The Undocumented Americans Read online

  When I was in high school, my dad began to share stories he’d heard about undocumented restaurant workers who’d died on 9/11. I decided to interview my dad’s co-workers for the first piece I had ever pitched, for The Tribeca Trib. They were the only other undocumented people I knew. I had just watched All the President’s Men and wanted to break a story.

  My father picked whom I could talk to, and he chaperoned the interviews. He bought me a yellow flip notebook because I was pretending to be a journalist and he knew that would make me feel important. He also bought me a tape recorder from Kmart. I never actually managed to talk to anyone who directly knew an undocumented restaurant worker who died on 9/11, but everyone had heard the stories.

  The undocumented immigrants who died on 9/11 worked in restaurants, in housekeeping, in security. They were also deliverymen. The 9/11 Memorial and Museum now stands where the Twin Towers once stood. They have an exhibit that gutted me when I saw it. It’s a bicycle, presumed to have belonged to a deliveryman, a bike that was left tied to a pole near the Twin Towers. Visitors to the site had left acrylic flowers—red, white, and blue roses and carnations. They also left a rosary on the bicycle. It became a makeshift memorial. There was a note on the street next to the bike. EN MEMORIA DE LOS DELIVERY BOYS QUE MURIERON. SEPT 11 2001. “In memory of the delivery boys who died.” Delivery boys. That’s how I know it was the delivery boys who put up that sign, who left those acrylic flowers, men like my dad.

  I wonder what the bike owner brought to the Twin Towers that day. It was September, a mild day, so maybe an iced coffee. Black. Probably a scone. Maybe a $4.50 breakfast. A 15 percent tip would be sixty-seven cents. A 20 percent tip would be ninety cents. A generous person might tip a dollar. My father would travel anywhere for a dollar. My father would chase a dollar down the road, a dollar blowing in the winds of a hurricane, even when there was an equal likelihood of getting swept up by the wind. My dad would always take the chance. A dollar is a dollar.

  There was Antonio Meléndez, and Antonio Javier Álvarez, and Leobardo López Pascual, and Juan Ortega-Campos, and Martín Morales Zempoaltécatl, and Arturo Alba Moreno, and José Manuel Contreras Fernández, and Germán Castillo García, and José Guevara González, and Alicia Acevedo Carranza, and Víctor Antonio Martínez Pastrana, and Juan Romero Orozco, and Enrique Octavio and Santos Anaya, and Margarito Casillas, and Norberto Hernández.

  There was also Fernando Jimenez Molinar, who worked at a pizza shop nearby, delivering pies and washing dishes. He was nineteen years old. (My brother is nineteen years old. Jesus Christ, the hair above my brother’s lip, he’s so proud of it that he doesn’t shave. He writes spoken-word poetry and keeps a dream journal. I bought it for him; it has Batman on the cover. He collects comic books.) Fernando had two roommates, undocumented like him, and they called his mom when he didn’t come home on the night of 9/11. A local Mexican organization looked everywhere for him. He was gone. The Twin Towers fell shortly before 10:00 A.M. Who wanted a pizza delivered that early? Probably a finance bro coked up after a long night lying with numbers. Maybe he was high on Adderall. Hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours and was finally hungry, but only for pizza. Probably a little older than Fernando, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three. Harvard grad. Bro, is that my pizza?

