Children of the Land

by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

  “Child, get out of there right now.”

  *

  If I was watching the sunset for the first time, I still wouldn’t doubt that it would return on the other side of the sky in the morning.

  *

  Through the kitchen window, I could see the neighbors still kissing like they always did, the man gripping the small woman by her skinny shoulders, looking straight into her, saying “I’m sorry, baby, it won’t happen again.” Amá didn’t hit me, didn’t touch me, simply sat me on a chair and asked, “Child, where did you learn that?”

  Maybe I had done it before, unknowingly, until it ceased to be a mystery to me and simply a repetition. I didn’t know what other kids in the neighborhood were doing at the age of six or seven. We were painting things with our hands and making macaroni necklaces at school.

  “Child, go think about what you’ve done.”

  *

  If I stood still long enough, perhaps no one could see me anymore. I wanted to disappear into the small holes beneath the car, or among the tall grasses in the yard, to lie down and stare up at the sun and, if there was rain, let the rain pour over me.

  The car would soon be turned back to soil. I used to collect things in jars and bury them.

  4.

  I kept looking for lawyers who offered free consultations. Apá didn’t know how hard we were still trying to keep Amá back, but he had settled down because he’d finally gotten what he wanted, his answer he had been waiting so many years to hear. When he called, his only question was when would she leave, and it irritated me to hear him say it so casually, as if she was just leaving to the store to buy some groceries.

  A friend recommended us to a lawyer who was young and enthusiastic. I had already come across his type before, and they usually clicked their teeth and apologized when they saw there was nothing they could do. Although his consultation wasn’t free, we took the risk and paid anyway because he came highly recommended. His office was in a tech business park outside Sacramento, not in an old Victorian home-turned-office in midtown, where most of the other capital lawyers resided. With each visit to a new office, they always asked us who our current lawyer was, but we always refused to give them a name because we were a little ashamed that we were looking elsewhere for other opinions. This new young lawyer, however, didn’t ask.

  Rubi and I sat down and prepped ourselves to tell him the same story we had told every other lawyer, but he stopped us and began with a question.

  “Has your mother ever been a victim of a violent crime? Has she ever called the police on anyone who has hurt her?”

  “No, I mean, she never really could. She would never call the police, afraid that she would be deported,” I said.

  “Has she ever crossed paths with the police for any reason? Any reason at all?” he insisted again, trying to find something to latch on to.

  Rubi’s eyes lit up. “She was hit by a drunk driver a long time ago—does that count?”

  “Was he sentenced? Was there a police report?” the young lawyer asked, leaning forward a little too eagerly into the desk.

  “Yeah, he was sentenced, and my mom testified, and the man was sent to prison.”

  “That’s good, that’s good, that’s real good,” he said, which seemed strange because I hadn’t caught on to his angle yet.

  “You see, your mother might be eligible for a U visa, which would overrule any and all inadmissible crimes [previous deportations]. It would fall under felonious assault. She was a victim of a violent crime, and under that law, any victim of a violent crime who helps law enforcement with the persecution of the perpetrator is eligible for a special visa that would soon allow them permanent resident status.

  We had been looking so closely, so meticulously that we failed to see that the answer was right in front of us this entire time. Her accident was in 1996, and for nineteen years, up until that moment in the lawyer’s office in the summer of 2015, we had overlooked such a glaring detail. Every day that I held my mother’s hand, I felt the large abscess from her accident, every time she made lemonade I placed the sliced lemons on her left hand, knowing it was the good hand. It was right there and we missed it.

  Amá’s pain from the accident never went away, but her pain was secondary to the burden of survival. As much as she tried to hide it, her body pushed back, growing bulges of what we hoped was benign tissue where she hurt most—glass and metal scraping against bone. We knew. We all knew the pain was there, and yet we didn’t know it was also what could have saved her.

  It was her pain that held the answer all along, and rather than turn away from it, rather than look away, we all should have run toward it. Had we known, had anyone told us she could have applied on the day of the accident, nineteen years before, we would not have wasted a single day. I couldn’t imagine how different our lives would have been, how much grief we would have been spared. We researched the U visa and prepared to file her application immediately.

  5.

  The U visa was a law that was “enacted to strengthen the ability of law enforcement agencies to investigate and prosecute serious crimes and trafficking in persons, while offering protections to victims of such crimes without the immediate risk of being removed from the country.” Congress recognized that “victims without legal status may otherwise be reluctant to help in the investigation or prosecution of criminal activity.” A person is eligible for a U visa if the victim:

  Is the direct or indirect victim of qualifying criminal activity;

  Has suffered substantial physical or mental abuse as a result of having been a victim of criminal activity;

  Has information about the criminal activity; and

  Was helpful, is being helpful, or is likely to be helpful to law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, or other officials in the detection, investigation, prosecution, conviction, or sentencing of the criminal activity.2

  Some of the eligible crimes include sexual assault, incest, domestic violence, felonious assault, involuntary servitude, “and other related criminal activity.” The process was fairly straightforward: if a person was a victim of a qualifying violent crime and they helped law enforcement in their investigation, regardless if their help led to a conviction, they could petition for this special protection. At any process during the investigation, either during the trial, before, or years after, the victim could begin their motion, and there was no statute of limitations for filing. The first step, however, before anything could be done, was to have a local law enforcement agency3 sign a certification testifying that a crime indeed had taken place and stating the role that the victim played in helping with the investigation of the case. However, if a victim failed to secure this certification, they could not advance their application, which would essentially kill it before ever reaching immigration—“Without a certification, a U visa petition will be denied.”

