The Undocumented Americans Read online

  After digesting the news, Ricardo’s mother announced that when her body can no longer withstand picking apples she’d like to go back to Mexico. His father has been here since he was nineteen years old, so it’s hard for him to imagine returning to Mexico, but Ricardo thinks he’ll probably end up going back too. Ricardo is devastated that he wasn’t able to adjust their legal status but finds comfort in the fact that he can provide for their retirement if they go back to Mexico. He is a middle school teacher now, back in L.A. “Any money I make will not be for me. I just need an apartment. The rest will be for my parents.” I take him out to drinks and am like, how about chemical engineering, baby? But he wants to be a teacher and I admire that purity even if I have no high hopes for its financial output.

  But Ricardo is young, and for now his parents can still work. He does not yet know what this life will do to him. I’m looking to interview children of immigrants partly to get a blueprint for myself because I’m lost and I am scared, so I set off to find somebody a little older, someone who has been doing this for a while, and in my research I stumble upon thirty-six-year-old Mira Fernández. Mira is a Latina journalist who writes for the local Spanish paper who counts my dad as one of her readers. She grew up in New York, the daughter of undocumented immigrants. Her dad was a day laborer, and she lived with her parents—and paycheck to paycheck—until she was an adult. She remembers that, one month, after paying her bills and rent, she had no money left over to buy sanitary napkins, so she bought a roll of toilet paper that she made last her whole period. It was humiliating. “I decided that would never happen again. I wanted to save up so I could retire one day, and I was going to provide for my parents’ emotional health and quality of life,” she tells me. She did not want to be able to provide only for their basic needs. She wanted them to live with dignity. So she began to work toward that.

  Then, after decades as a day laborer, her father started to show signs of depression. His years had consisted of going to work, coming home to sleep, going to work, coming home to sleep, and back again, with nothing in his life to give it meaning or pleasure. He got older. He became overcome by stress and anxiety. He stopped talking. This is when Mira started noticing the miniature cars. They were the size of Hot Wheels cars, but they were built with intricate detail, like built-to-scale models. Her dad soon began amassing dozens, tens of dozens of tiny cars. He was skilled in woodwork, so after work or on weekends, during any free time he had, he would work on an elaborate wooden display for the cars. He’d clean them lovingly with small cotton rounds. He painted any scratches they had, and he rearranged them constantly. It’s the only way he passed the time when he was home. I ask Mira if this made her sad. She is quiet for a long time, then says, “You know, he filled up this space in his heart with those little cars, so I’m just glad he found a way to feel better.”

  After many years of trying, Mira’s parents, now much older, could not do manual labor in the United States anymore and went back to Mexico. Mira fully supports them, sending money twice a month. I ask her what percentage of her paycheck goes to her parents, and she says it is something she does so naturally and so much, she’s never even thought to calculate that.

  “Look, they’re better off there,” she says. “They were tired of their lives here. Their emotional health is more stable there, they have their own home, they have activities, they have friends. Here, they worked constantly just to make ends meet, just to pay rent on time. They could not retire here, but with some financial help on my part, their lives over there are more peaceful.” She admits it is financially complicated for her, but her parents always express their gratitude and they never ask for money outright. “I’d feel guilty not doing it, but I’m very happy to be able to do it, and I’m very happy to help them,” she says.

  * * *

  —

  Her brother doesn’t contribute. He says he has his own family to take care of. Mira theorizes that Latin American culture is so imbued with patriarchal values that paint women as natural caregivers and nurturers that women feel a greater responsibility toward aging parents, and women who are not able to balance or reject those values feel an inescapable burden.

  I used to say that I would slip antifreeze into my brother’s coffee (it has a sweet taste, and he likes how I prepare his coffee, dulce and light enough that it should match my skin tone) if he did not help me take care of our parents as they aged. Once, he was maybe twelve years old and his report card was pretty bad. His report cards were pretty bad from his first ever one in kindergarten until he was in community college, so this was not a surprise—we all have our strengths and academics was not his. But it was a fucking nightmare for a family so focused on social mobility—and I was pissed. I called him on the phone and screamed at the top of my lungs that as an American citizen, he was wasting his opportunities, and that if he ended up working at a Best Buy and not going to college, I would never speak to him again in my life. “You hear that? I have no problem cutting you off. Don’t you try me. You won’t be a burden to me. I will never fucking talk to you again.” I recently apologized to him for being so cruel and he just laughed and said he didn’t take me seriously because I was just like Dad.

  * * *

  —

  When my father could drive—before he started dying—he would take me to the Land of Make Believe or Splish Splash or some other tristate-area water park every summer. He did it because commercials for water parks were featured prominently on local television and they depicted children acting carefree and wild and I was not carefree or wild and it weighed on him, so he insisted I try. I did not know how to swim. He tried to teach me but I was terrified of the water. My father is prone to anger and so he is not a good teacher. When he made me practice long division at home and I got answers wrong, he’d rip up the pages I worked on about an inch from my face while telling me I was stupid. He took that approach to swimming lessons, and after a few minutes, he’d usually just storm off and my mother would tell me to ignore him. Through adulthood, my friends treated my not knowing how to swim like my not knowing how to ride a bicycle or not being able to leave the country—just, like, a quirky thing about me.

