by Joshua Davis
Midway through Cristian’s freshman year, Dean Martin, an Arizona state senator, sponsored Proposition 300, an effort to extend Proposition 200’s ban on public services for undocumented immigrants to education. The referendum sought to prevent state colleges and universities from offering reduced in-state tuition to undocumented residents who’d grown up in Arizona. “Arizona is currently giving away millions of your tax dollars as subsidies to illegals,” Martin wrote in a ballot argument sent to voters. “U.S. citizens from other states attending Arizona schools have to pay the full cost of tuition. However, citizens of foreign countries, who break the law to enter Arizona illegally, are given taxpayer subsidized tuition … It’s not fair; it’s not right.”
Russell Pearce was an outspoken proponent of the new measure. “Free state services for all takes away the incentive for illegal aliens to become full citizens and legitimate members of American society,” Pearce wrote in support of Proposition 300. “It is vital that we spend our tax dollars on helping Arizonans and not aid and abet illegal aliens.”
On November 7, 2006, Proposition 300 passed with 71 percent support. Cristian’s tuition quadrupled as a result. Normally, one year of residency in Arizona would qualify a student for in-state tuition. Cristian had lived in the state since the age of five but was now deemed to be an out-of-state student. His first-semester tuition was about $2,000, but the next semester was now going to cost roughly $8,000. To get through the remaining three and a half years of college, he would need $56,000. His share of the scholarship money would get him only halfway through to a degree. If he took only two classes, he wouldn’t trigger the tuition increase, but the mechanical-engineering department required students to take a full load of classes to remain in the program. It seemed hopeless. He decided to drop out.
Technically, he should have returned to Mexico. Once there, he could apply for a visa, though if he admitted that he had stayed in the United States beyond his eighteenth birthday, he would be banned from reentering the country for years. He hadn’t been in Mexico since he was a young child: it was a foreign country to him. He couldn’t bring himself to leave the United States.
For the next five years, Cristian took intermittent courses at Gateway Community College. He found work at Home Depot and was assigned to the floor-and-wall department, where he helped customers order carpets and blinds. When someone bought a particularly large order of tile, he would walk in front of the forklift waving a flag to clear a path down the aisles.
At home, he set up a small laboratory in the corner of his room. He bought a soldering iron for thirty dollars and kept his eye out for deals at Home Depot. When two hundred feet of doorbell wire went on sale for three dollars, he bought himself a spool and brought it home. Most nights, he stayed up late, inventing new machines from scavenged parts. He found a broken guitar on the street, repaired it, and made a sound-effects pedal for it. He designed a new wheel that could rotate in any direction. He kept a gallon of muriatic acid beside his bed to etch circuit boards. At night, amid the smell of solder and machine oil, he felt most happy.
IN MAY 2006, Lorenzo walked up to the stage in the auditorium at Carl Hayden to receive his diploma. He was the first member of his family to graduate from high school. It should have been a happy day. At one time, Principal Ybarra was on the verge of expelling him. Now he was a nationally recognized robotics star. But as Lorenzo shook hands with Ybarra onstage and accepted the diploma, he scanned the crowd. His father hadn’t shown up.
Lorenzo tamped down his feelings and tried to focus on his future. With his share of the scholarship money, he enrolled full-time in Phoenix College’s Culinary Studies program and went on to receive an associate’s degree after two years. Luis also went to cooking school, attending the Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in nearby Scottsdale. Together, the two friends formed Neither Here, Nor There, a catering company that specialized in Mexican-fusion dining. They started with their mothers’ recipes but revamped them, turning a traditional green mole sauce into a mole pesto by adding basil, pine nuts, and cream. They catered weddings, church retreats, baby showers, and quinceañeras. It was fun but intermittent, and both had to get steadier jobs. Luis found work as a night-shift janitor at the federal courthouse in downtown Phoenix. From nine at night until five in the morning, he wandered the halls of justice with a trash cart and buffed the marble floors. Lorenzo got a job as a dishwasher at St. Francis, an upscale restaurant in central Phoenix.
