U.S. Immigration Has Tormented My Family For Generations

On Jan. 26, this year’s Dia de los Reyes celebration on Cherokee Street in St. Louis bustled with people happy for sunshine.

After weeks of brutal snow, the event, put on by local Latino community organizers, featured taco tents and tables full of free coats, shoes, and blankets. Kids ran around with new toys, and families looked relieved to be outside in the sun, but there weren’t many people out and about. Usually, this annual event has people lined up around the block waiting to pick up their free goodies.

My husband and I brought Gabriel, a recent 25-year-old refugee from the Congo who had arrived in St. Louis with his family just weeks earlier. This event would be the perfect opportunity for him to experience some joy in urban St. Louis and gather much-needed cold-weather items for his brothers and sisters.

The organizers also passed out red cards created by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. The cards, written in English on one side and Spanish on the other, say that people do not have to answer questions, sign documents, or show paperwork, based on the Constitution’s 5th Amendment right to not incriminate oneself. They also say that under the 4th Amendment, authorities do not have the right to search their belongings. These cards are specifically to be handed out to immigration authorities. 

Gabriel read his card carefully. “Hopefully, the police will respect it,” he said. “This is affecting us all.”

I had heard of such cards before but never held one in my hand. At that moment, I thought of my family and wished these cards had been available to us when we needed them. 

Six days prior, on Donald Trump’s inauguration day, the president issued 27 executive orders — eight directly affecting the immigrant community in the U.S. As of Jan. 28, the White House logged 969 arrests and 869 detainers. More than 2,000 people have been arrested, and Trump isn’t satisfied with those figures. Authorities aren’t meeting their quotas. Some of the detainments and arrests, however, have been of U.S. citizens, including Native Americans.

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Long before the people knocking on doors and demanding documents were called “ICE,” we called them La Migra. Many of us still do. They’ve been a part of my family’s history as far back as I can remember, like an abusive uncle you hope never shows up. 

Watching the way the Trump administration has proudly paraded the round-ups of people on military planes, it may be easy for some to forget that they are real people. They are human beings. They have families here and have built a life here, and their only crime has been a desire to work in the U.S. 

I have cried thinking of the trauma of the children left behind, feeling scared to leave their house or go to school because that could have been me. 

FOR MY FAMILY, THESE STORIES OF La Migra have become part of the fabric of our history. We tell them again and again, using gallows humor to alleviate some of the pain we endured. “Remember when La Migra took Güero?” “Remember when my Tio Chuy was deported?”

One of my first memories is sitting in our idling RV at the border between Calexico (in California, where we lived) and Mexicali (in Mexico, where my dad worked). We made the trek back and forth daily, so my parents were familiar with the agents. My mom would nudge my dad to drive toward one particular agent’s booth because he had her surname, and they’d built up a rapport. I remember cozying up to my dad while he spoke to this agent in the driver’s seat whose name tag said OCAMPO, the same as ours. My four-year-old brain thought we must be related — why else would he be so nice to us?

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During these trips back and forth, I learned how to respond to La Migra’s demand, “Where are you from?” with the magic words “U.S. citizen!” Even at that age, I knew that being a “U.S. citizen” meant I had a privilege my parents and most of my siblings didn’t.

My sister Mari and I were the only ones born in the U.S., so we didn’t have to show green cards at each crossing. As a toddler, Mari was envious of her siblings’ green cards. She just wanted to show something with her picture on it. I, even tinier, was delighted at my mom not having to scrounge around her folders looking for my documents the way she did for my dad, herself, my eldest sister Pati, and our two brothers, Pepe and Güero. I was free and could speak for myself.

My mom’s road trip ritual was collecting and distributing paperwork. She carefully guarded manila envelopes to ensure they were always within reach. We learned the hard way that misplacing them could be devastating.  

Every summer from 1980 to 1985, my family would drive our RV 22 hours from Calexico to Mt. Vernon, Washington, to pick strawberries at a farm. I didn’t think it was odd that we worked in fields. Many of our heroes were in that same farming community; it felt natural.

The first time I watched La Bamba, I saw Ritchie Valens and his family working in the fields, and I concluded that all Latino families worked in them. I even thought we were related to the legendary farmworker union organizer, Cesar Chavez. His face was plastered everywhere like Jesus, and we even looked a little like him. Mari told me once, “If it weren’t for Cesar Chavez, we wouldn’t be able to use the bathroom.” So, to us, he was like God.

Most Mexicans who work on U.S. farms are called “migrant workers,” people who travel outside their native country for work. We didn’t identify that way because we lived here. The U.S. was our home.

During these summers, we were among a dozen Latino families that lived in cabin-style row homes in the middle of a muddy field. The houses resembled mobile homes or shipping containers and had a basic kitchen, a wooden dining table with a bench, and a chair.

The other room was stacked with bunk beds. The bathrooms were outside the house, which we shared with the rest of the families. These bathrooms were basically outhouses — and they were lined up side-to-side.

Many videos on social media show farmworkers working urgently as if it were a matter of life and death, even working in an excruciating climate. For many, it is their means of survival. But for my family, working in the fields was like a summer job, a way to make extra money. 

But working the fields was also hard — and scary when La Migra showed up. My dad had warned my siblings that they should not be afraid or run away if they ever saw La Migra raiding the fields. They had their green cards (micas), and “we have every right to stay and work,” he’d say. But my brothers were still nervous, especially when they weren’t working close to our parents. 

