The Making of a Dream

by Laura Wides-Muñoz

  At a progressive conference held in July in Las Vegas, Reid promised to bring the bill up if he could get sixty votes in the Senate. In the middle of his Q-and-A session, students who had been sitting quietly in caps and gowns stood up and silently protested what they saw as one more effort to stall. By late summer, Reid agreed to tack the proposal onto a military appropriations bill, although that version would fail.

  As Felipe and Juan watched the political process play out, they couldn’t help but grow excited to see other undocumented youths step up the pressure on lawmakers, but they also felt increasingly out of their element. They were not comfortable in the Washington environment, where the right political alliances were so important. They wanted to go back home and to the grassroots work they thrived on.

  The students’ tactics were working, though. More and more young immigrants were stepping in to take on the fight. And more veterans were coming out publicly for the DREAM Act. Even if the concept left a bad taste in their mouths because it excluded so many, they, too, could see the impact the young immigrants were having on both lawmakers and on the American public. Opposing a campaign led by telegenic young immigrants was not what political leaders wanted to do. As Frank Sharry had already realized, this was not a moment to miss. In cities across the country, older immigrant advocates, emboldened in part by the youths, now began to hold more sit-ins and protests for comprehensive reform, as well as increasingly for the DREAM Act.

  IN CALIFORNIA, Dario Guerrero, like most DREAMers, followed the congressional debates from afar, occasionally watching them on TV with his parents. But for the most part, he tried to ignore politics. It all seemed so far away from his daily life. He wasn’t the only one of his childhood friends who was undocumented, and though he didn’t advertise his status, it didn’t seem like a deep, dark secret either; it just was. More immediate were the college applications. The Internet told him his choices were simple: shoot for the moon, the handful of elite schools that could afford to offer full private scholarships, or go to community college, the cheapest option, paying for one class at a time. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology recruited him and even flew him out to visit the campus. But it quickly became apparent that it could not accept him without the right documentation. On that trip, he wandered over to the Harvard University campus. He remembered his teachers joking about how one day he might even go to Harvard. He hadn’t even known what it was back then, just somewhere important, yet the idea had embedded itself, floating in the back of his mind for years. Why not apply? He had nothing to lose. Dario searched for advice on applying as an undocumented student. Soon he connected with an online thread of other students in the same situation. For fun, Dario and a few buddies began documenting their research, playing around with his dad’s old camera, making a short video about their experience applying to college as undocumented immigrants. On a whim, he attached the film to his application. The university would know his status anyway; he might as well own it.

  Dario tried to tell himself it didn’t matter, tried not to care too much as he and his friends discussed immigration at lunch or while his parents watched the news. He asked his girlfriend, a US citizen, if she’d consider marrying him. She stalled. Something’s got to pass, he thought, watching the protests back east.

  NOT ALL YOUNG IMMIGRANTS were excited about the DREAM Act. Some 65,000 undocumented students were graduating from high school each year,18 but at best about 10 percent graduated from college—and two years of college was one of the requirements for citizenship under the DREAM Act; that or military service.19 Others had arrived in the country at too old an age to qualify for the proposal. Edgar Alejandro Aldana Viramontes was among them. He had arrived in California with his family from Guadalajara, Mexico, during the winter of 2003, just two months after his sixteenth birthday. When his family had settled near Pomona, California, about thirty miles east of Los Angeles, going to college had been the least of his worries. His family was among thousands drawn to the plentiful agriculture and construction work and the small-town feel of southeastern California, but life was far from easy.

  Alex, as he quickly became known at school, hoped that the move would improve things for his parents, whose industrial chemical business back home had floundered. He hoped it would end the fighting between them and the beatings his father inflicted mostly on his older brother and mother. Instead, things had gotten worse. Two years after they had overstayed their tourist visas, they were still living with an uncle and his wife, sharing two rooms. Alex’s father had found work in construction, but money was still tight. Alex’s older brother often stayed out all night. His little sister cried at school. His father easily flew into rages.

  Alex begged his mother to leave. She refused. Alex was small for his age, with shaggy black hair hanging over his eyes, shy yet determined, often lost in a book, dreaming of one day moving to Los Angeles. He threatened if his mother didn’t leave, he would. A school counselor at his sister’s school tried to intervene as well, encouraging Alex’s mother, Laura, to seek help as a victim of domestic violence.

  But Laura couldn’t believe anyone would help someone like her, an “illegal.” And as bad as things were, the situation was familiar. Leaving opened up the possibilities of even worse scenarios. She worried what would happen if her husband called the police to hunt her down. Most battered women in Southern California went first to an emergency shelter, then transitioned to low-cost long-term housing with help from the state and federal governments. As an undocumented immigrant, Laura didn’t qualify for that aid, nor did her Mexican-born children. Then one day, as his parents fought, Alex stepped in, and his father grabbed him by the neck. The next morning, Alex finally told his own school counselor what was going on, triggering action Laura couldn’t stop; she would have to leave her husband or risk having social workers come to the apartment and possibly take her children away.

