The Undocumented Americans Read online

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  A year passes: I gain seventy pounds, eluding medical explanation. Miami is ravaged by Hurricanes Irma and Maria. ICE stops Greyhound buses and Amtrak trains to ask travelers for proof of citizenship. The #MeToo movement erupts. We buy special glasses for the first solar eclipse since 1918. (I stare directly into the sun because I’m drawn to self-harm.) White nationalists and neo-Nazis terrorize Charlottesville, Virginia, with motherfucking tiki torches and run a car into a young counterprotester named Heather Heyer, killing her. Trump says there were “some very fine people on both sides.” My father starts disappearing on weekends, supposedly to go watch volleyball games at a local park, and my mom is too tired to deal, until he doesn’t come home one weekend, and she and my brother call asking me to intervene.

  My mother my mother my mother. My mother is a result of her mother’s rape. Her mother abandoned her with her mother, who beat my mother with a vengeance and gave her permanent eye damage. When she was twelve she moved in with her very wealthy aunt and uncle and their three kids in the capital, away from the poor rural town where she was living with her grandmother. She adapted very well to the life of a rich adoptee. She was class president four years in a row and first in her class. She hung out with the popular girls. She loved her friend Fernanda, who wore blue jeans ripped at the knee, which revealed just a sliver of the perfect tan year-round.

  When my mother’s biological father approached her at her high school graduation in Ecuador to say he was proud of her and ask that she take his last name, she told him to fuck off and kept her mother’s maiden name. She idolized Hillary Clinton from the moment she laid eyes on her, which was shortly after a young Bill Clinton shook hands with my mother at a campaign stop in Brooklyn. When Hillary wore headbands, my mother wore headbands. When Hillary forgave her husband, my mother forgave my dad, too. When I was in the second grade, I got an 85 on a math test, and I hid the test from my parents. When my father found it, he took me on a car ride and explained that as a cabdriver he made a hundred dollars on good days and sometimes regardless of how hard he worked he would make fifteen dollars on a bad day, and it didn’t make him any less of a person. My mother took me aside and asked me who the first man on the moon was. Neil Armstrong, I told her. Now name the second man on the moon. I don’t know, I said. Nobody does, she said. If you’re not number one, you’re nothing.

  My parents’ apartment is railroad style, which means there are no doors. We have always had to shed our “outside clothes” because “outside clothes” are contaminated. My mother made us shower after being outside. When I was a child, and other children entered our home, she had them put on long socks and covered the couch with a cut-open trash bag before they could sit on it. She has taste outside her means. She’ll starve for a week if it means she can buy herself a Chanel eye shadow. She likes to be photographed in front of tall buildings so she can emphasize her slim figure. She drinks her coffee with oat milk, no sugar. My father accuses her of secretly hating her coffee that dark but sticking to it because it makes her seem white. Never let a man tell you what you like or what you don’t like, she told me on the phone the other day when I asked her for life advice.

  I interviewed her for this book. She listed all of her life’s regrets. I itemize them because she itemized them for me:

  Marrying young.

  Having a kid young.

  Leaving me in Ecuador.

  Not finishing college.

  Not working out of the house when she was raising me.

  Not having a career.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “You’ve been such a good mom. I wouldn’t be where I am without you. You made me.”

  “I understand I’ve been a good mother, but I want to know what it’d be like to be a successful woman on a personal level, not on the level of a mother,” she responds.

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  Since we met, Esme has become a surrogate for motherly warmth. We text regularly. I am genuinely happy to see her again when I visit Miami a year later. I ask Esme to meet me at her favorite restaurant, an Italian place in a fashionable shopping district in downtown Miami. Everyone there is Cuban. Esme orders squash ravioli and a glass of orange juice. We talk about the new activist group she cofounded and presides over as vice president, a local group of mostly housekeepers called Mujeres en Solidaridad. They hold know-your-rights workshops and teach domestic workers about gender-based violence.