  In early 2015, when we were filing, the law enforcement agency was endowed with complete discretion in their decision.4 And so even if a person met all the basic requirements, and even if everything they said was true, backed up by court documents, and police records, they also had to meet the subjective requirements and whims of the local law enforcement agency, who decided for themselves if someone like my mother had “suffered enough.” There were no statewide standards in place as to what was meant by “enough suffering”; it was simply relegated to each department on a case-by-case basis. And the certifying agencies were not “required to have an internal policy or procedure [of eligibility] before they can sign U visa certifications.”

  Decisions depended on the department. Our lawyer explained to us that the Yolo County agencies were particularly conservative and were known to deny most petitions for U visa certifications, so it was our job to try to convince them that Amá had suffered enough.

  6.

  Highway 113 passes through the rural back roads of Yolo County in California without bending for many miles, with rice fields on either side and ditches along the shoulder. It is a
two-lane road, and sometimes a long line of cars will back up when a large tractor combine barreles slowly down the middle of the road, taking up both lanes. The road is notorious for the amount of lives it takes because of how straight it is, and because so many drive into oncoming traffic trying to pass other drivers. The road is so straight that it is dizzying, and it is easy to begin swerving, especially in the warm afternoon, after a long day’s work. The county tried to remedy this by perforating the asphalt along the middle to stir drivers awake if they began to swerve, but the deaths continue.

  That was the road where Amá and Apá were hit by the drunk driver twenty minutes away from home, and the same road Rubi, Amá, and I drove down as we made our way to the Yolo County Courthouse. We were going to recover the court documents from the accident and the later conviction of the man who hit them, in order to begin Amá’s U visa process. We were banking on using the government’s own legitimacy against itself by gathering as much of its own information about my mother as possible to give us credibility. I could write an eloquent letter stating in a well-thought-out argument that Amá had indeed sustained, and continued to sustain, significant emotional and physical pain from the accident that happened nineteen years before, but I knew their words were worth more than mine. If it wasn’t me who was speaking, but rather the government documents themselves, in a detailed account of her wounds, perhaps they would be more compelled to believe them.

  We could see the dark outlines of people in the distant fields, hunched over the crops with hoes in their hands, moving slowly and methodically. So much had changed since the years Amá had worked in those fields. They had water stations at both ends of the fields now, as well as in the middle; they had tents for shade, and places to sit. Amá looked out into the fields and let out a deep sigh, because she knew that at the same time, very little had changed. It was still very hard work, but even so, she missed it. She missed the smell of the dirt, and the communion of voices gathered to work for a better life. She said she oddly missed working so hard and so mind-numbingly fast that there was no other room in her head to think about anything else. In that moment, all that mattered was getting as many strawberries into her basket as possible, as many peaches, apples, pears, plums. She made most of her friends working in the fields. They found ways to have fun, like scaring each other with dead snakes mangled by the harvesters.

  They learned from each other, they cared for each other, and they grew old with each other. “We could all see the pain when a new young little thing would arrive on the first day on the job, how much she missed her home, but we could also see the courage and hardened resolve in her eyes to work,” Amá said as we made our way along the endless road. “We, the older ones who knew, made sure to make them feel at home and welcome. While hoeing weeds, we would make sure to get near a new girl and ease her load. Or sometimes, if it was the peach harvesting season, we would sometimes each drop one of our own bags filled with peaches into her bin to help her a little. It wasn’t much, but it made her feel like things would be okay.”

  Amá liked to work. She liked to earn her own money. But her tales of the camaraderie of the women in the fields made me realize that she also liked having a life of her own, away from Apá, away from us, something no one else could claim.

  *

  The Yolo County Clerk-Recorder’s building rose where the old courthouse once stood. It was a stately, large stone building, with typical Corinthian columns along the front. It reminded me of the English-department building back at school. The style was neoclassical revival, harkening back to the origins of democracy, from which it was so far removed that only the distinctive columns remained.

  We took off our belts and keys and placed everything in a small tray before walking through a metal detector. Amá passed, and it rang. She lifted her arm for the guard to see, and he waved her on without ever really looking at her, his hand slowly making circles in the air.