  Mother and children made their exit the very next day, staying a night with a school official until a space opened up at a shelter an hour’s drive away in neighboring Riverside County.

  Alex spent his senior year of high school working full-time at night as a dishwasher in a Japanese restaurant to earn money for food and rent, often falling asleep at school the next day. Once a strong student, he no longer considered college his next step. He just needed to survive. Eventually he reconciled with his father and got a job in construction with him. And he did move to Los Angeles, finding work in HIV educational outreach to at-risk immigrants. It was through this work that it often fell to him to break the news to other young immigrants he met that the DREAM Act they had been hearing about on the radio might very well leave them out because they had arrived too late or had not graduated from high school. Alex increasingly resented the attention lavished on the valedictorian types. He wished he could see more young people like himself testifying in Congress, those who weren’t stars but who were working to support their families and contributing to the economy. Did his work to halt the spread of AIDS really have less value to the country than a two-year college degree in communications? What about the guys who had spent years building the San Bernardino and Pomona homes so many Californians were flocking to?

  BACK AT WASHINGTON-LEE HIGH SCHOOL, Hareth Andrade-Ayala was now a senior. Her adviser, Mr. Garcia, put Hareth and her friend Antonella in touch with activists he knew. In the fall of 2010, the girls organized a small group (made up mostly of boys who had crushes on Antonella) to volunteer for the growing DREAM Act campaign. They joined other more experienced organizers working the halls of Congress. The first day they walked up Constitution Avenue toward the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hareth swallowed as she stared up at the bronze doors. “I didn’t know you could just go in,” she whispered.

  She asked one of the leaders of her contingent what they were going to do. “A sit-in,” he told her. More and more students were adopting the practice of dropping into offices and threatening to stay until they could meet with staff, and to Hareth, the who
le scene seemed almost quaint. It was something she’d read about in her high school history books. They were going to the office of the junior senator from North Carolina, Kay Hagan, joining up with a few students from her state, and weren’t going to leave until she agreed to meet with them. Elected just two years before, Hagan was among some five Democratic senators still on the fence over the DREAM Act, and activists believed they could bring her to their side. Hagan was a former bank vice president, a centrist Democrat, and the niece of Florida’s last elected Democratic governor. But less than a year into her job, she was already under attack from groups backed by the Koch brothers, who, in addition to funding the American Legislative Exchange Council, were supporting the nascent Tea Party movement. Opponents of the president’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act had also begun amassing money to unseat her.

  Hagan wanted to be careful about alienating the state’s white conservative voters, many of them low- and middle-income earners, who increasingly saw the wave of new immigrants to North Carolina as a threat to their own livelihoods. Still, the freshman senator seemed open to discussion.

  The teens spent that first afternoon camped out in her lobby. Hagan’s staff was friendly and eventually agreed to hear out the students.

  “What am I supposed to say?” Hareth asked the organizer leading the sit-in.

  Tell your story.

  “What do you mean, tell my story?” she asked. That would take hours.

  The organizer’s response: make it shorter.

  Hareth was indignant. She’d never told her story publicly, and she wasn’t about to cry. She watched as several students recounted some of the most intimate details of their family histories to complete strangers. Some did cry. She was embarrassed for them. She was also in awe. The staffers were visibly moved and agreed to pass the message on to their boss. Hareth marveled at their success.

  So this is lobbying, she said to herself. I can do this. No problem.

  Only later would Hareth learn the staffers’ response was standard practice—often a polite way to nowhere. And only later would she begin to feel the toll it took on her to relive the worst moments of her family’s story again and again.

  7

  A MARRIAGE, A DEATH, AND A VOTE

  Marie Gonzalez walks to church on her wedding day, accompanied by her mother, Marina Morales Moreno, in Puntarenas, Costa Rica, November 2010. (COURTESY OF MARIE DEEL)

  Marie Gonzalez took a bus to Washington in September to lobby in support of Senator Reid’s DREAM Act push. As she stared out the bus window at the blur of flat midwestern farmland, she thought of how many trips she’d made to the nation’s capital. Maybe a dozen. There had been fewer in recent years. She had tried to focus on her studies at Westminster College. Money had gotten so tight her last year that she ended up sleeping on her friends’ dorm couches. Then came graduation. She had fallen hard for Chapin Deel, too. They had kept dating well after he graduated. Now, it felt strange to head once more to Washington. Coming from Jefferson, Missouri, she’d never had many nearby friends in the movement and had always felt some distance from the other young advocates who had learned the ropes locally and often traveled to national meetings in tight groups. That distance was more acute this time. She watched the new crop of undocumented leaders flooding Washington with both joy and sadness. Seeing people like Gaby Pacheco take charge was thrilling. She wanted to stand up and cheer. But there was guilt, too. Soon she would no longer be among them.