  Fernando’s mom didn’t want him to come to America. He went anyway. He grew out his hair into a ponytail and grew a beard. That’s what the newspapers say. But he was nineteen, and I know nineteen. Nice beard. His sneakers were clean, white, like a fool’s. My father always told his teenage co-workers not to get white sneakers, and they always did anyway. Slaves to fashion. Earbuds in his ears. Metallica. Mexicans and their Metallica. It’s not racist when I say it. It was bright and sunny that day. His life ahead of him. The day ahead of him. His mom still young. He could still change her life. He could still tell his father off. The pizza delivery would net him five dollars. That’s a calling card. He could call his mom, but the entire card would be spent on her sending him blessings. He wanted to buy her a house. A garden where she could grow her own flowers; she loved marigolds, not bodega flowers like rainbow-colored carnations—marigolds. The house would have one room for her, and an office where she could read her Bible. The edges of the pages were colored gold. He would get his mom a dog so she wouldn’t be lonely. She liked frilly things, so maybe she’d like a poodle, but he wanted to get her a German shepherd, something to protect her, bark if anyone but him approached the house. So many people had hurt his mother, but not again. Not under his watch. His mother, his saint. Sometimes he’d swing by hair salons and steal the lady magazines and send them to her. Sometimes when he called she’d describe the dresses she loved from the magazines over the phone, and he resolved to buy them. She loved silk. His mother never knew silk. He’d make her know silk. He’d make her know death. He’d make her know silence. He’d make her know the death mask of a man disappeared, incinerated, and gone. Fernando Jimenez Molinar? Was he ever alive?

  Did you know that before dialing Mexico you have to dial 011? There are so many numbers to dial to get to your mother. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0. You learn those numbers young. The jet-fuel smell thick in the air, the flame and smoke surrounding you, you can only get to 011 and that’s enough to make you foreign, to make you other, to make you Mexican. You take out your wallet and put an ID between your teeth so they can find you when it all collapses. Your flesh may burn but your teeth will remain and the ID will be there. It’s a fake ID. Nobody will ever know you died. Nobody will ever know you lived.

  CHAPTER 3

  Miami

  The city of Hialeah in Miami-Dade County is the last bit of U.S. soil on which Amelia Earhart stood before embarking on her doomed solo flight in 1937, disappearing in the Pacific Ocean somewhere near Howland Island. I’m about to go to Hialeah on a reporting trip, so I text this factoid to my mother. At fifty-three, she is in the middle of a feminist awakening and is usually eager to talk about feminist heroes to compare herself to—unlike my father, who compares me to those women instead. A few days later, she texts me a picture of a tiny pilot costume for a dog, saying she is at a white people’s pet boutique and she is about to buy my dog, Frankie, a leather jacket and matching pilot cap. Oh my god, I say.

  I never write about my mother. Why do you never write about me? my mother asks, a copy of The New York Times on her lap open to a two-page spread about my father. Of course I write about you, I say. You don’t, she says. I don’t, it’s true I don’t. The obvious answer to that is that I have daddy issues. (“Stop saying that,” my partner says. “It doesn’t mean what you think it means.”) My father was the one who worked outside the house for twenty-five years, so he was the one facing grueling labor conditions and racist abuse on the front lines in America. I thought my mother was protected somehow because she was in the home.

  And when she stepped out into the wild to work outside the home three years ago, she went to work for these white people who didn’t abuse her so I was like, okay, we’re okay. Working outside the home changed her, she became this whole new woman, emancipated and bold, and it caused problems at home. You always take your father’s side, she said, adiós. She was always hanging up on me. I am not taking my father’s side! I’m being objective! I scream into the phone, but she’s gone. She drinks organic kombucha, once mailed me a leather leash because she thought Frankie looked “homeless,” and has zero tolerance for my father’s temper, the third member of their marriage.

  I sometimes fantasize about my parents divorcing. It’d devastate my brother but that’s why I pay for his therapy. I’d be relieved. I’ve looked for houses in Havana where my dad wants to “retire” and I can maybe afford that, if I sell a book and TV show every few years, and keep my kidneys healthy and available. I imagine my mom would live with my brother, who will remain a Jehovah’s Witness, like our parents, and marry someone young and nice and equally interested in having two biological children. My brother sure does
love my mother, in a whole, pure, white-woman-at-a-farmer’s-market kind of way, but that’s because my mom didn’t leave him in Ecuador before he could speak, so there aren’t many things unsaid between them.