  She talks to me about the disappeared. All Latin Americans know about the disappeared. The period of the late 1970s and 1980s was a dark time in South America. It was a time of military dictatorships in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. The governments kidnapped civilians and took them to undisclosed locations and tortured and killed them. Their bodies were never found. Their bones were never found. In Argentina, in just seven years’ time, the government disappeared about thirty thousand people. They woke up one morning and went about their days and then they vanished without a trace. So in Argentina, their mothers formed a group called the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. They wore white scarves around their heads and marched two by two in front of the presidential palace every Thursday afternoon at 3:30 P.M. holding pictures of their disappeared children. They still do it every Thursday afternoon. These mothers are legendary. They have been marching for forty years.

  Esme is undocumented and Uruguayan. She grew up during the dictatorship of Gregorio Álvarez. Some women in Mujeres en Solidaridad are Argentine, and they feel that in their adopted country of America, undocumented immigrants are being disappeared into the silence when they go into their routine check-ins at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services offices in nearby Miramar. The immigrants are treated like livestock, they don’t allow them to use the bathroom or sit on the floor during days-long waits, and they often just ship them to detention centers, never to be seen again. So Esme and some other ladies formed a subgroup called You Are Not Alone, and they stand across the street from the Miramar USCIS offices and invite immigrants in line to approach them for coffee, water, doughnuts, ponchos, and phone chargers. Esme saw a woman give birth waiting in line in hundred-degree weather. We see you, and you won’t get away with this! the women yell at officers.

  Esme’s father was a revolutionary under the Álvarez dictatorship. At eight o’clock in the evening, when the country went dark for curfew, people came over to her house to plot by candlelight against the dictatorship. She still feels panic when she hears helicopters overhead, remembering being shoved under tables or pushed into shallow canals when they heard choppers. “Of course, the only thing that matched my father’s revolutionary spirit was his violent temper, which was worse when he drank,” she says. “His beatings were barbaric. I’ve been a survivor ever since I was a baby. I was born premature and I was born a girl. He wanted a boy.”

  His beatings would leave her nearly bedridden. The last time he laid a finger on her was when she was nineteen years old. She grabbed a knife and confronted him with it. “That’s when I realized I was capable of anything,” she says. She had boyfriends who abused her psychologically and sexually, but she didn’t recognize it as domestic violence until she began volunteering at shelters for women. “When I began leading workshops about abusive relationships, I was like oh my god.” She’s never told her husband about her experiences with sexual assault because she’s afraid of what he’ll say. “You know men,” she tells me. “He’ll ask me what I was wearing or something. I don’t trust him not to say that. So there’s no catharsis in the home.”

  I tell her my parents are having a moment.

  “You know what?” she says. “I don’t have the spirit of a homemaker. I wasn’t born for the kitchen. I hate household chores. When I was little, I used to tell my mother, I wasn’t born for this, I was born to be a musician. And she’d tell me, Even violinists have to cut potatoes, and she’d send me to the kitchen. I loved t
o study. I loved to travel. I’m ambitious. I’m fascinated by the world. But I had an accident at the factory where I worked and after that I stayed at home while my husband worked, and when that’s your dynamic, you have to earn your keep. Food has to be on the table. Laundry has to be done. Your mouth has to be shut. I always rebel, but then there’s the guilt. Rebelling has its price.”

  We order dessert. She orders a tiramisu and shows me pictures of her recent trip to New York in support of a boycott and protest by female agricultural workers in Florida. Esme participated in a hunger strike—okay, it was more of a fast—and she’s still on a high from the adrenaline. She couldn’t fly there, because she doesn’t have a state ID, so she took a chartered bus, with other undocumented women like her. She was scared every minute of the twenty hours she was on the bus that ICE was going to stop them. When she finally got out of the bus and was able to breathe in the freezing New York air, she felt alive again. She seems almost hysterical as she tells me this.

  She leans into me. “The truth is that to me the immigration advocacy is almost secondary,” she confides. “We’ve helped shy women who clean other people’s homes and pick up after their husbands to leave their homes and deliver press conferences, do TV interviews, have meetings with congresspeople. We had a gala, and I said, ‘Ladies, you don’t have to go smelling like Clorox. Be glamorous!’ And they did. You should have seen us, with our hair done and our gowns, rubbing elbows with lawyers and doctors and politicians. We get women out of the home and give them a reason to exist.”