  Nearly a year before, in November 2009, Marie’s cell phone had rung as she sat in her cubicle at the Farmers Insurance call center. She still daydreamed about someday putting her political science degree to use working in Washington or as a social worker or finally applying to law school. But for now she was just glad to be able to earn a paycheck.

  It was a cool November afternoon. Chapin was on his way to pick her up from work, but they would have to take a detour, he warned her. A friend was having car trouble thirty minutes away in Kansas City, and he needed a lift. Marie sighed. Chapin’s buddy had roommates. Why couldn’t they pick him up?

  Once again DHS had delayed her work permit renewal, which she also needed to renew her driver’s license. The work permit had finally come, but she was still waiting to get her license. The government rarely gave her an explanation for the delays. Sometimes the work authorization renewal took a couple of months, sometimes more than six.

  The upshot was that she had to depend on Chapin and other friends for a ride. There was no easy public transportation in Jefferson City, and unlike many undocumented immigrants across the country, Marie refused to drive without a license. Grudgingly, she agreed to tag along.

  She tapped her pen on her desk and looked around at the other cubicles, where a dozen or so employees served as the front line for incoming claims. Chapin had helped get her the job, and the work allowed her to send money back to her parents in Costa Rica. Her bosses didn’t seem to mind her precarious status.

  She imagined the simplicity of her colleagues’ lives. If they needed to drive to work, they could drive to work. They wanted to go to an R-rated movie or go out with friends and order a beer? Easy, they pulled out their ID. Sometimes it felt easier to mourn not having a driver’s license than not being able to see her parents for more than four years. Now when she talked to them, they barely ever asked about serious things. Marie wanted so much to tell them about her job searches, the gnawing question about her and Chapin’s future, but lately it was the latest local gossip they talked about, as if anything real were too painful a reminder of everything in her life they were missing.

  Chapin arrived late and was preoccupied. They barely spoke on the ride to the city. Marie hunched in her seat, still thinking about the permit, work, her parents. Finally Chapin pulled into the parking lot of a red, wood-paneled Kansas City steak house called the Golden Ox. It was a place where ranchers had once gathered after selling their cattle at the Livestock Exchange Building next door. Now the historic restaurant drew a mix of old-timers and hipsters. Marie fumed. This was supposed to have been the restaurant they’d one day go to for a special occasion, not to meet Chapin’s careless friend.

  She got out, slammed the car door, and strode toward the restaurant. Instinctively she stopped, waiting for Chapin to catch up with her. But he hadn’t moved. Marie turned back. Chapin stood there with a nervous grin, eyebrows raised in silent entreaty. As she approached his side of the car, he bent down on one knee and held a small box open toward her. Marie shook her head.

  Oh, my God! Yes!

  It was time. No more waiting. Marie threw her arms around him.

  Chapin had visited Marie’s parents, Marvin and Marina, in Costa Rica over the summer. He had wanted to meet his future parents-in-law and get their blessing. It was strange to go without Marie, be presented to her entire family alone with his rough Spanish. But they didn’t have another option. Marina and Marvin had met him at the airport and taken to him immediately. Marina had even given Chapin the diamond that had come loose from her own engagement ring. He’d combined that one in a band with a small diamond from his grandmother’s wedding ring, leaving space for yet a third stone, a new one, something of their own.

  The Golden Ox wasn’t the kind of place that offered champagne, but the owner comped the couple a small bottle of wine. Over dinner, Marie laughed as Chapin explained that he’d waited so long, he really didn’t think he could wait another minute to get to the restaurant. For years she had resisted marrying Chapin for status. They’d broken up several times. Once she’d even given up and bought a one-way ticket to Costa Rica before Chapin had talked her into canceling it. She had hated the idea Chapin or anyone else would think they were together for convenience. But also, she had been only nineteen when she’d met him. She’d wanted to be sure. She kept hoping maybe she’d be able to get permanent residency and then marry him.

  Yet each year it seemed less and less likely that her deferment would be renewed. The last time she’d reapplied, h
er work permit had been delayed by nearly six months, making her unable to get any real job and leaving her daily life in flux. In the spring of 2009, she’d even started to look for work in Costa Rica. But once again, at the last minute, and thanks to yet another letter from Durbin, DHS had come through just days before the Fourth of July and given her a reprieve.1

  As she approached her twenty-third birthday, her opposition to marriage began to seem silly. Who else was she going to spend her life with?

  They decided to get married in Missouri as soon as possible. Given that the spousal green card process could take between six and nine months, they used the time to organize a proper Costa Rican church wedding, which her parents could attend. They chose Thanksgiving 2010, so friends and family might be able to fly in and join them.

  Now, nearly a year later, the invitations had been sent, and their US friends and families had bought their tickets. Still Marie’s application had not been approved, and her temporary visa had yet to arrive. She couldn’t leave the country without risking that the application would be denied. The case was complicated because even though she’d been granted a temporary reprieve each year, she still had a pending deportation order. She called the DHS hotline, but no one seemed to be able to give her a clear answer.