Lorenzo’s added income wasn’t enough to save his family’s home and, in 2009, Lorenzo handed the keys over to the Realtor who had bought the property. The guy walked through the house and was astounded by the state of poverty the family had been living in. The building was poorly built to begin with, but now the walls were discolored from years of use. The Realtor got the distinct impression that bugs were crawling on him and hurriedly left. On his way home, he bought a bottle of rubbing alcohol and doused his legs and feet. He couldn’t imagine how anyone would live there. But to Lorenzo, it was his home.
While the kids from Carl Hayden struggled to get by, the second-place winners of the 2004 MATE competition excelled. Thaddeus Stefanov-Wagner, the student who had rebuilt MIT’s electronics in a week, landed a job as a mechanical engineer at Bluefin Robotics. The company was founded by MIT alumni and built self-piloting ROVs for commercial, military, and scientific customers. Jordan Stanway, the team leader in 2004, got a Ph.D. in oceanography from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and builds underwater robots for the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Other team members went on to work at NASA and ExxonMobil. They were all exceptionally talented students and deserved to do well.
Meanwhile, in Phoenix, Lorenzo’s dishwashing abilities impressed his superiors, who promoted him to prep cook and then line cook. On a typical Friday night at the restaurant, the airy dining room fills with well-dressed patrons. There are exposed roof beams, rough-hewn brick and concrete walls, and a roll-up, see-through garage door. Like many hip restaurants, it feels as if someone spent a lot of time and money to make it look rustic and down-trodden.
The patrons tend to ignore the cooks, who are clearly visible in the open kitchen. Lorenzo stands there for hours every day roasting salmon and pork chops. He’s also responsible for the prosciutto-fig-and-goat flatbread and the Moroccan meatballs. He sends out dozens of plates every day for customers who appreciate the pleasant tang in the chile verde sauce and the crunch of the stuffed peppers. They eat the food never knowing the history of the twenty-five-year-old robotics expert who cooked it.
IN FEBRUARY 2005—before the response to the Wired article provided him with enough money to start college—Oscar stopped by a friend’s house in West Phoenix and met the guy’s cousin. Karla Perez was visiting from El Mirage, a town northwest of Phoenix, where she was a junior at Dysart High School. Oscar couldn’t stop watching her. She was only sixteen, but her pencil-thin eyebrows made her look older, and she had a half smile that seemed to say, I know what you’re up to and I’m not buying it. Oscar was smitten.
For her part, Karla fell for Oscar immediately. She appreciated the way he dressed—button-up shirts with no wrinkles, polished leather shoes. He looked serious and respectable even though he was only eighteen. She watched as Oscar and his cousin raced remote-control cars down the street. Oscar seemed so sure of himself, so confident, even when horsing around. “This is a man who is going places,” she thought.
That night, they piled into the friend’s yellow Mustang convertible to meet up with some friends. Oscar ended up in the back with Karla. Somebody handed him a camcorder and told him to record the evening. Oscar leaned out the back and started taping. When they hit a bump, Karla instinctively reached up and grabbed his butt, pulling him back in by the pocket. It was awkward and funny. They both laughed.
Over the next few months, both continued to make excuses to visit Karla’s cousin’s house, where they knew they’d see each other. Karla’s family approved of Oscar and encour
aged the relationship. “That’s the type of guy we like,” Karla’s aunt told her. Somehow, when it was time to drive Karla back across town, everybody else in the family would suddenly be busy. Oscar would find himself driving her twenty miles back to El Mirage. It was nice, at least until his car broke down. He didn’t have the money to fix it, which slowed the nascent romance.
In April 2005, Karla tried to get things back on track by asking Oscar if he would like to take her to prom. She was sure he would say yes. In her mind, it was going to be the night they kissed and started dating. They would get married, have kids, and always look back on the night as the start of their relationship. Unfortunately, Oscar said he couldn’t go.
“What?” Karla demanded. She was hurt, suspicious, and angry.
“I can’t afford to take you,” Oscar said. “And if I can’t pay for it, I can’t go.”