  I’ve always been super casual when people ask me about my parents having left me in Ecuador. That’s a bravado I’d like to keep on the official record but something else intrudes. I love my mom. She’s a hard worker. She’s a feminist. She’s kind to you if you’re 1) my partner or 2) a formerly abused dog. But we haven’t talked about her leaving me in Ecuador when I was a year and a half old. Sometimes I do adorable things like take pictures of myself chugging vodka bottles or pretending to down the contents of a pill bottle and send them to her with the caption “because you abandoned me” but, lately, in response to those jokes, she’s begun to suggest it was my dad’s fault. When I meet a toddler, I’m like, damn, I was a baby baby. When I am away from my partner and dog for a few days for work, and it’s hard, I wonder how they were able to do it for five years.

  I don’t blame either of them for it. I never have. What I’m describing to you is dirt extracted from a very tight pore. I don’t feel anything about being left on the day-to-day but I am told by mental health experts that it has affected me. And I fought that conclusion. I denied it. I wanted to be a genius. I wanted my mental illnesses to be purely biological. I wanted to have been born wild and crazy and weird and brilliant, writing math equations in chalk on a window. Instead, therapist after therapist told me I had attachment issues and that my mental illnesses were related to my childhood. I left those therapists. Ghosted them.

  But it’s not just those early years without my parents that branded me. It’s the life I’ve led in America as a migrant, watching my parents pursue their dream in this country and then having to deal with its carcass, witnessing the crimes against migrants carried out by the U.S. government with my hands bound. As an undocumented person, I felt like a hologram. Nothing felt secure. I never felt safe. I didn’t allow myself to feel joy because I was scared to attach myself to anything I’d have to let go of. Being deportable means you have to be ready to go at any moment, ready to go with nothing but the clothes on your body. I’ve learned to develop no relationship to anything, not to photos, not to people, not to jewelry or clothing or ticket stubs or stuffed animals from childhood. Sometimes to prove my ability to let go, I’ll write something long and delete it, or go on my phone and delete all the photos I have of happy memories. I’ve never loved a material object. When my parents took me home after my Harvard graduation, we took the Chinatown bus, and we each took one suitcase. If it didn’t fit, we threw it out. We threw out everything that wasn’t clothes.

  The U.S. government’s crimes against immigrants are beyond the pale and the whole world knows. At protests I’ve been to outside of courthouses and ICE offices, I’ve seen white people carry signs plastered with images of the drowned bodies of Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his toddler, Angie Valeria, on the banks of the Rio Grande. But when I was growing up, and throughout the Obama administration, these same crimes were happening, if on a different scale, and I’m not sure the same people cared. I felt crazy for thinking we were under attack, watching my neighbors disappear and then going to school and watching the nightly news and watching award shows and seeing no mention. I felt crazy watching the white supremacist state slowly kill my father and break my family apart. I would frantically tell everyone that there was no such thing as the American Dream but then some all-star immigrants around me who had done things “the right way” preached a different story and Americans ate that up. It all made me feel crazy. I also am crazy. Pero why? My diagnoses are borderline personality disorder, major depression, anxiety, and OCD. (I love diagnoses. Gives you the ability to read about yourself.) Researchers have shown that the flooding of stress hormones resulting from a traumatic separation from your parents at a young age kills off so many dendrites and neurons in the brain that it results in permanent psychological and physical changes. One psychiatrist I went to told me that my brain looked like a tree without branches.

  So I just think about all the children who have been separated from their parents, and there’s a lot of us, past and present, and some under more traumatic circumstances than others—like those who are in internment camps right now—and I just imagine us as an army of mutants. We’ve all been touched by this monster, and our brains are forever changed, and we all have trees without branches in there, and what will happen to us? Who will we become? Who will take care of us?

