The Undocumented Americans Read online

  Let’s talk about money for a second. I’ve established I grew up poor. Let me guide you through the present day. For my family, poverty is like walking in a hurricane. I buy my parents umbrella after umbrella; each provides some relief, then breaks—cheap fixes, all of them. The rain has paused for now. In Spanish we call that pause escampó. The rain has escampado. It will resume. Right now, I have some discretionary income. But it will not last forever. The guilt I feel having made it out—for now, until my own umbrella breaks—is like having been poisoned. I feel constantly disgusting, dirty, hungover, toxic unless I’m hemorrhaging money in this very specific way that I find cleansing.

  So what happens is, let’s say I go out to dinner. If I’m having an anxious day, I will send my parents take-out dinner. If I see a brown person in the kitchen at the restaurant, I will think that every kitchen in America probably has a Mexican in it and it will make me feel proud but sad—RIP Anthony Bourdain, a homie who got it—and then if my server is brown, if they are either in my opinion too young or too old or seem too tired for the job, I will leave a crazy tip—for what I am, which is a freelancer. Now. I do not have the kind of money to be leaving people crazy tips. But I remember every person who ever left my dad a really good tip when we lived off his tips, I remember every one, you don’t understand, I have been thinking of those nice Puerto Rican executive assistants for the past fifteen years, it was always the Latina executive assistants, very rarely the white people in power, and I remember how he felt for the rest of the evening when he came home. It was like having my dad back from the dead. He would dance to no music and he’d make jokes, and he’d come out of his shower looking like a teenager. I know what a good tip feels like for a poor family. Every good tip feels like Simon helping Jesus carry the cross.

  When I am introduced to Octavio I hand him the heavy envelope but it’s awkward. I don’t know him. I don’t tell him there’s money in there, but why am I, a total fucking stranger, giving him a greeting card? He keeps forgetting it everywhere so I’m finally like, Octavio, there’s money in there! He does not open the envelope but puts it away and we’re both like, Fuck what now? Are we friends or something?

  We go to lunch. He’s small and appears to be made out of paper. We walk a long time to get to the restaurant and we have the same stride. When we arrive, he’s disappointed to hear they’ve changed management and he doesn’t know the owner anymore. He was trying to impress me. He orders stewed ribs and chamomile tea. Octavio tells me that much of the discrimination older immigrants experience is at the hand of younger immigrants. That they will stand within earshot of the older guys and loudly wonder what they’re still doing here, or outright say they’re too old for the work. But Octavio knows his worth. When an employer picks him to do a job, they always call him back. He says he is friends with a seventy-two-year-old man who makes decorative wooden floors better than anyone else in the game and younger guys can’t match his skill.

  I ask how he feels on a daily basis as an older man without family here and Octavio says that he feels depressed and anxious. “What kills us is loneliness. I feel lonely even in a room full of people. I feel destabilizing anxiety and pain. Doctors say I don’t have anything, but I know I’m sick.” I ask Octavio whether his friends have similar problems, and he says they do but their symptoms manifest in different ways. “I think some men who grow old in this country get lost here. They are unfaithful to their wives or turn to alcohol or drugs as a way to blow off steam, to forget their pain. I’d say that out of every hundred older immigrants, ten succumb to depression, anxiety, or worse.”

  I think about the work of Roberto Gonzales, a Harvard scholar who has conducted longitudinal studies on the effects of undocumented life on young people. As a result of all the stressors of migrant life, he found his subjects suffered chronic headaches, toothaches, ulcers, sleep problems, and eating issues. Which is funny to find in research because I’m twenty-nine and I have this ulcer my doctors can’t seem to soothe or diagnose the cause of. It feels like I have an open wound right beneath my breasts in the center of my abdomen and I can feel it spasm and bleed and it never goes away. Sometimes I have to go to Urgent Care, and I drink concoctions and take pills and drink teas and I just keep bleeding, and it hurts the most when, after a long day of reading about people forming human chains to block ICE officers from arresting a man and his child, I sit down to write about my parents.