Karla was disappointed but also loved him more for it. Oscar’s integrity was one of the things that drew her to him. Though she was a U.S. citizen, she knew Oscar was in the country illegally. She also knew that he struggled with the predicament that he found himself in. His parents had brought him here when he was a child, and he had grown up as an Arizonan. Legally, he was now supposed to leave America for a country he barely knew. He could then apply for a green card once he was back in Mexico, but in his budding relationship with Karla he had found yet another reason to stay.
Karla decided to go to her prom anyway—it was her big night after all—but she skipped out after a couple of hours and found Oscar at a small Mexican restaurant called El Pitic, near the airport. She was wearing her prom dress—a luxurious, white, frilly thing. She looked radiant amid the discolored ceiling tiles of the strip-mall restaurant. They left together and, later that night, at a friend’s house, kissed for the first time. Seven months later, they were married.
THE MONEY SENT in by Wired readers allowed Oscar to enroll full-time at Arizona State University starting in the fall of 2005. He decided to major in mechanical engineering and poured himself into his course work. It was intellectually challenging, but he felt detached from the real world. Fundamentally, he missed building things. He assumed that the university would have a robotics team, but to his surprise there wasn’t one.
Carl Hayden had trained Oscar well. To start a team, he needed an adviser, so he quickly scheduled a meeting with Antonio Garcia, a professor in ASU’s school of engineering. Oscar explained how formative his robotics experiences had been. Competitions were a great way to help students apply their classroom learning. Plus, it was just fun.
“How can I help?” Garcia said.
“I’d like a grant to form a team.”
It was easy to say yes to someone like Oscar. By the end of the meeting, the ASU RoboDevils were born with the support of the engineering department. The team’s success would spawn other robotics teams at the university, including an all-women’s robotics squad. But, at the outset in 2005, it was just Oscar and a handful of other mechanical-engineering students.
By his sophomore year, Oscar had established himself as a standout student leader. He was the captain of the RoboDevils and traveled to high schools around Phoenix to talk to kids about forming their own robotics teams. He had been featured on ABC’s Nightline program, discussing his robotics accomplishments and immigration challenges. Karla was also pregnant with their first child. Everything seemed to be going right in his life.
But nothing could change the fact that he was still an immigrant with no visa or permanent residency. Even though he was married to a U.S. citizen and would soon have a daughter who would also be a U.S. citizen, the fact that he had stayed in the country past his eighteenth birthday marked him. This doomed any residency or citizenship claim he could make.
The political atmosphere also complicated his life as Proposition 300 threatened to end his college career early. The referendum had succeeded in driving Cristian out of school, but Cristian was just one of thousands of new freshman. He didn’t stand out yet. Oscar had already distinguished himself at the university, and a consortium of groups rallied to fund his education. The Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University and Chicanos por la Causa chipped in money, as did Luis, who allocated a portion of his scholarship money to Oscar’s education. Luis was attending the Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts and wasn’t going to need all the money, so he gave his remaining share to Oscar. By the end of his sophomore year, Oscar had commitments to fund his remaining two years at ASU.
On May 13, 2009, President Obama stepped onto the stage at Sun Devil Stadium to give the graduation speech for ASU’s fiftieth commencement. The stadium was jammed with more than seventy thousand people. It was the largest graduation ceremony in American history. The president’s arrival was such a draw, students were reportedly scalping their tickets on Craigslist for thirty-packs of Bud Light.
To Oscar, the idea of missing his own, hard-earned graduation for some beer was laughable. Though it was hot—the temperature reached 110 in the late afternoon and a dozen people were rushed to the hospital—Oscar looked sharp and fresh in a crisp blue button-up shirt, a classic black gown, and a cap with a yellow tassel. He was ready to graduate.
Part of his excitement was due to a secret. He hadn’t told Karla or his parents that he was one of three seniors out of a class of more than nine thousand to receive “special honors” as an outstanding member of the class of 2009. The graduation organizers had reserved a spot for Oscar near Obama. When the commencement began, Christine Wilkinson, the university’s senior vice president, took the podium and, to Karla’s amazement, called on Oscar to stand up in front of President Obama and the entire seventy-thousand-person crowd.
