The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2023

52 JULY-AUGUST 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL The officer denied the permit to go to Los Angeles, confiscated my border crossing card, and deported me to Mexico. With the inspiration of many conversations and articles in this publication, I first told it as a bedtime story for my 4-year- old daughter. After she fell asleep, I stayed up for hours writing it down. b I grew up going back and forth across the border between Calexico, California, and Mexicali, Mexico. I was born in Mexicali, but with one parent from each side of the wall, I felt at home on both sides. It wasn’t until my mom had brain surgery in 1992, when I was 11, that my parents decided to settle on the side with better health care. Dad lost everything to take care of Mom. He scattered the kids with family members in Mexico while Mom relearned how to walk and speak. Slowly, all her memories returned, and in six months she was ready to reunite the family. But we didn’t have a place to live, so Tía Lupe, from El Centro on the American side, offered to convert her stand-alone garage into an apartment. Tía Teresa, an architect from Mexicali, sketched plans to fit our family of six. The day before construction started, the whole family came to celebrate cousin Luís, who was leaving for Army boot camp. He was 18 years old. I heard the grown-ups reason that if he was old enough to go to war, he was old enough to drink alcohol. So he did. He was hungover the following day when Tío José Luís assigned us to cut the two-by-fours. I measured and marked, and he handled the circular saw. I also had to take the wood scraps to the dumpster, so I held the scrap ends while Luis cut. On the last piece, Luis dropped the saw on my hand, and my severed ring finger fell into the palm of my hand. I squeezed it with two remaining fingers and ran to tell Tío José Luís. He gave me a towel and ran to start the car. I was wrapping my hand with the towel when I met Mom on the way to the car. I did not want to worry her and pretended it was nothing. She saw the drenched towel and instinctively devised a tourniquet with a sock and a stick. I sat on her lap in the front seat of my uncle’s Astro van. My hand was burning and pulsat- ing, and it took all the conviction I could muster to hold back tears on the way to the hospital. I did not want to distress Mom, who was still recovering from surgery. Tío José Luís decided to take me to a hospital in Mexico that was at least 30 minutes away, not counting the wait to cross the border. He was concerned that converting his garage into an apartment without permits would create issues with his home insurance and the city’s building department. And besides, he said, “ El niño no tiene papeles [The boy doesn’t have papers].” That was when I learned I was undocumented. b My great-grandparents migrated from Mexico to Chicago in the 1920s when my grandfather was a kid. They were legal resi- dents. In 1936 the whole family, except for my grandfather, was deported. As the Great Depression saw unemployment sweep across the country, hostility to immigrant workers grew, and the government deported up to 2 million Mexicans, including citizens and lawful residents, between 1929 and 1939 through the Mexican Repatriation Act. Grandpa followed his family to Mexico, settled in Mexicali, and went back and forth to California to work in newspa- per press rooms. He married, and his children were born in America. The family stayed on the Mexican side to be near the deported relatives who could not return to America. Although my father has birthright American citizenship, and all the rights enshrined in the 14th Amendment, I was born in Mexico and did not. At that time, the law was that citizenship only passed automatically if the citizen parents could prove they had resided in the U.S. for one year before the child’s birth. In the mid-1980s, my parents hired someone they believed to be an immigration attorney in Calexico to process immi- gration documents for Mom and the four kids. Mom got her permanent resident card, but we kids were denied for using the wrong forms. Thousands of dollars went down the drain. We did not have enough money to reapply until years later. b The surgeon in Mexico did the best he could to save my fin- ger. But the following summer, Mom took me to a community clinic in Calexico to see if they could fix my hand. They referred me for surgery at the Shriners Hospitals for Children in Los Angeles. The nonprofit hospital even offered free transporta- tion from the border to Los Angeles. On surgery day, we went early to the U.S. Customs Port of