  Now, imagine that thirty, forty, fifty years in. Of course Octavio is sick. We’re all fucking sick. It is a public health crisis and it’s hard to know how to talk about it without feeding into the right-wing propaganda machine that already paints immigrants as charges to the healthcare system and carriers of disease. The trick to doing it is asking Americans to pity us while reassuring them with a myth as old as the country’s justifications for slavery—that is, reassuring Americans with the myth that people of color are long-suffering marvels, built to do harder work, built to last longer and handle more, reminding them what America already believes in its soul, which is that we are “impervious to pain,” as scholar Robin Bernstein has put it. We can only tell them we’re sick if we remind them that sick or not, we are able to still be high-functioning machines.

  “I don’t feel at home in this country,” Octavio says. “Even immigrants in extreme poverty find a way to send their deceased loved ones back home to be buried. They won’t be alive to feel happiness again, but they will feel at peace, finally a place to rest. All the dead want is a place to rest.” He says this may be his last year before going back to Guatemala. He came here to make enough money to send his kids to school back home, and he did it. One is a mechanic, another is studying law, and the third is an aesthetician—Octavio financed her salon. “Everyone who kills themselves through their work is doing this for their children,” he says. “If you don’t have kids, why would you kill yourself like this?” For my family the question is, once your kids are grown and doing okay, what happens when you keep killing yourself like this?

  * * *

  —

  I meet Mercedes Soto through Pedro Ituralde, the head of Nuestra Calle, the Staten Island day laborer center, who describes her to me as the best housekeeper he has ever known, which is pretty high fucking praise. She is fifty-six years old but looks a lot older. She has long black hair shot with gray and a round, kind face. I tell her I’m writing about older immigrants and she gasps dramatically, envisioning a world in which she grows old in the United States and takes to living under a bridge. She walks me through the scenario she has envisioned while cracking herself up. “People are going to see me and gossip,” she says. “I can’t let them do that. They will whisper among themselves, Have you seen Mercedes? She lives under the bridge now, in a box. She’s fallen so far from her days of glory! A ghost of who she used to be! And then they will avoid saying hi to me because I live under the bridge now. No, ma’am, I’m not going to give them that satisfaction.”

  She tells me that I remind her of her granddaughter, small and fragile. So when she invites me to her home on Staten Island one afternoon to teach me how to cook small corn cakes called arepas, I immediately say yes. I’ve never had a grandmother and she seems fun.

  Mercedes and her husband rent a small room in a house that she shares with four young Ecuadorian men on the second floor and a young Salvadoran man across the hall from them on the first floor. Mercedes and her husband are, by decades, the oldest people in the house. She is the only woman. The house is spotless, and her room is neatly packed to the brim with belongings. Today, Mercedes is wearing dark-blue Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and a mock-turtleneck sweater, and her hair is in a long braid down her back. She invited her best friend, Monica, to cook with us. She is also fifty-six. (“And she has papers,” Mercedes says immediately.) They met at an English class and have been close ever since. Monica has henna-dyed black hair and black eyeliner tattooed on her lids. She suggests I am wearing too much makeup. />
  The women do not let me cook. Latina women never let me cook. I used to have this self-mythology about my upbringing, which is that my parents never taught me to cook because they didn’t want to teach me skills that would make me a good housewife—my mother’s biggest fear—since whenever I asked to help them in the kitchen, they sent me to go read a book. So I was like, I had feminist parents! But now I realize that the literal truths about myself that are immediately manifest to others—I am clumsy, distracted, have no attention to detail, am messy, fall often, hurt myself easily—made me clearly useless in the kitchen and they just didn’t want me around to interfere. When I have tried cooking for various older Latinas, they always take over immediately, not because they’re feminist vigilantes, but because they’re perfectionists and they are good at what they do and why would they let me make a mess of things? To indulge me?