Oscar stood with a giant, embarrassed smile.
“Oh my God,” Karla shrieked from the grandstands. “That’s my husband!”
“In the spring of 2004, Oscar and his three teammates took it all,” Wilkinson said. She described Oscar’s success in Santa Barbara, noting that his team triumphed due to their “ingenuity, positive outlook, and willingness to work hard.”
“That’s my husband!” Karla shrieked again.
“He is known as a leader, the motivator of his team.” Wilkinson cited his desire to enlist but noted that an “immigration technicality” had derailed both his education and military career. Robotics, she said, helped his flagging spirits during that time and had kept him focused on his education despite the challenges. Now he had crossed the finish line.
“He will graduate with a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering,” Wilkinson said as the crowd cheered and the president clapped approvingly. “Congratulations, Oscar.”
After an introduction from ASU’s president, Obama took the podium and told the seniors that they were entering a world of “upheaval.” Two wars were ongoing and the financial crisis was causing turmoil around the world. But he wanted his audience to know that there was hope.
“I know starting your careers in troubled times is a challenge,” Obama said. “But it is also a privilege. Because it’s moments like these that force us to try harder, to dig deeper, and to discover gifts we never knew we had—to find the greatness that lies within each of us. So don’t ever shy away from that endeavor. Don’t stop adding to your body of work. I can promise that you will be the better for that continued effort, as will this nation that we all love.”
Oscar listened intently. He was now twenty-two years old and had spent a decade in the United States. He had an American wife and an American daughter, and had built a life in Phoenix. But that made him more vulnerable than ever, as he risked losing everything he loved by being deported. He might be graduating with a valuable degree in mechanical engineering, and the president of the United States might have applauded his accomplishments, but Oscar was still a hunted man.
He decided to do what Obama had asked of the class of 2009, to not shy away from finding his own greatness. He decided to deport himself.
ON SEPTEMBER 1, 2009, Osc
ar walked back into Mexico for the first time in ten years. The Greyhound that brought him to El Paso faded away behind him as he walked across the bridge leading to Juárez, Mexico. Below, the Rio Grande was a sickly black trickle. The Mexicans knew better than to call it grand. For years, farmers on both sides of the border had siphoned off much of the water. That it still existed at all was a surprise. In Mexico, it was called the Río Bravo—the Brave River.
Karla came with Oscar and left the baby with her mother. She wanted to support him, though she was nervous. In 2009, Juárez was ranked the most dangerous city in the world, often posting more than a hundred murders every week. To Karla, it was like stepping back into a lawless, impoverished time. The cars in Juárez were twenty years older, the roads were ragged, and many windows were covered with plywood. Motorists ignored the streetlights and swerved wildly across all lanes. It seemed dangerous just to walk on the sidewalk. Karla clung to Oscar’s arm.
Oscar remained stoic. He didn’t want to let his emotions take over. On the far side of the bridge, they got into a taxi and drove to a medical clinic a block from the U.S. consulate. Applicants for residency had to have a clean bill of health, so Oscar gave blood and had an X-ray taken of his chest. He was found to be in perfect shape. At least from that perspective, he was an ideal candidate for citizenship.
They checked into the Quality Inn, a hotel on the same block as the consulate. The lady at the front desk warned them not to stray far: “This block around the consulate is okay. But don’t go farther than that.” She also told them to get to the consulate early—the line could stretch around the block.
They woke at dawn. Oscar felt terrible; he was coming down with the flu, but he tried to ignore it. They walked down the street in the dark. Hundreds of people were already lined up. Oscar and Karla took a spot in the queue and waited. When the sun came up, it got hot. The line inched forward a little every hour. After five hours, it was Oscar’s turn. Applicants weren’t allowed inside the walls of the consulate. They just arrived at a small, bulletproof window cut into the wall. Oscar leaned in. A man was sitting on the other side.