The Making of a Dream

by Laura Wides-Muñoz

  To help his mother, Felipe lied about his age and got a job distributing political campaign flyers during election season, his first brief foray into politics.

  LIFE GOT EASIER once Carolina found cleaning jobs in the United States and started to send money. They finished the roof, added windows and a door and later two bedrooms. They finally had running water. But Felipe still saw much he wanted to change. Each morning he dressed in his government-issued school uniform: blue pants and a white shirt with blue stripes and a gold sun. The sun was supposed to be a symbol of bright power and potential, but for Felipe it was a bright, burning symbol of poverty—an announcement to all the world that he couldn’t afford even his own clothes.

  To get to school, Felipe rode his bike along the open sewage ditch at the edge of the road. During the rainy season, the water rose and the sewage washed over the streets. As he biked, he often thought of his mother’s brother. Tío José had organized against the Brazilian dictatorship in the 1970s and had attained a level of respect and prestige in that movement that even now was a source of pride for Felipe. He tried to imagine what his uncle would do about the sewers. He was a man people would listen to. One day I will be, too, Felipe vowed.

  When he heard that the mayor would make a campaign stop at his school, he decided it was time to take action. As the mayor came to shake hands, twelve-year-old Felipe handed him a list of demands for the neighborhood: sewers, streetlamps, medicine for the hospital, paved streets, a playground. The mayor took the paper. He would see what he could do. Felipe never heard back, and in the following months, nothing changed. But later, after Felipe left, his mother informed him that the municipality had begun to pave the streets and a playground was built. The hospital improved. Maybe I had something to do with it, he thought to himself, even if he could never be sure.

  Eventually, Felipe’s sister suggested he come to Florida. Their mother’s back was in great pain, and she needed to rest. He could help Carolina care for her young daughter while she worked. Felipe agreed to go. He told the immigration agent at the consulate how much he wanted to visit Disney World.

  Carolina made Felipe promise to stick it out for the year. And it only later occurred to him that perhaps that had been the plan all along, enough time that he wouldn’t want to return.

  In Florida, there was so much to get used to. At home, milk had been a luxury. Felipe would often just stand in the milk aisle of the grocery store, staring at the row upon row of cartons, wondering how he was supposed to choose.

  By the summer of 2001, Felipe could chat easily in English with his friends. All arms and legs, with thick brown hair and golden brown eyes to match, he missed his mother. At night, away from the world, he thought of her, of his friends back home, and tears slipped down his pillow. But his life was now in Miami. He threw himself into school, where he excelled. He thought less about becoming like his uncle. More and more, he wanted to become a teacher. He wasn’t quite sure of the path, but in a country where you could find a dozen different kinds of milk in the supermarket aisle, he figured there had to be a way.

  And that summer, across the country in Washington, congressional staffers were looking for one, spending long days writing and rewriting a bill to create a lawful pathway for students like Felipe to stay in the United States. They researched the legal justifications and lined up expert testimony for the DREAM Act. Durbin’s office arranged for Tereza, the music prodigy, to fly to Washington to testify and possibly play the piano for the lawmakers, as well as for another undocumented Chicago teen, Tania Unzueta, whom Durbin had helped in Chicago, to tell her story. Josh hadn’t felt this confident about a piece of legislation in years. He could barely sleep in the run-up to the bill’s first big hearing, set for September 12, 2001.

  Then, one day before the hearing, Hareth in Virginia, Felipe in Miami, and Dario and Rocio with their sons in Los Angeles watched on TV the smoke and crumbling steel and concrete—the tiny dark spots plummeting from the burning towers—trying to comprehend what they were seeing. How could this happen in the United States of America? Who would want to do this to us?

  AFTER THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS, few in Washington wanted to talk about how to keep the kids, or anyone else, in; they wanted to talk about how to keep dangerous people out. Within weeks, massive concrete barriers appeared outside the US Capitol to deter suicide car bombers. The USA PATRIOT Act passed on October 26, expanding government surveillance and allowing for indefinite, and sometimes secret, detention of immigrants suspected of having terrorism ties. Congress also passed a bill to step up border security and improve the exchange of criminal and visa information across agencies.

