The Undocumented Americans Read online

  So when Theodoro tells me he gives his own rations of filtered water to the dogs, I feel like dying, but the kind of death that rebirths you into something less painful, like a tree, a tree like him. I ask him to text me pictures of his pit bulls and he sends them to me. They’re plump. Their coats are shiny. Why do you give them your own water, I ask him. Well, they can’t really speak, but if they could speak, they’d have a lot to say, he tells me.

  * * *

  —

  I come back to Flint almost a year later, after Governor Rick Snyder announces that the state of Michigan will stop providing free water to Flint residents because lead levels have not exceeded federal limits in two years, even though they’ve replaced only sixty-two hundred pipes affected by lead and have about twelve thousand to go. In addition to the high water bills they have to pay to the city that poisoned them, they will now have to buy their own clean water.

  Margarita is thrilled that I have returned and hosts me at her home, where she has invited several immigrant women from Flint over for lunch to talk to me. For the special occasion, she has made tortillas from scratch, rice, and ground beef with potatoes. But the women never show for various reasons, some of them unconvincingly disguising their discomfort with the idea of talking to a stranger from New York, so instead, I meet Margarita’s husband, Kenny, a tough guy with a tough-guy demeanor, who keeps telling her to slow down and take it easy. She’s full of ideas for the community and she helps everyone, he says. Kenny did some time in prison, ten years, made some bad decisions. He hates cops. Calls them pigs. Kenny tells me the plot of Serpico, an Al Pacino movie about corruption among police; so, at some point Pacino’s character gets shot in the face during a drug sting, and Kenny says it’s based on a true story.

  “Baby, it’s not based on a true story,” Margarita says.

  “Hell yeah, it’s based on a true story,” Kenny says.

  “You think everything is based on a true story,” Margarita says.

  “A lot of movies are based on true stories,” Kenny says.

  In Kenny’s own story, the one about his life, it was a Latinx cop who infiltrated his friend group, got close to him, and pushed him to do certain things that resulted in his arrest—by the same Latinx cop. At the court hearing, Kenny’s mother scolded the cop. “You’re a traitor to your own people,” she said. “It’s my job,” he told her. “I was just following orders.”

  * * *

  —

  The next day, Margarita introduces me to her friend Salma Pinzón. We meet at the Sloan Museum in the Flint Cultural Center, which is a museum dedicated to the history of Flint, with a particular focus on the rise and fall of the automobile industry. She’s been there many times. It’s my first. The water fountains in the museum have signs above them that say PLEASE DO NOT USE WATER FOUNTAIN. HELP YOURSELF TO THE COMPLIMENTARY WATER COOLER. The exhibits include miniatures of town buildings, collections of guns and pistols, union jackets, a mural dedicated to a United Auto Workers Labor Day Picnic, and an expansive re-creation, with life-size mannequins, of the Flint Sit-Down Strike, where the mothers and wives of the striking autoworkers broke windows in the factories to allow their men to breathe after they were teargassed by police. There are assembly-line station games where you are timed to perform assembly-line tasks; a loud bell sounds if you fail. Salma is good at that game.

  Salma Pinzón has a date in immigration court. I ask her if she has her outfit planned. She doesn’t. But I’ve had her outfit planned since she told me she has a court date.

  Her hero is the late Mexican American singer Jenni Rivera (1969–2012), a charismatic, voluptuous terror of a woman whose song “Sin Capitán” is Salma’s favorite. Some lyrics: My boat doesn’t need a captain / because I’ve conquered the storm alone.

  “I think I’m just like her,” Salma says.

  The dress I have in mind for her to wear to immigration court is something Jenni had worn for the Latin Grammys in 2010. A gown. Royal purple with bell sleeves, with a deep V-cut, tight at the chest, bodice, and hips, then ruffled out accordion-style, with the smallest layers at the front. Yellow marigolds embroidered on the dress, and a marigold yellow shawl to wear around her shoulders. Salma’s hair is long, waist-length, black everywhere but the crown, where it is white, but she has two months to begin bleaching it. She will be blond for the court date. Not a flattering, buttery warm blond, no—cold, ice blond. It won’t look great but it’ll be striking, and I’d rather she look striking than pretty.

  Salma has a son with autism, Felipe, who is twenty-three years old now. He was eligible for DACA but she didn’t sign him up out of fear that his information was going to be used against him. He doesn’t speak Spanish, and she lives in fear that he’ll be deported. What would he do in Mexico? “People over there would be cruel with kids like him,” she says.

  Salma has a date at immigration court because an ICE officer followed her around looking for a reason to arrest her. She said she protested and it was fruitless.

  He took her to a detention center. She was detained for a month, alongside women with theft and drug charges, all of whom complained that they thought she had been unfairly detained. She didn’t have a lawyer then and she doesn’t have a lawyer now. No one has wanted to take on her case. She’s making phone calls. She begins to cry and admits she doesn’t have much hope but doesn’t know what will happen to her son.