  * * *

  —

  I went to Miami in 2017, shortly after the House of Representatives voted 217 to 213 to replace the Affordable Care Act with a new piece of legislation that listed cesarean sections, rape, and depression as preexisting conditions. Experts estimated it would strip healthcare from twenty-three million Americans over the next decade. Miami could hardly afford the blow. Miami-Dade has the state’s largest number of employed yet uninsured adults, as well as record-setting rates of heart disease, diabetes, and HIV infection.

  Undocumented immigrants in Florida who do not have insurance have experiences that are not dissimilar from those of other uninsured people, but the key difference is that it is impossible for undocumented immigrants to purchase insurance, even if they can afford it. One of the bogeymen of the right, in this country or any Western country, is the image of the sick immigrant—the supposed strain on the healthcare system, the burden on emergency rooms and taxpayers. I cannot overstate how little interest I have in changing the minds of people who might believe this—I’d honestly rather swallow a razor blade than be expected to change the mind of a xenophobe. But I’m curious about the bogeyman so I thought to explore it.

  What I discovered was a story about illness and healing in migrant communities through the lens of women—caretakers and rebels. These women were also coincidentally like my mother, immigrant women married to immigrant men, mothers to immigrant and citizen children, looking back on decades of the American Dream and taking stock.

  During my first trip, they were kind, nurturing, supportive, and so proud of me. We kept in touch all year. I’m ashamed to say it, but I sometimes fantasized about one of them being my mom. You’re so beautiful and so smart! they’d text me with a flurry of heart emojis, and I’d compare that to my mother sending me pictures of herself in mink hats and vintage dresses, saying I needed to lose thirty pounds before her death so I could inherit her clothing. But when I visited the ladies in Miami a second time, a year later, they sounded more like my mom. They confided in me the same things she has confided in me. They were restless. They wanted more for their lives, and I couldn’t help them.

  * * *

  —

  Julieta and I meet at the corner of a construction site. The air is thick with dust, and against the grim heat and among the empty storefront windows stands a small coral building with a roof painted gold. A placard outside advertises Macondo, the local pharmacy.

  Julieta is thirty-nine years old and Nicaraguan, a big woman with the cheerful, paranoid manner of a debutante with a secret. The morning we see each other, she has her hair in a messy knot and is on her way to the beauty salon to get ready for her goddaughter’s quinceañera. She doesn’t talk about her children unless you specifically ask, and even then she offers the most succinct of answers. Her eldest daughter is twenty-two years old and a recipient of DACA. Her eleven-year-old daughter is an American citizen. Within the first few minutes of the first time we talked, a couple of weeks before my trip, she told me about having procured a cheap prescription for a yeast infection. On the phone, she was boisterous. In person, she is more subdued but warm. On her neck hangs a chain with a solid gold and ruby pendant of a salamander in honor of Luna, her pet salamander of seventeen years whom she saved from a pet store within days of arriving in the United States. Luna died a few months ago, and Julieta rests her hand on the pendant when she talks.

&nbs
p; Julieta gives me instructions before we go in. We need to be careful because Macondo is one of a handful of pharmacies in Miami where uninsured immigrants can purchase prescription medication at inexpensive prices and without a prescription, and the people who run it wouldn’t take kindly to questions from a stranger. These pharmacies run the clandestine operation from the back. “They know my face, I know their faces. They sell to me because of my accent. Whenever I need a medication that requires a prescription, I can get it there, though not very serious ones. They are very strict about some,” Julieta explains. She tells me of a Dominican pharmacy elsewhere in Miami that sells a drug that helps addicts cope with withdrawal without a prescription. “They know they’re doing something they shouldn’t be doing, but they understand the human necessity,” she says. “I have gone to them with my face swollen because of molar pain and they gave me something for the pain. I can go to Walgreens and they won’t give me something even if I’m dying in front of them.”

  The pharmacy is run by a woman around sixty years old, who wears her hair down and blow-dried straight and puts on thick eye makeup behind her wire-rimmed glasses—impractical choices. “They call her a doctor but she doesn’t do consultations,” says Julieta. I am not allowed to ask her questions.