  I wonder what it would take for my mom to feel alive again, to have a reason to exist. She only gets dressed up to go to the Kingdom Hall and I usually tease her like, “Mom, Jesus thinks you look great, that’s enough highlighter,” but I know she’s actually dressing up for church because she has nowhere else to go other than work and it makes me feel guilty.

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  That night, I travel to Miramar to see a mambo named Naomie whom Jacob recommended. She is his spiritual sister, and she says she can give me a cleansing treatment to protect me against ICE—for a price. This sounds to me like a notario, someone who claims they can fix people’s immigration papers for a steep price but is not licensed to practice law. They are vultures in the immigrant community.

  Miramar is about a half hour away from the hotel where I am staying. The hotel is inside Dolphin Mall, one of Miami-Dade’s largest malls, which is packed with outlet stores and Cuban men manning As Seen on TV kiosks who try to guess your country of origin (“Mami, you look Peruvian, are you Peruvian?”) and offer to straighten your hair with a mini ceramic flat iron. I take a stroll through the mall every day, and every day I see people taking paraplegic family members out for a window-shopping excursion and paletas, and against the backdrop of loud club beats it makes me sad. I’m just this sad bitch.

  In the cab, I get a text from Jacob telling me to bring a bottle of Tito’s and a pack of Newport cigarettes. He says he’s coming too. Oh, cool, what are you getting done? I ask. “Who’s going to translate for you and how are you going to understand what the spirit is going to say to you?” he says. Naomie’s apartment complex is checkered with lush grass; ducks happily peek their heads out of bushes and newts and geckos scurry up and down walls. She doesn’t live far from the USCIS check-in facility that Esme told me about, the site of the abuses against immigrants. The cleanse costs $277.77.

  I meet Jacob outside Naomie’s apartment. He makes me feel safe. He has a strong, grounding presence and he smells like cigarettes. Naomie interviews me before the rite. She asks me what afflicts me. Oh man. I tell her that I write about immigration and worry I can’t protect the people I write about. I would like to protect them, or at least not have nightmares about ICE. That’s true and feels like a safe thing to share, although I don’t go into detail. As a rule, I try to not tell strangers my nightmares unless I’m being paid by the word.

  I’m not sure what to think. I’m curious about vodou because of its anticolonial roots but I also believe an immigration cleanse is bullshit because nobody can protect anybody from ICE, and this cleanse is expensive and the Haitians who would ask for an immigration cleanse in Miami right now are probably scared shitless about losing TPS. Is Naomie a notario? Maybe. But maybe one with powers.

  Naomie writes down some notes on a square of white paper. This will be my plea to the spirit she will invoke. She is barefoot and her toenails are painted bright yellow. The apartment is very hot, and my mascara melts and gathers on my bottom eyelashes. There are two chairs facing each other. Naomie sits in one; I sit in the other. A large piece of red silk is laid out on the floor, along with white candles, a set of tcha-tcha rattles (kind of like maracas wrapped in colorful beads), the notepaper with my plea to the spirit, and various huge bottles of alcohol. A gallon jug of Tito’s Vodka stuffed with hot peppers. A bottle of perfume. The requested pack of Newports. Naomie powders her face with a chalk-white powder. Jacob is seated beside Naomie and begins chanting in Creole and French, and Naomie closes her eyes. The air gets still and then she collapses and begins to shake. Her eyes roll to the back of her head. Then she sits upright again, and she opens her eyes and it’s like she’s this new person. That’s because, Jacob says, she has been inhabited by a male spirit. She slouches on her chair, leaning back with swagger and her legs apart, and lights a cigarette. (That’s another thing about vodou. Men are often inhabited by female spirits and women by male spirits. Vodou spirits are said to protect and nurture queer people, unlike Christian denominations that persecute members of the LGBTQ community in Haiti.) Her eyes are black black black, and her powdered white face has taken on the form of a mask. She speaks to me through Jacob, who translates between English and Creole.