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen at my court date. I don’t know what god wants.” But I know what god wants. God wants to see her in the motherfucking gown, unrepentant, with no captain.

  * * *

  —

  Ivy was born in Mexico to a father who is an American citizen and a mother who is Mexican. After their divorce, her father won the custody battle so she came to Texas to live with him when she was eleven, and moved to Flint after he bought a house there on eBay in 2009. She is a single mom. She had a baby, Lidia, when she was twenty-one. During her pregnancy, which was during the water crisis, doctors responded to any health concerns she had by telling her to drink more water. “I would tell them I had fever and vomiting and they kept saying I needed to drink more water, everything was me needing to lay off the Coke and drink more water; it was a constant dismissal. But I didn’t have money for anything other than tap water so that’s what I drank.”

  I meet Ivy and her baby at a break during a Latino Leaders meeting one morning. It’s a group of mostly Mexican American members of the Flint community with personal business cards and fantastic border accents who want to make the city more hospitable for Latinx and especially immigrant members. The meeting is conducted in English. Ivy takes notes during the meeting, and raises her hand to say something brilliant. The others nod and take notes. Her father shushes the baby in the other room. At eleven o’clock, they call a break for assemble-your-own taco bowls. Ivy comes over to me and writes down her number, angrily, in my notebook. She is pissed. She wants to talk. She is also young, really young, and has a full-moon face and long, straight black hair that she wears with a center part. I try to engage with the baby. I tell the one-year-old baby that it is good she is bilingual.

  Ivy remembers, in vivid detail, the day she realized the water was dirty. “I remember taking a shower one day, and when I ran my hand over my skin there was a sticky layer all over my body that hadn’t washed off. It was like jelly. I felt dirty. My neighbor brought a water jug to our house wanting to know if our water was like hers. It was yellow with some brown film in it. Yet we got letters from the city saying it was fine, that they were taking care of it. So what can you do?”

  Ivy developed hives and rashes, for which she was prescribed steroids while she was pregnant. The doctors never performed any tests to determine the origin of the skin irritations. Then her baby girl was born. Over time, Ivy noticed the baby did not react to her or to motion, crying constantly and piercingly as if she was in tremendous fear,
and when she took her to the doctor, he told her they’d just have to wait and see. “They did the exam and said we were going to have to give it a couple of months. A waiting game.”

  The doctor waited four months before determining the baby was blind from the lead poisoning.

  “Her first seizure was when she was three months old. I always put her in her own bed at night, but for some reason, on this one particular night I brought her over to sleep with me, and all of a sudden I saw her shaking violently in a terrifying way. I picked her up, screaming, and ran her to my father. I have never felt such regret or guilt. They say breastfeeding is the safest, best thing you can do for your child, but it was after the fact that they said that if you have lead in your body and you breastfeed, you pass it on. When I heard that, my heart just dropped. I don’t know if it happened when she was in my womb or after. If she has any delays or any problems down the line, I couldn’t begin to apologize to her enough. I feel so much guilt.”

  Ivy’s baby has regained her vision, but nobody knows what the long-term effects of the water poisoning will be in her little body. The wait is torturous for Ivy. It is torturous for her mom. It is torturous for the community. It is not torturous for the government. They want us all dead, Latinxs, black people, they want us dead, and sometimes they’ll slip something into our bloodstreams to kill us slowly and sometimes they’ll shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot until their bloodlust is satisfied and it’s all the same, our pastors will say god has a plan for us and our parents will plead with the Lord until the end to give them an answer.

  I am not a journalist. Journalists are not allowed to get involved the way I have gotten involved. Journalists, to the best of my knowledge, do not try to change the outcome of their stories as crudely as I do. I send water. I fight with immigration lawyers. I raise money. I make arrangements with supernatural spirits to stop deportations. I try to solve shit the way an immigrant’s kids try to solve shit for their parent because these people are all my parents, I am their child, if I wasn’t their child—and I was their child—I should be patented and mass-produced and distributed to undocumented immigrants at Walmarts. I am a professional immigrant’s daughter. My job was simple, to tell this story: The government wanted the people of Flint dead, or did not care if they died, which is the same thing, and set in motion a plan for them to be killed slowly through negligence at the highest levels. What I saw in Flint was a microcosm of the way the government treats the undocumented everywhere, making the conditions in this country as deadly and toxic and inhumane as possible so that we will self-deport. What I saw in Flint was what I had seen everywhere else, what I had felt in my own poisoned blood and bones. Being killed softly, silently, and with impunity.