  I passed through the detector next, followed by Rubi, and heard no buzz. The guard seemed to be there more for show and inconvenience. We showed him our IDs, and Amá showed him her Mexican passport.

  We took a flight of stairs down to the basement, which renovation had forgotten. The walls still had that thick layer of smoke residue from decades past. The main floor had its handblown glass art deco chandelier and its granite rotunda, but the basement had only the dreariness of the 1970s that no one really liked to remember. The signs led us to a small office with a waiting room lined with receiving windows, small holes drilled into their glass.

  “I’m looking for a police record of an incident,” I said through the glass. Nineteen years had passed. I had no idea what they would say or find, but technically, it didn’t matter that so much time had passed, since the U visa rules stated that there was no statute of limitations on signing the certification. We were simply doing some of the investigative work ourselves that the certifying agency (the sheriff’s department, who’d arrived on scene at the accident and written the original report) would need to do, but which we feared would not. Their only job was to determine that a crime had indeed happened and sign off on it, but if we left the search to them, with such an old case, we feared they might come up empty-handed. We wanted to make sure nothing was left to chance in compiling as much information as possible that documented Amá’s case and injury.

  The woman told us to wait and went into a back room for what seemed like hours while we waited on plastic chairs that squeaked every time we adjusted ourselves.

  Finally the clerk emerged from her window and called us over. In her hand was a thick stack of papers, freshly printed, because some time ago they had switched all of their records to digital archives. “This is all we’ve got, and it’s pretty much everything from that case,” she said, flipping through the stack. She didn’t ask what we needed them for, but the mere fact that we needed them nineteen years after the date must have meant something to her, must have meant that something new had happened.

  They charged thirty-eight cents per page, and I asked her if they accepted cards. She smiled and nodded. It wasn’t cheap. I quickly flipped through a few hundred pages and noticed that many sections were redacted in thick black strokes of permanent marker, which I still paid for. The clerk said it was information we weren’t allowed to access, but she couldn’t specify why. We took whatever we could and thanked her.

  The court documents had diagrams of the position of the cars, the angles at which they collided, descriptions of materials, blood alcohol levels, and speeds. The language was clinical and dry, but Amá, sitting quietly next to us in the car as we passed the fields of corn and rice on Highway 113, was the living translation of what the documents couldn’t quite completely say. We learned the man’s name, and that he’d served three years. It wasn’t his first DUI. He too, like Apá, like every other man on the crime scene, had walked away uninjured.

  *

  Before we could ask the sheriff’s department to sign the certification that we needed in order to begin the U visa application, we decided that we needed more proof of Amá’s injuries and how they continued into the present day. The court documents alone were probably enough, but we wanted to be extra thorough.

  I knew we needed to move quickly; time was against us, and Apá was growing impatient. He still didn’t know what we were up to. The next day, after visiting the Yolo County Courthouse, we went to the hospital that Amá was airlifted to on the day of her accident. They too had switched to digital archives. They too accepted Visa, Mastercard, or Discover.

  The attendant at the medical records office said she was doubtful that they would have any records dating that far back. “Please, can you check?” I asked. She came back with a small stack of papers with Amá’s name on them. Her medical records showed what the police report couldn’t—what happened on the inside. It described Amá’s injuries in clinical specificity. It said how many plates, how many bones, how much glass could not be removed, and also provided her lab results, which would ex
plain why she lost so much weight in the following years. Her medical records quantified an otherwise unquantifiable characteristic—pain. Amá could say she hurt, but forty-two metal staples on her forearm hiding metal plates where bone should have been was a specificity well understood by bureaucrats in suits.

  Her medical records completed the narrative we were trying to build: that her accident wasn’t just a single event, but rather the beginning of a lifetime of complications. Each detail on her chart was like a small flag sticking out of the snow in a slow avalanche that was taking the course of her entire life to roll down. We left the clean, air-conditioned hospital office in search of more evidence of Amá’s pain.

  I was nervous about taking her to the doctor to get X-rays, because I knew they would also want to check whether the abscess growing on her wrist was benign, but it was necessary; it wasn’t the same thing to tell them what was inside her as it was to show them a picture. At the doctor’s office, I tried to explain what we were trying to accomplish, because there wasn’t anything illicit about it, and I asked her if she could write a letter explaining Amá’s condition and the years of pain she had continued to endure. By now, we thought all of the evidence we gathered was certainly overkill, more than enough not only to convince the certifying agency to sign off but also, once we sent off their certification, to have her approved by USCIS.

  We thought we had made a significant bridge between past and present, and would never have to speak ourselves. We knew our stories would not hold up, so we presented hard evidence in the form of these official documents that could better speak for us. None of our evidence was subjective or biased; we only provided the language and materials that the state had come up with. The last thing I did was take a close-up picture of Amá, so they could see the scars and the size of the bulge on her wrist. But it wasn’t too close; I wanted them to see her face, hoping that would help.