  My fear of water and inability to swim did not stop my father from taking me to water parks. It made him more dogged in pursuit of the activity. It’s all he wanted to do in the summers. My mother packed sandwiches and snacks because concession food was too expensive, and off we went. The only ride I could tolerate was the Lazy River because all I had to do was float on an inner tube, but my father liked for us to go on the rides with long, dark tubes that twisted into crazy loops at high speed and then spat you out into a pool. Those rides had long lines, and the entire way up I would have a pit in my stomach and I pleaded with him not to make me go. He insisted it would be fun, the whole point was my having fun. He’d go first, then wait at the bottom. At the top of the ride, when I was standing barefoot on a warm wooden landing and there was a dark tunnel in front of me filled with a fast current of water rushing into the pitch black, the people who worked at the ride would repeatedly ask me if I was okay going down. But I didn’t want to face my father if I gave up, so I lay down in the tube, crossed my arms, counted to three, and pushed myself down. Years later, my psychiatrist would tell me that my anxiety and adrenaline run on the same “train tracks,” so I often get them confused. If I experienced an adrenaline rush in the dark tubes, or if I experienced a panic attack while I was in them, I cannot say. I remember it as a sharp intake of breath, down to the cold of my soul. And I remember the next moment of awareness, which is being spit into a pool, and sinking.

  I sank. I always sank. I knew I could stand, but my body was leaden and I fell at the wrong angle. And my father always reached down and brought me to air, my long black hair stuck to my face. I was never underwater long enough to come up gasping for air, but I can still feel the taste of chlorine in my lungs. I miss the taste of chlorinated pool water. And
I miss this dynamic, of my father putting me in a manufactured scene of crisis in which I would feel helpless but at the same time be perfectly safe. I felt like I was going to die, but I would not die. A person who cannot swim and who panics in water is in danger in a pool, and my father knew that, and he made it so that he could save me every time. It was never a big production when he did it, he’d just pick me up by the armpits and say, “Wasn’t that fun?” I think the lesson was: He was my father, and he was god. As long as I would panic and sink, and he could save me, he would always have that place.

  I never learned to swim. The farthest I had ever ventured into the ocean was to my knees, screaming the whole while. But by last summer, right before I turned twenty-nine and he turned fifty-four, our roles had so profoundly reversed and his self-esteem was so devastatingly low that I wondered if I could give that back to him, this ability to save me. Like the water-park drownings, this invitation was also perfectly manufactured: I invited him to come spend an afternoon at the beach in the middle of July precisely with the purpose of teaching me how to swim. It would take, max, three hours and I would take, just, one Klonopin.

  The beach we went to is called Lighthouse Point. It’s on the Long Island Sound, not far from New Haven. The Long Island Sound is technically an estuary, which is where salt water from the ocean and fresh water from rivers mix. Sixteen different very New Englandy rivers empty out into the Atlantic Ocean at this spot. Emma Lazarus wrote a forgettable poem about it with not a huddling mass in sight. It is described in The Great Gatsby as “the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere.” When I was in college, I got the coordinates of East Egg and West Egg, fictional places on Long Island, tattooed by my left breast because they symbolized my desire for what I cannot have. But now, I just like this beach because there are always black and brown families fishing or building sand castles there, proudly being alive, and there is just something about the ocean air perfuming dark bodies refusing to die that makes me want to live another day too.

  To begin, my father poured cold water over my body with his hands like a priest baptizing an infant. It was freezing. His arms were very white. My father had not been to the beach in seven years. He told me the first step was being able to stand in deep water, which he likened to standing on a packed subway when you don’t have a pole to hold and cannot lean against a door. Your legs have to be apart just so, and you use your arms to stabilize yourself. He asked me to shift my weight from foot to foot as if I was on a bumpy subway ride, I guess kind of like he stands when he chops lettuce. He grabbed my hand and we went deeper into the ocean until the water was up to my chest, the deepest I had ever gone. “Next, you float,” he told me. He grabbed my hands and asked me to go on my stomach, extend my legs as far as they would go, and kick. He assured me he would not let go. I told him I weighed 140 pounds, which is not true, laadeedaa, but he said it didn’t matter, and to prove that to me, he asked me to grab him by the hands and he told me I would be able to support his entire weight in the water. “The water will help you carry my weight,” he said.

  I did. I mean the water did. When it was my turn, I asked him to swear to not let me go. I’d usually ask him to swear on his mother, because I know that’s what he holds most holy, but I think she’s demonic so I don’t like bringing her up. Instead, I asked why I should believe him. As an adult, he has told me that because he is a good father, he has lied to me my whole life, and he is proud of lying to me, and he will lie to me until he dies, so his word means nothing from him. I held on to his hands so tightly I am sure I bruised them. He did not let go.

