she had to look like a Mexican-American.
That’s when they made me look like a teenager. They put me in shorts with a lot of flowers. They put me in a blouse—phosphorescent orange. And they put my hair up, like a chola!2 They colored my eyes black, and red lipstick! Oh, my goodness.
Juana María is a pretty woman, but her wardrobe is conservative and she wears only minimal makeup. She was happy to play dress-up “because I needed to look like the girls from El Paso. The teenagers in El Paso look different from the teenagers in Mexico. That’s why they changed my looks.”
They flew to Dallas with no trouble, the baby disguised as an El Paso infant, sporting a Hawaiian shirt. Her mother-in-law was still with them, not worried in “a dress like a North American” because her hair is blonde. “I felt nervous,” Juana María admits, but more than just nervous. “I felt embarrassed to look like that, when I looked at myself in the mirror I said, ‘Oh, my God. No!’ But I needed to relax and look normal, like all the other people in the airport.”
When they arrived at the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport they waited for another brother to pick them up. “He passed me three times, and he didn’t recognize me.” Finally she said to him, “Hi, honey! I’m Juana María.” He was shocked at her appearance.
Well, I looked like a chola! He told me, “If your husband sees you looking like that, immediately he will divorce you.” We left the airport, and the first stop was Sears to buy make-up and a dress, to wash my face and change clothes. We went to my brother’s house and then we called up my husband and I said, “Honey, I’m here!” He said, “No, you are joking.” I told him I was serious and that I had another surprise—I had his mother with me.
The mother-in-law had told her husband she would only go as far as Ciudad Juárez, but she went across into the United States, says María Juana, on a lark. “The coyote said, ‘It’s fun. You can cross. It’s not dangerous.’ So she crossed to have one more adventure in her life. My brother paid only five hundred dollars for all three people. Very cheap.”
The date of her arrival in El Norte3 is fixed in her mind. “I crossed the border June 24, 1990.” After a week visiting her brother, she flew to California for a reunion with her husband. It was July 1, just in time for the Fourth of July festivities at the ranch where he worked. “My husband told me I needed to buy clothes for the celebrations. I got blue jeans and a red-and-white blouse, because those are the three colors of the American flag.”
Juana María’s parrot is chirping. Her daughter takes a break from the television to listen, eat some corn chips and make a mess on the counter trying to pour some 7-Up into a glass. Outside cattle are feeding at the trough. Her blue heelers periodically bark. Through her kitchen windows I see the bucolic California hills that surround her home. “I haven’t been back to Mexico for thirteen years.” She looks pensive when I ask her why. “Because I don’t have a Green Card and now I am worried about crossing the border. I hear a lot of bad stories. It costs $2,500 for each person.” That early year 2000 price tag looks like a bargain a generation later.
Living without proper documentation for 13 years was nothing much more than an annoyance for Juana María. “I don’t do anything illegal. I live a good life and take care of my kids.” Immigration officers rarely show up in her rural neighborhood, and when they do patrol places she frequents in the nearby urban district, she says she’s warned and just avoids them. “When the INS4 is around here they say on the [Spanish language] radio station: don’t go out to Wal-Mart or Sears or whatever shopping center because the INS is around. So I don’t go there. After one or two days, they’re gone.”
I ask Juana María what she would do if an immigration agent approached her. “If he asks me for a Green Card, I can’t do anything,” she says about this perpetual threat to her domestic tranquility.
If you don’t have the Green Card, they only arrest. They say, “You have a right to call a relative, but you’re going to jail.” If I don’t have a Green Card, they’ll deport me to my country, to Mexico. That’s what they do. They don’t ask for identification, they ask for a Green Card, or your permission to stay in the United States, like a passport. If I don’t have anything with me, they’ll arrest me, and they’ll take me out to the border.
But life was more uncertain for her when Pete Wilson was governor of California and he rallied voters to pass Proposition 187, the referendum that limited the rights of undocumented migrants and was ultimately struck down by the courts. During the anti-immigrant climate of those years in the mid-1990s, just picking the kids up at school was cause for concern. “The INS came to the schools and they arrested parents. For more than a week, we didn’t send our boy to the school, when I heard that the INS was here in my county.”
Juana María figures about 70 percent of her Latino friends in California are in the state illegally. When we talked, Juana María still held out hope for legalizing her status. Meanwhile, she and her family thrived. She worked hard at the local PTA, organizing fund-raising dinners of rich Mexican food. Her daughter was christened at the local Catholic church in a Spanish-language ceremony, followed by a block party crowded with friends and relatives, food and music. Her husband went off to work each day; she worked part time. They paid their taxes: Americans by every definition except for paperwork.
A few days after we talked at her home, it was Mexican Lunch Day at the local elementary school. Juana María brought together a group of the Latino mothers to prepare burritos. The women were lined up in the kitchen, the first ladling out the rice, the next passing out a tortilla, the third the beans. The burritos were topped off with lettuce and cream and salsa. The money raised was used to provide childcare for Latino mothers who were taking classes to earn a high school equivalency certificate.
Despite the all-American lifestyle, Juana María suffers because of her illegal status in the United States.
I feel sad because I cannot go to Mexico and come back again. I cannot visit my relatives. My friends who have Green Cards, they do that every year or every other year. I want to go to Mexico. But how can I cross? Maybe I’d be lucky, and not have any problems, like the first time. Or maybe I’d have a lot of problems.
She has reason to worry; she’s heard the horror stories. “I have friends who came two months after I came here to the United States. Two years later they went to Mexico.” The return trip was a disaster. “One of the ladies,” she says it with a combination of sadness and a matter-of-fact reporting of the news, “the coyote killed her. With a screwdriver. In Tijuana. I say no. I’m not going. I love my relatives. But my life is first, and my kids.”
Nonetheless when Juana María’s father-in-law was dying, her husband chose to take the chance on a trip back to Mexico. In just over ten years, the price of a coyote had increased fivefold. He paid the $2,500 for help crossing from Tijuana to San Diego. The costs for help crossing illegally continue to soar. As the Trump administration focused political capital and dollars on the border, coyote fees—along with the bribes to authorities and bandits on the route north—tallied as much as ten thousand dollars.
Juana-María’s husband crossed with a false Green Card—not a counterfeit, but stolen. Coyotes prowl border nightclubs, Juana María explains, looking for drunk Latinos with legitimate identification papers. They steal their Green Cards. Her husband sat down at a table with a coyote who displayed a stack of stolen Green Cards. Together they searched through the cards for a picture of a Mexican who looked enough like her husband to satisfy a border guard. He crossed the border with someone else’s Green Card. The system isn’t perfect. He crossed successfully three times. She tells me,
But the last time the officer said, “You don’t look like him!” They arrested him and sent him back to Mexico. He called me from Rosarita and said, “I am here because they caught me and sent me back to Mexico.” I called the coyote and said, “You promised me my husband would come to California safely. If my husband is not here in my house, I will not pay you anything.” The coyote went to get my husband at Rosarita and he crossed again at