didn’t want her last name used in the story because her husband is undocumented, with two problems. The first was that Alicia was pregnant and wanted her mother around to help her with the birth, but her mother couldn’t get a visa to come to the U.S. The second is that Alicia’s brother, who was also born in the U.S., never got his birth certificate when his parents took the two of them back to Mexico as young children. He has had a difficult time establishing his citizenship and has no U.S. passport.
Alicia is frank about her situation. Her husband, who works in landscaping, likes the lifestyle in the U.S., even if he has to live in fear of deportation. As a citizen, she has nothing to fear, but she would rather be in Guadalajara, where she was raised and where her family is.
“[People at home] think everyone here has a laptop and an iPhone. Once someone gets here they realize the American Dream is totally different from how people tell it,” Alicia told me in Spanish. “The people who have never come here think of it like the Ultimate, like we’ll be able to do whatever we want. And then when they’re here they realize it’s totally different. So many doors close on you, and the first one is family.”
These days, when Americans think of the the border, they think of walls and fences, but to the people on the other side it functions more like a tap. When the U.S. economy needs workers—in agriculture, in factories, in construction—the tap is turned on. When public opinion gets hostile and jobs scarce, the tap turns off.
But the draw to come to the U.S. and make a better life is always there.
“At least here the food is cheap. Rent isn’t obviously, but here you can eat meat and there it’s nothing but beans,” Alicia said. “The reasons [for coming ] will always exist.”
Alicia may be a U.S. citizen, but she doesn’t feel part of our society.
“I feel like a missing person in this country. I feel like I’m any other person without papers,” she said. “For me it’s a totally unknown country. The culture, the language, the people… it’s all foreign, strange.”
Alicia and Wendy Miranda’s children are U.S. citizens, born to mothers who are U.S. citizens, but they’ll live with the reality that their fathers could disappear or have disappeared. As the U.S. ratchets up its immigration enforcement, the fear of losing it all is becoming very real for people who have spent a decade or more here working and paying taxes, and it plays out in many ways.
“I have seen the tension growing between the ones who came and the ones who were born here,” Trujillo said. “They know they don’t have the same opportunities, the same rights. Even in the workplace, if you know that I don’t have documents, you won’t be treated in the same way.”
Trujillo has helped women who have lost their jobs because their employees found out they were pregnant. She has dealt with families that have been separated because one parent or another has been deported. And she has crossed the border facing an uncertain future. She says that among all the issues she sees her clients facing, the inability to cross the border freely is one of the constants.
“It breaks your heart to think that you haven’t seen your mother in the last 10 or 15 years. You’re not part of the family anymore. You become a Norteño, someone who’s relied on to provide money,” she said. “When you hear your mom is gone, your dad is gone, you lose every connection you have to your own country. Not to be able to be there and give them a hug and say goodbye, it depresses you and it takes many years of your life to recover.”
Trujillo has had three family members kidnapped or killed, fallout from her country’s drug war, which, like the immigration problem, reveals how inextricably Latin America’s issues are tied to U.S. demand for cheap labor, cheap drugs, cheap materials.
“Sometimes people think that you are selfish coming to the United States and leaving your family, but you don’t have a choice,” Trujillo said. “People work from early morning until sunset for a week there to make the money you can make here in a day.”
Trujillo estimates that about 40 percent of the local Latino population is undocumented and that the largest percentage of citizens are under the age of 18. In other words, Charlottesville, like so many towns and cities in North Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia, has a generation of citizens whose parents are not legally recognized and who can’t yet vote.
She does not believe the immigrants she deals with will go home or that the U.S. can deport its way out of the current predicament. With the net migration stable, an inhospitable economy, and a recent court decision underpinning the legal framework for national policy, she feels like the country needs to seize the moment.
“The number of citizens is growing in a tremendous way. Something has to be done,” Trujillo said. “The fact that parents have been here for 20 years, I think they deserve an opportunity. If you have been giving your life to make a good economy and you’ve raised children who are good citizens, you should have an opportunity to have some kind of documents a path to citizenship.”