To hear my father tell it, Güero, who was 13 or 14, once forgot his advice.  Güero told my parents he wanted to pick cucumbers with friends, so he left to work in another section of the field. The rest of them worked separately, picking strawberries.

La Migra did show up, and everyone around Güero started running, so he did, too. They rounded up Güero and his friends. When my mom and dad heard Güero had been picked up, they scrambled to locate his papers in the RV. My mom stashed everyone’s documents in her safe place underneath the mattress. Güero swore to La Migra that he had papers, but they didn’t believe him.

When La Migra finally released Güero, my mom and dad scolded him, even though he was already in tears and terrified. “I told you not to run,” my dad said sternly. Years later, I asked Güero about the day La Migra picked him up. He recounted the story a bit differently than my dad. For one thing, he says, he didn’t run.

“Pepe was with me,” he explained. “It was the weekend, and we wanted to make extra money. Everyone else started running when La Migra showed up. We stayed put, but they took us anyway. They drove us back home so my parents could show them our papers, but my mom couldn’t find them. She only found Pepe’s. While she was scrambling to look for them, my dad told me, ‘Well, if they take you, you will end up in Tijuana, and your Tío Ezequiel lives there. Go to his house.”

“That’s when the tears started streaming down Güero’s face,” Pepe said. “My mom said, ‘Why can’t they take Pepe? He knows Mexico better than Güero and can blend in easier.’”

What she knew but didn’t say was that Pepe would be OK in Tijuana because he had darker skin. Thankfully, it all got settled, and none of us got deported. Others weren’t so lucky.

Pepe recalled another summer when my Tía Chela and my Tío Juan didn’t have their papers and had to hide in one of the cabins while La Migra raided the fields. Pepe and others figured out that La Migra raided the fields toward the end of the harvest season, and the farm owners were in on it. That way, whoever got deported back to Mexico after working an entire summer wouldn’t get paid.

LIVING AND WORKING IN THE SHADOW of La Migra didn’t start in the 1980s for my family. It spanned back decades.

My dad, who first came to the U.S. in the mid-1960s when he was 26, was always on high alert.  It was common knowledge among Mexican workers that you always needed $50 in your pocket in case La Migra picked you up. That way, they could bail themselves out once deported to Mexico.

“I know what it’s like to be a slave,” my dad casually said to me once during Donald Trump’s first term, as if he were talking about the weather. We’d been discussing a news story about a group of immigrants working at one of Trump’s resorts who’d come forward to disclose their undocumented status and then lost their jobs.

My dad shared that something similar happened when he first tried to build a life in the U.S. In 1967, he worked as a ranch handler in Chino, California, making $65 per six-day workweek. My dad asked, through an interpreter, for a raise to $90, and that didn’t go over too well with his boss.

“I’ll call immigration on you,” my dad remembers her saying. He still felt uncertain despite entering legally with his Mexican passport, and he feared deportation.

He wasn’t allowed to leave the ranch, so every eight days, my dad’s friend would come and bring him food. One Sunday, my dad told his friend about his situation and how she denied him a raise.  “He told me, ‘Grab your things and let’s go,’” my dad said. “Did you just take your backpack and leave?” I asked, “Backpack?” he said. “I put whatever clothes I had in a plastic bag and left.”

THAT TYPE OF EXPLOITATION AND VIOLATION in the U.S. didn’t begin in my family with my father’s search for the American Dream, but rather with my maternal great-grandparents almost 40 years earlier.

At the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1920, many Mexicans fled north for better job opportunities. American labor contractors actively sought out Mexicans to work for them, and my great-grandfather, Simon, was among them. He and his wife, Rosa, my great-grandmother, moved to the U.S. to embark on their new life, where Simon worked as a manager of migrant workers in central California. During this period they bought a home, went to school, and eventually had three children: Simon, Julia, and Evelia — my grandmother, born in 1928. A year later, when the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began, the government started an illegal removal of Mexicans and Mexican Americans.

It was called the Mexican Repatriation, and I didn’t even know about it until Trump began his anti-immigrant campaign in 2015. I was looking to see whether such a thing had been done before. I discovered that from 1929 to 1939, the U.S. forced around two million Mexicans and Mexican Americans to move to Mexico. 

It was only then that I connected the dots in my own history and realized that my great-grandparents were among those deported. None of us in our family had a clue. We knew my grandmother and her siblings were born in the U.S., but no one questioned why they had left, assuming they had chosen to move to Mexico.

History is repeating itself once again. Trump and his cronies have chosen to ignore the fact that they are on stolen land, and to deny that the U.S. was built on the backs of immigrants. But we won’t forget. Despite having evidence that we’re Americans — as descendants of Indigenous Americans, green card holders, naturalized citizens, American passport carriers, or having been born here — history shows that, in white America, people of color are not wanted. 

Trump doesn’t care about proof of citizenship, diversity, or the marginalized. Yet, the love for Mexicans is undeniable, and we know that the U.S. needs us more than we need it. So, the Trump administration can continue to vilify us, but we know who the real criminals are.

Araceli Cruz is a social media manager for Courier Newsroom and frequently writes about immigration, American politics, and the Latino experience. Her forthcoming memoir, Five Times I Died, will include portions of this article.