  But I did not float. My body is not buoyant. “Your body is determined to sink,” my father announced as he tried to hold me up by the stomach. My legs do not extend in the water, so I cannot kick; they gravitate toward my father’s body like a magnet and I sink. I sink, but not down. My legs sink laterally, toward his body, so I end up vertical. He relaxed his body and showed me how easy it was to float on his back—Mire!—totally flat, but in my resting state, my body in water wants to be upright, on my feet. Both of us realized at the same time that this was a true thing about me, and we tried to change it until finally our limbs gave out and we returned to shore. I was not able to restore the natural order of things.

  Back on sand, I asked him if, before, on the roof that summer, he had lied when he promised to stay young forever.

  Yes, he said.

  If you break little promises you’ll break big ones. That’s what you said.

  I know. But I won’t.

  My mom was on a beach blanket, her back to the sun, trying to darken the skin around a scar. She didn’t turn around to look at my dad and he didn’t look at her. Now that I think of it, they didn’t speak to each other at all that day except for when they awkwardly waded into the water together and stood some space apart, looking like two dead fish in the ocean together, stagnant but afloat. And that’s how they planned to stay, dead, stagnant, and afloat, even after we discovered that my dad wasn’t going to watch volleyball on weekends after all, even after I confronted him and he admitted it but blamed my mom. I separated them. He left home one night while my mom and brother were at church and I reminded him to write my brother a loving text because that night would be hard for him.

  There is research about migrant families, but children do not see it as prophecies foretold. I should have known better. I had spoken to a lot of people telling me the same things. And now here it was happening to my family, my soccer team, the world’s best. Shortly before I asked him to leave, my father had told my brother: “I am tired of living just for you and your sister. It is my turn to be happy now.” And he handled it the wrong way, totaled some people’s lives in his wake, but he was right. It was his turn to be happy. And now my mom is free to figure out what makes her happy, after thirty-one years. Thirty of those years have been spent here in America, being undocumented together. She goes to yoga now. The other day, she had a hot dog.

  I asked almost everyone I interviewed for this book about regrets, but they didn’t tell me many. That’s not what they remember of their time here. That’s not what we’ll remember when we have to leave, by choice, force, or casket. The look in a mother’s eyes at her baby’s first word in English, my father’s heaving sobs when I handed him my diploma in Latin from the best fucking school in the world, Leonel’s first steps of freedom outside the church in the autumn cold after four months in hiding, the Mexican chefs behind every great restaurant in New York, the Upper East Side babies who love their Haitian nannies so much it makes their moms jealous, a day laborer’s first cold shower in America after wearing off the soles of his feet in the desert, the two young men who pushed Joaquín up the mountain when he wanted to die, Jesus Christ himself on the cross—Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.

  Chinga la Migra

  In memory of Claudia Goméz Gonzáles

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not have been possible without Cindy Spiegel and Julie Grau. All thanks go to Emi Ikkanda for her patience, wisdom, and bravery, for championing this odd little book and my odd little voice. To my agent Peter Steinberg for making it all happen and for always believing in a freak like me. To Cecil Flores, you’re the best. Most of all, thanks to Christopher Jackson, who taught me how to write out of clarity and not anger, and whom I’d trust to lobotomize my brain to match his, no anesthesia.

  My editors and mentors throughout the years who have watched over me since I was a teenager—thanks go to Theodore Ross, Sasha Frere-Jones, Ben Metcalf, Jim Dao, Ryu Spaeth, Rachel Ronsenfelt, Dayna Tortorici, Nikil Saval, and Kara Vanderbijil for my first breaks.

  There were moments in my life when I needed critical support and Susan and Chip Fisher, Jason Wright, the Ellsworth and Sanger families, and Jessica Switzer Pliska were selfless and nurturing. I can never return the kindness. />
  To Laurene Powell Jobs, for support of my work and my vision. To Amy Low, Peter Lattman, and Alex Simon.

  To Meg White.

  At Yale, I owe everything to Allegra di Bonaventura. To my closest advisor and mentor, Kathryn Dudley, for teaching me how to write with empathy for the living, the dead, and the never alive; to Albert Laguna for reserving compliments until I deserved them; to Laura Wexler for encouraging me to think wild and big; to Sally Promey for her unwavering belief in me; to Mary Liu for never giving up on me even when I had, and to Glenda Carpio, Alicia Schmidt Camacho, and Steve Pitti for paving the way.

  Thank you to Brad Weston, Pam Abdy, Scott Nemes, Jonás Cuaron, and Richie Kern.

  To Sam Baum, for believing in a girl from the wrong side of the tracks.

  To the activists from whom I’ve learned so much, thank you for welcoming me into your world—Gonzalo Mercado, Aurora Saucedo, John Jairo Lugo, Vanesa Suarez, Charla Nich, and Gini King.

  To Dan Berger and Jonah Vorspan-Stein.

  To my friends Stephanie Rodriguez, Christopher Kramaric, Pierre Berastaín, Shelby Kinney-Lang, Annie Badman, Mira Lippold-Johnson, Carolee Klimchock, Carole Anderson, Moira Donegan, Nico Olarte-Hayes, Adam Berkwitt, and Jordi Oliveres.