The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2023 53 Dad hired a “coyote” van to take me across the interior border patrol checkpoint from Calexico to Irvine. Entry in Calexico to request a permit to cross the Salton Sea border patrol interior checkpoint. I had a border crossing card, a type of visitor visa, and was not allowed to go beyond 50 miles from the border. The immigration officer quickly found that we, indeed, lived in California, in El Centro. The officer also decided that I did not have the right documents to reside in America and that I could not live with my family. The officer denied the permit to go to Los Angeles, confiscated my border crossing card, and deported me to Mexico. (Whether or not the deportation was legal is another story.) Mom pleaded, but the agent threatened to take her green card and deport her, too. I had to pull her in tears across the border into Mexico. The Shriners shuttle left without me (and it was 25 years before I got hand surgery). It took three months to get smuggled back home to Cali- fornia. It was the peak of summer, when temperatures top 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the Imperial Valley. Crossing through the desert was out of the question, and I have never been a good fence-jumper. The weekend before starting high school, an aunt picked me up in Mexicali. She had my brother’s border crossing card and a few cousins in the car. We all crossed the border as if going to McDonald’s any other Sunday after church. b Now back in El Centro, I was genuinely undocumented. I had no pretensions that having a U.S. citizen parent could protect me from deportation. I avoided going out to play for fear of being separated from my family again. When most of my friends went out to play, I stayed inside our studio apartment reading. I worried every day about the border patrol taking my siblings or me. By the time I was a freshman in high school, Mom had saved money to pay for immigration applications and lawyer fees for the four kids. (It wasn’t enough: We were evicted from our studio apartment for missing rent the month after we paid for the applications—but that is yet another story.) I remember the day we went to submit the forms in the Downtown San Diego immigration office as if it were yesterday. We left El Centro at 3 a.m. We were sure we were going to be the first in line. To our surprise, a dozen people were in front of us when we arrived at 4:30 a.m. After submitting the applications, all we got was a receipt that looked more like an old bodega cashier’s register receipt than an official acceptance of the applications. I was always a good student but did even better with all that indoor time to avoid the border patrol. Still, Mr. Benson, my aca- demic counselor in high school, advised against wasting money on university applications, saying kids like me are not allowed. I applied anyway to the three University of California campuses closest to my hometown and went to Irvine. I had a complete aid package with grants and loans but no ride to Irvine. Dad hired a “coyote” van to take me across the interior border patrol checkpoint from Calexico to Irvine. I jumped into the back of a van with no windows, with nine men who had just crossed the border illegally, and we headed north through back roads. I arrived at my new life in the dorms, where I pretended to be an ordinary college student who parties and studies. I only understood how I slipped through the university gates a couple of weeks before the end of my first academic quarter, when I turned 18. I received a letter from the admissions office that explained I had derived residency from my father; but as an adult, I no longer qualified to be a student there. My world crumbled. After classes that day, I took three buses to the Santa Ana train station. I took the last Pacific Surfliner Amtrak train to Downtown San Diego. Then I walked a few blocks to the Grey- hound bus station and took the last bus to El Centro. I arrived home before midnight and went through the family files look- ing for the receipt, which had the application case numbers and a phone number to get status updates. Armed with the “bodega” receipt, I searched for my applica- tion in every Naturalization and Immigration Services office in Southern California. It turns out that my application was archived by mistake and had been lost for a few years in a San Diego field office. To my great relief, I received interim papers just days before I was to be expelled from school. b Those documents gave me the right to dream and the hope that those dreams could become real for the first time. I dreamt of going on a study abroad program. Unfortunately, I did not have the resources or the type of papers to study overseas, so I did the next best thing. I volunteered to build homes and schools across the border in the slums of Tijuana.