  The spirit’s name is Emmanuel. He is one of Naomie’s ancestors. He takes a swig of his favorite drink and offers some to Jacob. Jacob takes a swig, then coughs a lot. I drink a tiny little bit. It tastes like gasoline smells. Naomie makes me wash my hands in perfume, then moves the chair aside, and I kneel on the red silk sheet as she blows smoke all over me—when the smoke is blown in my face, I exhale instead of inhaling, I’m not getting dizzy—and rubs perfume on my neck and back. They light the piece of paper with my plea on fire and combine the ashes with the spirit’s favorite drink. They ask me to take one swig from the bottle in every cardinal direction, and I tell Jacob to tell Emmanuel that I didn’t have lunch and too much alcohol would make me throw up. They put the drink in a water bottle and say to drink it when I get home after I put some food in my stomach. The spirit asks me if I am worried about anybody in particular. I tell him yes, many people in particular. After a few back-and-forths, Jacob says Emmanuel has offered to turn me into a protective shield, and that he will offer me guidance via dreams, déjà vu, the way the wind blows, the flutter of my heart, and hunches.

  The vodou spirit wants to know if I’m satisfied. He wants to know how I’m willing to show that I’m satisfied, how much his offered protection against ICE means to me. I take this to mean the mambo wants me to put a price on how much this cleansing meant to me by paying more than the $277.77. I tell them I only brought $280 in cash, but that I was a writer and thus, my words being currency—the worst pickup line in the world—I offer to recite for the spirit, Emmanuel, a poem. I know some Emily Dickinson poems by heart, I tell him. They’re love poems but they’re not about a boy, they’re about Death, I tell him. Jacob takes a long time to explain this to the spirit, and Emmanuel, chalk-white and boozy, makes a face, aghast, then another face—disgusted. He does not want me to recite a poem. I know they were just asking me for more money. Notario shit. A few months later, Jacob texts me out of the blue. He needs me to loan him some money. He doesn’t explain why, and when I tell him I don’t even lend money to family, he stops responding.

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  Salome Allende is a friend of Esme’s, a fellow member of the domestic worker
advocacy group Mujeres en Solidaridad. She is forty-eight years old and Argentine. Her husband died of brain cancer in 2012 after being turned away by every local hospital they approached because he was uninsured. Overnight, she became the family’s sole breadwinner.

  When we speak on the phone a few weeks before my first visit, Salome cries, puts her hand on the mouthpiece to try to block the sound of it, and tells me she wants to show me the notebook her dead husband kept during his last weeks alive to keep track of his treatments. After we hang up, I text her U.S. Census data showing that children of immigrants have higher rates of college and postgraduate education graduation than other groups, and she says my texts make her feel good. She has four children, one of whom has DACA. I am a one-trick pony, unable to comfort with anything other than grades.

  Salome is tall, with straight dark-brown hair and the intense feminine air I associate with perfumed talcum powder. She has been in the United States for seventeen years, working mostly as a housekeeper for hotels and apartments. She has four pugs: fourteen-year-old Tobin and her three puppies, Megan, Alex, and Ashlyn, named for members of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team. “I like to lie down on the couch and let them climb all over me,” she says. She sleeps curled on her side with Tobin at her chest, Megan on the backs of her knees, and Alex on her back. Ashlyn has been staying with her daughter.

  Salome was fifteen and sheltered when she met Harrison, a lone Argentine. He was a year older. His parents were not around, which led him to a fierce and early independence. Salome describes her own parents as authoritarians who had two expectations of her: go to school and return home to take care of her younger siblings, which meant no boyfriends or even friends. But Harrison drew her in. “Meeting him was like a soap opera,” she says. After the two dated secretly for a year, Harrison tried to talk to her parents but they wouldn’t listen. So she ran away with him and they got married. “In retrospect, they just wanted me to study, like any parents would. I thought it was love at the time, but it was an escape,” she says. “My own kids don’t know that story,” she adds, sounding surprised by her own words. “They always ask me how we met and I tell them their dad was taking a stroll when he passed me standing in a doorway. I just don’t want them to do the same thing.”