  * * *

  —

  The whitest thing I have ever done in my life was not repeatedly trying to get bangs after seeing pictures of Zooey Deschanel. The whitest thing I’ve done in my life was trying to save Flint youth while I was visiting there. At various points when I was in Flint, I did a cowardly thing, which was to try to suggest a trip in which some of the kids would come to New York with me, because I wanted to open a Pandora’s box for them, the view of the city at night. The skyline! The fucking skyline! I asked the teens if they’d seen New York (they hadn’t), and then asked them if they’d like to see New York (they didn’t know), and holy fuck I hadn’t anticipated that. In my mind, the kids would want to get out. They’d have big Broadway dreams. They’d have questions, they’d want answers, we’d talk gypsy cabs and SAT scores and Plan B both in life and in birth control. But what happened instead is that the teens conscientiously ignored me the entire time I was there—they had no intention of talking to me—so I’d eavesdrop on their conversations, and I’d overhear them talking about how they wanted to be waitresses at some local bar because they heard you could earn mad tips that way, and I fucking DIED, because I grew up on my dad’s tips and knew what kind of life that gave you, and I wanted to save them from that. I’d drunk the social mobility Kool-Aid from college prep programs run by white people when I was in high school and didn’t know how to reconcile all that with what I was seeing in Flint. I had created for myself a world in which I could only feel reprieve from panic if my parents were either dead or at peace, preferably both, and if they were to be just at peace, that would be expensive, and I had to work toward that, and I knew to the gram just how much blood they had shed for me over the past thirty years and I had to repay it in gold. And I didn’t understand these kids who didn’t think the same way. I felt like it was our one fucking job—they were alien to me. I didn’t know how to talk to them. So I didn’t.

  When Margarita and I drove around the city, I asked her if she had any kids in mind whom I could help write college entrance essays and she said no and I insisted and she said no, she couldn’t think of any, and I said, Oh, okay, cool cool cool.

  On the third day of my first visit in Flint, I texted my friend Max who has a pill problem and I told him I was thinking of drinking the water and he definitively told me not to and I said, I know I know but I feel so guilty, and maybe I’d feel less guilty if I just drank the fucking water. Then I felt like I sounded like a white girl trying to slum it, so that made me feel disgusted with myself, so now I felt like cutting my arm with the room service knife but that seemed even whiter, so I didn’t do anything at all, I just went to my hotel, where they gave us free water bottles for everything, even for brushing our teeth, and where there was a machine on the first floor for guests to refill their reusable water bottles and the TV on the first floor was always on Fox News even though the manager was black and he always smiled at me in the mornings when I went to get coffee, not knowing I was a bad girl in a good city, in a country that wanted both of us dead.

  CHAPTER 5

  Cleveland

  Strictly as a matter of taste, I do not like children. Small animals are adorable in the way my biology programs me to find large-eyed, small-skulled mammals adorable, and they can grow up into formidable or admirable creatures—cubs become bears, calves become elephants, fledglings become eagles. Babies lack language, which makes me bored and impatient, then turn into children, whose saccharine vocal emissions grate my nerves, and then turn into adult humans, the most monstrous of all animals. But kids do not do the kinds of things adults are capable of that earn them some goodwill with me—like breed the French bulldog, perform open-heart surgery, tell good jokes. In general, kids don’t mind me, because I leave them alone. I respect them. How do you do, I say. Terrible, they say. We’re good.

  But then, when I see a video online of three small boys, all American citizens, saying goodbye to their father at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport as he is being deported, my heart stops. They remind me of my brother. Meaning: They are boys, they are skinny and brown, they have heads of thick, jet-black hair for which there does not exist a single good haircut. I am ten years older than my brother, a mentor but not quite a mother figure, more like Gandalf to the hobbits, and this video awakens in me a lion’s heart of desire to protect. I contact their lawyer. I want to help these children, I say. I want to become their role model. Do they like dogs? I write the boys a letter through their lawyer. “The first generation of immigrants comes to this country to work hard, and they often suffer and are treated badly. Do you know why they do it? For their children. That’s us. It’s up to us to honor our parents’ sacrifices by doing better than they did, by having better lives than what we saw growing up. I’m here to tell you that the best way to do that is through an education,” I write. I’m brainwashed.

  A couple of months later, I travel to Willard, Ohio, to meet th
em. Willard is the most rural place I have ever been to, and on the long drive there I pass through vast stretches of farmland where my cheap cell phone loses service completely. Willard is known for its rich, fertile soil—people call it “the muck”—and its agricultural industry is booming, which means that temporary workers from Mexico come in seasonally to help plant, weed, and harvest. Before I visited Willard, there was a huge battle over a welcome-home party that the chamber of commerce was throwing the migrant workers. A Vietnam War vet threw a tantrum in a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, writing, “Myself and a lot of other Vietnam veterans and also Korean veterans are still waiting on our welcome-home party. Where does the Willard City Chamber of Commerce think that it is right to give the migrant workers a welcome back party?” At a city meeting dedicated to planning the party, a woman stormed out of the room with her husband, saying, “I’m a compassionate person. I believe people who come here have to come here the right way. It makes me angry when I hear people talking about harboring illegals.” The city has a population of approximately six thousand people, 94 percent of whom are white. This is where the boys live.

  I come armed with the cutest pictures of my dog back when he was a puppy because I assume all children like puppies. When I arrive, I find out three of the four children are scared of dogs. (There are three boys and an even smaller child, a girl.) And clowns. I could not have arrived at a better time. They want to discuss their fear of clowns.