  Monica assembles a growing pile of arepas next to her. To make them, you mix white corn flour, warm water, butter, salt, and cheese in a bowl. You set it aside to cool, then take out the sticky dough and knead it. Monica uses a drinking glass to press perfect circles into the dough. Mercedes has made Mexican champorrado, a thick hot chocolate with oatmeal and molasses. It is already simmering when I arrive.

  Mercedes and her husband, Jacinto, plan on “retiring” in a couple of years. That means they’ll stop working in the United States and move back to Mexico, probably to work in some much more relaxed capacity there. He is a gardener and, at sixty-two years old, finds himself going head-to-head with younger men. His lower back kills him and he gets overheated easily. He refused to go to the doctor for a long time—I’m fine, leave me alone!—but Mercedes put her foot down, issued an ultimatum, and he went to the community health clinic, which charges twenty dollars for a visit. “I can’t love you more than you love yourself,” she told him. “Grown children will not take care of you when you’re older—especially boys, and we have boys.” Monica agrees that being a mother to adult sons with their own families to take care of makes her feel vulnerable. Jacinto comes to the kitchen to eat and drink with us. He is shy and laughs quietly at his wife’s jokes but speaks up when we begin to talk about adult children. “I don’t want to have to extend my hand to them to ask for food,” he says firmly. Plus, the children can be demanding, expecting too much of their parents. One day, Mercedes’s son raised his voice at her on the phone because he needed her and didn’t know where she was. “The day I live in your house and you spoon-feed me, I’ll listen to you, but until then, I’ll do as my heart desires,” she told him.

  The following night, I take a taxi to a church on Staten Island where Nuestra Calle is having a Christmas party. Mercedes is being honored for helping out in the community. The tables are covered in red plastic cloths and sprinkled with snowflake glitter confetti. I sit with Monica and Jacinto. Their phones ping with automated Bible-scripture text messages in a huge font that they have to hold far from their faces in order to read. We eat plates of baked ziti as we watch teenagers in plush antlers dance with each other. There is a live band, a group of men in pink blazers with accordions. There’s a toddler in a tiny matching blazer and tiny matching accordion pretending to play along. Mercedes and Jacinto show me a picture of their religious marriage ceremony, which took place recently, forty-two years after their civil one. She looks like a teen bride, wearing a white princess dress and a tiara. I walk from table to table, complimenting all the women’s makeup and asking if anyone wants to talk about aging, which you know, I’m no Ronan Farrow. One woman stops me to say she wants her story told. Altagracia is nearly fifty years old and is recovering from surgery to remove a cyst in her uterus that she had unsuccessfully tried to self-treat with herbs from a naturalist. She wants to tell me that she was conned by a woman in Mexico who said she could expedite her green-card petition and soon began extorting her for ever-increasing fees with the threat of being turned in to ICE if she did not comply. Altagracia paid her a total of twelve thousand dollars.

  Because of her poor health, Altagracia has death on her mind and is thinking about going back to Mexico. “There was a raid on a 7-Eleven near my house just last week. And the other day on the bus, a white woman went on a racist rant against me while I was just standing there. All of the racism here makes me want to go back to my country when I die. I’m not wanted here, and I do not want to live in eternity in a place where I’m not wanted.” In the meantime, she says, her plan for aging involves her two children. She tells me a story about a woman she sometimes sees when she goes out to collect recycling for cash. The woman is seventy years old and collects recycling for a living. She was widowed when she was very young and never remarried, never had children. Now, Altagracia says, the woman is all alone and left to die in a foreign country without anyone to take care of her. She says the lesson is that it is important to have children who can take care of us when we grow old.

  “You can’t guarantee how your kids are going to turn out. There are good children and there are bad children, so in my opinion, people should have two kids. One of them ought to turn out well. I have two kids, and after my surgery, there was always one of them around to take care of me when the other one was busy.” An heir and a spare. I ask her if the pressure of that might be hard on the children.

  “Perhaps,” she says. “But that’s the tradition.”

