The American Dream
I met Bertha Solorzano at her store, El Tepeyac, on Greenbrier Drive just off 29N. It took her a few minutes to disengage herself from the cash register. She was answering a man’s questions about forms he was trying to fill out. I waited for her in the little restaurant area in back, which is like thousands of other tienda food counters around the country, decorated with paintings of pastoral Mexico, an Aztec warrior, and a colorful rendition of the Last Supper.
Solorzano’s husband, Adolfo, is from El Salvador so the food counter sells Salvadorean pupusas in addition to Mexican favorites like menudo. You can buy anything at El Tepeyac: a replica soccer jersey, a DVD, a phone card, a loaf of bread. Stores like El Tepeyac are the unofficial centers of Latino immigrant communities all over the U.S. First, there’s the tienda, then the restaurant, then the soccer league.
Now 46, a U.S. citizen, and a successful business owner twice over, Solorzano speaks perfect English with a notable Chicago accent. She has four daughters. The oldest, Bertha Estrada, is a teacher in the Chicago Public Schools. Maria Gracia, her second, graduated from Northwestern with a political science degree. Jasmine, who attended Albemarle High School, is in nursing school in Chicago, and Denise, her baby, is still at AHS.
Solorzano is a living monument to the immigrant’s success story in every way except that she entered the U.S. illegally twice.
Ford: “In the old days there was a waiver, a way to wipe off your illegal entry, and that waiver doesn’t exist anymore.”
After 9/11, immigration law changed, and the clause in the Immigration Nationality Act that allowed people who had entered the country without authorization to naturalize if they had sponsorship from an employer or family member expired.
Solorzano came to the U.S. from Michoacan in 1975 as a 9-year-old with her parents. Her father worked as a chef and her mother worked at a factory on the north side of Chicago. In those days, public schools wouldn’t accept students without a social security number, so Solorzano attended Catholic schools.
When she was 15, she fell in love with an undocumented Mexican, and they were married. She got pregnant with her first daughter and her husband took the young family back to Mexico. She had her second daughter there and then her marriage fell apart.
“The only education I had was in the U.S. I found myself kind of lost in Mexico. What kind of a future could I offer my daughters there? I couldn’t see any potential. I had no family there,” Solorzano said.
She found herself an isolated teenage mother in a country she didn’t know.
“In Hispanic tradition, you’re supposed to stay with your husband. I decided to come across illegally,” Solorzano said.
So she packed up her two baby daughters and made her way to the border at Tijuana where she hired a coyote to take her across with her youngest daughter. Solorzano, her oldest daughter, had a U.S. passport, so she went through on her own.
“They took her across in a car and she had the passport and everything. We stayed behind and walked across. It was the worst. Very hard and very sad. But I was sure I had to go across,” Solorzano said.
Solorzano made her way back to Chicago where her parents, who had become legal residents, took her and the girls in. She worked at a pizza shop and as a seamstress at a factory and studied for her GED.
“My English might not have been the greatest but I was able to get ahead,” she said.
She filed for divorce from her husband and petitioned for legal status with her parents as sponsors. She got her resident status in 1990 and became a citizen five years later at a ceremony alongside 5,000 other people in an auditorium.
“It was a sense of happiness. I was seeing things completely different. I kind of felt like I was finally heading in the right direction,” she said.
Having fought hard for a foothold, Solorzano began to climb. She left her daughters with babysitters while she worked as a receptionist, secretary, sales person, and office manager and went to school.
“It was very hard because I didn’t spend the time I wanted with my kids but it was a sacrifice,” Solorzano said. “I knew if I wanted to give them what they could have I just had to work harder.”
Solorzano met Adolfo, who naturalized in the United States after getting asylum status as a result of the war in El Salvador, and they got married. She got her real estate license and found her way to the Frigid Fluid Company, where she was initially hired as an accountant.
“I was working just as hard but I wasn’t washing dishes and sewing clothes,” she said.
Frigid employed almost entirely Spanish speaking workers. Solorzano worked there for 10 years, holding every job and eventually running the operation.
“They opened my doors and I opened their market in Latin America,” she said.
The Solorzano family, 100 percent legal and U.S. citizens, was thriving. Solorzano’s parents had moved to Charlottesville and they kept telling her that there were opportunities amidst the growing Latino immigrant community. In 2003, she succumbed to the whispers and she and Adolfo opened La Guadalupana on Carlton Road in Belmont. Later she started El Tepeyac, a restaurant, named after the hill where legend says the Virgin Mary first showed herself to the indigenous people in the person of Juan Diego. She estimates that her customers were about 80 percent Hispanic and that only 10 percent of the adults she dealt with regularly were authorized residents.
The businesses were so successful that Solorzano and her husband sold them both and took a year off to spend time with their kids. Then they decided to reopen El Tepeyac. Solorzano is extremely careful of how she talks about immigration. She knows it’s a hot button issue, and she is a business person first and foremost.
“You gotta look at it both ways. It’s hard. I don’t think I can describe it. There’s a lot of hardworking people looking for their dreams. Hard working people. For people like that, there has to be an opportunity,” Solorzano said.
As much as Solorzano treads lightly around the immigration debate, she is also careful to talk about her appreciation for the immigrant community that has built her business. According to federal statistics, undocumented immigrant workers make up 25 percent of U.S. agricultural workers, 20 percent of household industry workers, 30 percent of roofers and dry wall installers.
“The immigrants are working here. They’re spending their money here. They’re paying taxes and helping the economy,” she said. “If we don’t have these people, who’s going to do those jobs? These are hard jobs that not everyone is willing to do, because they are hard manual labor.”
So what’s the solution, I asked her.
“It’s political. What can I say? I guess these people should be given a chance. Splitting up the families is not the best thing to do. It just hurts everyone. The kids that are here now need the support,” she said.
Like a lot of Latino immigrants, Solorzano is counting on her kids to make an impression on the U.S. in a way that her generation couldn’t. Currently, Latino voters make up only 3 percent of Virginia’s registered voting population.
“I remember in Chicago when there was only one Latino radio station. It’s just a matter of time. We’re gonna grow and we’re gonna catch up. This is just the first generation here. When the kids grow up, they’re going to take us there. Right now, it’s just small,” Solorzano said.
As we were finishing up our interview, the clerk at the front register came around the corner and held up a bag of pretzels.
“Dos veintinueve,” Solorzano said in Spanish. Then she looked at me. “In the future, everybody’s gonna be bilingual.”
Bilingual. Bicultural. Legal. Full of promise. Richard Aguilar gets the last word.
“What Charlottesville needs to know is that we are part of the community and over time we won’t be seen as documented or undocumented, legal or illegal. Ten, 20, 30 years from now, we won’t be looked at the way we are now. I see a movement, just like the black movement in the 1960s, and I’m so grateful to be a part of it, because it’s going to go down in history as one of the great demonstrations of liberty. Not just in Charlottesville but nationwide, Latinos are going to stand up for their rights. Right now it’s early stages.”