Chapter 2

       ILLEGAL ALIEN OR CLEVER NEW AMERICAN

      Let me introduce you to that friend of mine who crossed into the United States from Ciudad Juárez over to El Paso. When she recounts her migration story to me, Juana María is a bright and bubbly woman in her late thirties. Her toddler daughter is in the living room learning English from a television program when we sit down in her kitchen to talk about her trip across the border over thirteen years before. Her two boys are in school. She offers me a cup of tea.

      “Do you have anything decaffeinated?” I ask.

      She does. Her bi-cultural kitchen cupboards include mola, tortillas and decaffeinated mint tea. I’ve heard Juana María’s¹ border crossing story often, but in bits and pieces. Today she’s taking time out of her schedule to recount it from start to finish.

      It was 1990 when Juana María first came to the United States. She had waited patiently in line at the U.S. Consulate in Guadalajara and applied for a tourist visa, which she received. Eight months earlier her husband had crossed into California, looking for work. A hardworking mechanic, he found a job easily—on a ranch where his pay included living quarters in an old mobile home.

      She remembers all the dates precisely. “I came on May 27th in 1990. That’s the first time I came to the United States.” Juana María speaks English with a thick Mexican accent, and only rarely drops a Spanish word into the conversation. Her English vocabulary is more than adequate for her story. She’s spent the last several years studying English, working with a volunteer tutor, and her boys bring English home from school and into the household. “I flew from Guadalajara here to California.” In addition to her 3-month-old first son, she traveled north with her mother-in-law and her 13-year-old brother. She was 23. Stamped into her Mexican passport was her prized tourist visa.

      When she reached the immigration officer at the airport she was asked a few key questions. “He asked, ‘How much money do you have to spend in the United States?’ I had only five hundred dollars. My mother-in-law didn’t have anything. He said, ‘That is not enough money for three people to visit the United States for two months.’” The Immigration and Naturalization Service officer asked the next crucial question, and she now knows her honest answer doomed her trip. “He asked, ‘Why are you coming here?’ And I told the truth, ‘I come to visit my husband. I want to stay with my husband and I want my child to grow up with his father.” Despite the valid visa, Juana María and her family were refused entry. It was obvious she was no tourist; she was an immigrant.

      “We stayed all night, like we were arrested. We didn’t go to jail because we had two little boys. But we stayed all night in one room in the airport.” A generation later the Trump administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) radically changed U.S. policy: children were torn from their migrating parents’ arms and jailed in appalling conditions.

      The immigration officer was Latino, Juana María says, and told her, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I feel so bad about what I’m doing.” She says she remembers the moment vividly when he took her cash. “He bought a ticket. The next day we flew back to Mexico on another airplane. One officer went with us into the airplane and made sure we were sitting down in the airplane. And he never gave me my money back. He bought that ticket with my money.”

      A month later Juana María was shopping for a coyote. “I didn’t want to stay in Mexico. My husband was here.” Her older brother convinced her to avoid the Tijuana crossing into San Diego, scaring her with stories of rape, robbery, abandonment and murder in the hills along la frontera, the border. She decided on a crossing from Ciudad Juárez into El Paso. She bundled up her baby, and once again accompanied by her mother-in-law, she flew from Guadalajara to Juárez. This time she didn’t tell her husband of her travel plans. “I didn’t tell him because if something happened he would have worried about me and my boy. I wanted to give him a surprise.”

      Her brother confirmed arrangements with the coyote, secured an address of a house for the rendezvous with the guide. Juana María took a cab at the Juárez airport, but when the three travelers arrived at the Juárez house, they were unable to find their contact. And they quickly realized that they had left a suitcase in the cab. “We were missing in the big city,” she says. “In the suitcase we had diapers and formula.” Luck was with the migrating trio. The taxi company insisted on buying formula for the baby; when the company found the missing baggage, it delivered to the hotel where they had booked a room.

      Juana María called her brother. He contacted the coyote and sent him to the hotel and there they made their border-crossing plans. “I was nervous, but he told me to relax.” In those pre-9/11 and pre-Trump days, Mexicans routinely crossed the bridge into El Paso to shop. The crowds were so great and the traffic so important to the local economy that immigration officers only spot-checked border crossers walking north. Juana María was told to dress like a typical Mexican housewife, carry a shopping bag, and act confident. “We looked like people from Mexico who are shopping and going back home.” They agreed to make the crossing during the noon rush hour. The coyote figured inspectors would be eating lunch and that the throngs crossing the bridge would camouflage his clients.

      The next morning a car came to the hotel for Juana María. She was dropped near the border and walked north. “We crossed, walking”—Juana María, the baby, her mother-in-law, and the coyote. “I was wearing a dress to look like a Mexican shopper. We crossed at the border and we didn’t go far. We walked for maybe ten or fifteen minutes into El Paso.” As the migrants strolled north, homeless coconspirators living on the street kept the coyote informed that the path was free of Migra (Spanish slang at the time for the INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service—the government agency that became a unit of ICE). The coconspirators were tipped a dollar for the intelligence. “Finally, we stopped at a McDonald’s, because it was 104 degrees.”

      She ate her first American meal in the cool of the McDonald’s—a hamburger of course, and the coyote called a taxi. They drove to a house where a friend of her brother lived, and there they spent the night. The easy part of the journey was over. Now