  * * *

  —

  Early the next morning, I visit Nuestra Calle. There are just five older men sitting inside, out of the cold. One of the men recognizes me from the party and says with a large grin, “I remember you. You tried to interview me, but I didn’t want to talk to you.” I concede that that was me, and try again. He leans back in his chair and sucks his teeth, thinking awhile. “No,” he concludes. I sit down to drink my coffee and we make small talk, until we’re kicked out by a woman who wants to sweep the space.

  Outside, I lean against the façade. The men gather around me in a semicircle. The man to my right, in his sixties, wearing a red New York Yankees baseball cap and a brown hoodie, too light for the cold, starts talking bitterly about the life of a migrant. He says he has completely given up, and that’s what he says, but here he is, isn’t he, at 7:00 A.M. on a freezing morning, clocking in like the rest of us. The other men quickly interrupt him, tenderly, in hushed tones. They urge him to get help. I shut up and listen. A picture begins to form. He is homeless and addicted to alcohol. The men try to tell him that he has to stare down a childhood trauma in order to get better, rather than escaping from his pain with drink. They tell him he is the smartest man they know, the most eloquent, and they don’t want to see this end badly. It’s an intervention.

  It seems spur of the moment, brought on by the opportunity to speak about the suffering of migration in the third person, almost pedagogically. He gets mad at them, but they’re very loving toward him. When he walks away, they tell me they are the lucky ones, that old day laborers often end up sick, sad, and alone, too embarrassed and lonely to go to the worker centers, instead picking up work in remote corners. “But I wouldn’t advise you to go to those places alone,” the man who turned down the interview says. “If you want to go there, we’ll go with you.”

  * * *

  —

  I am ten years older than my brother. I have always imagined us as being part of an “heir and spare” sort of situation, which I know about because my mother is obsessed with the European royal families—she thinks I look like Charlotte Casiraghi of Monaco the way my father thinks I have the spirit of Greta Thunberg. I…don’t. My brother has always been so levelheaded, so sweet, and patient, and—I say this with absolute awe and relief—has never shown signs of mental illness, so my parents were grateful for him, grateful that he was healthy and fine, grateful that he was spared. He’s not crazy, sure. But he was also born in Brooklyn. Which means he’s an American citizen.

  Whereas it was my responsibility to be the face of the family, the hunter, the
gatherer, my brother just had to find it in him to do his homework. He was Prince Harry. He just had to…not be photographed in a Nazi costume. But he also had a bigger responsibility than I had, that I could not have because I was my parents’ undocumented child. He just had to turn twenty-one.

  Every mixed-status family in the United States knows the drill. An undocumented parent can be sponsored by their American-citizen child when the child turns twenty-one. (This does not work for siblings or other family members.) My parents never talked about it around my brother, though surely it made them hopeful, but I thought about it all the time. I took to lovingly calling him my little anchor baby, after the disparaging term Republicans used for the American-born children of undocumented immigrants who supposedly “anchored” them to the United States. I reclaimed the term. On his birthday, I always took him out to dinner, and as he ate his sushi happily and cluelessly, I’d think, You beautiful aging casket of wine. Better by the day.

  This all changed recently, when reports began circulating that ICE was arresting undocumented parents and spouses of American citizens when they petitioned for green cards. Immigration lawyers began advising children, husbands, and wives against petitioning for them at all.

  Ricardo Reyes, a twenty-one-year-old recent Yale graduate, is one of those kids. He is an American citizen. He has the face and demeanor of an adorable bludgeoned baby seal. His parents worked in the garment industry in Los Angeles for decades before moving to the Pacific Northwest to make a living picking apples. “Since I was in elementary school, I would hear my mom talk about naturalization,” he told me. He was their oldest child, so he’d reach the finish line first. He and several of his friends at Yale, also the children of immigrants, were turning twenty-one within a few months of each other and they were counting down the days, talking excitedly after class about who would turn twenty-one first. Then on the morning of his birthday, his lawyer told him it would be too risky to file an application. One of his classmates had seen her dad detained during their green card interview, and he was deported despite a national outcry.