  Embassies around the world canceled visa interviews as the nation struggled to assess the damage, including Betty Ayala and Mario Andrade’s September 15 appointment at the US Embassy in La Paz. They would have to wait till December to make their case for the tourist visas they hoped would reunite them with their daughters. Each night, as she slept, Betty dreamed her girls were next to her, their small legs and arms strewn across her body. And each morning she awoke to the empty space. They would be reunited soon, Mario assured her, but in December, their visas were denied. They put out their Christmas presents for Hareth and Haziel anyway, and Betty spent the evening staring at the brightly wrapped gifts. They would try again in the new year, Mario promised, but again they were denied visas in 2002.

  Americans felt vulnerable in a way they never had before. Across the nation, the fear opened new space for the expression of long-simmering resentment of some Americans about the increasing number of Latino, Middle Eastern, and Asian immigrants, who brought with them new traditions and whose arrival had coincided with the increasing number of blue-collar jobs lost to both global outsourcing and automation.

  Even in the heart of the country, far away from the terrorists’ intended targets, the winds had changed for immigrants. Recent immigrants were no longer predominantly staying in the port of entry cities where they arrived, such as New York, El Paso, Los Angeles, and Miami. Increasingly, they began to follow the demand for work into the American heartland and along the southeastern coast. In Missouri, for example, Latinos made up only 2 percent of the population, yet their numbers had nearly doubled from 1990 to 2000.17 Missourians were beginning to take notice.

  It was in this new climate that fifteen-year-old Costa Rican native Marie Gonzalez and her parents, Marvin and Marina, found themselves in the crosshairs of the war on terror and the burgeoning backlash against the state’s growing undocumented population. A month after the September 11, 2001, attacks, Marvin, a government mail clerk, was sorting packages for Missouri governor Bob Holden when he came across a package addressed to the governor that included an unmarked envelope and a book about Osama bin Laden.18 Frightened but remaining calm, he alerted his superiors. The nation was on the lookout for another terrorist attack, after a series of anthrax incidents had killed five people, sickened more than a dozen,19 and left the country once more on edge. State investigators later determined the package did not contain anything hazardous, but the government took anything that looked like the deadly white powder seriously, and the FBI came to Jefferson City, Missouri, to interview Marvin. He and others in the mail room began wearing protective gloves and masks when they handled the mail and were moved out of the capitol building. Marvin kept his head down and hoped that was the end of it.

  But in December, as Marvin opened another letter addressed to the governor postmarked from a nearby prison, white powder spilled out onto his leg. He was terrified. The FBI visited again. He called his wife. Don’t get scared, but a powder spilled on me when I was opening mail, and I don’t know if I’m going to be all right. They quarantined Marvin for the day and ran tests. For a week he waited for the lab results. A few days after the incident, the left side of Marvin’s face swelled up, and he developed a rash, but officials told him the powder had tested negative for any biohazard. Marie accompanied her father to the doctor and translated the diagnosis for h
im. The doctor suggested the rash was from something he ate. Marvin and Marina didn’t know what to believe. Now Marvin began to dread going to work. He couldn’t sleep, but for Marie, he tried to pretend everything was okay.

  Marvin became something of a hero after that, but it was attention he didn’t want. Marvin had brought his family to the United States a decade before on a tourist visa, and, like Dario and Rocio Guerrero, they’d stayed long past the legal limit. The last thing he needed was people looking into his life and realizing that the governor’s trusted mail clerk lacked legal authorization to be in the country.

  Marvin had sold his seafood restaurant in Costa Rica back in 1991 after a cholera epidemic20 crashed the local tourism industry. He and Marina packed up as much of their lives as they could into suitcases and flew with then five-year-old Marie to Southern California in late November. Los Angeles seemed the place to be, and Marvin looked for work once more in the restaurant industry.

  Five months later, Los Angeles erupted in flames. A mostly white jury had acquitted four white police officers on charges of brutally beating an unarmed black man named Rodney King. African Americans across the city took to the streets in a massive release of anger, grief, and frustration at a system that seemed to place so little value on their lives.

  Marvin and Marina were already frightened of the big city and understood little of the history behind the fires. When a friend from Costa Rica mentioned a restaurant opportunity in Missouri, the Gonzalezes eagerly picked up once again, eventually landing in Jefferson City. Marvin took over the American Wok, a popular downtown restaurant started by Nicaraguan immigrants that catered to the government worker lunch crowd. Then Missouri governor John Ashcroft, who would soon be appointed US attorney general by George W. Bush, was among those to stop by and leave a signed photo. They moved in upstairs. And eventually Marvin and Marina saved up enough money to buy the restaurant. During the afternoons, Marie did her homework at a table and in the evening played by herself in a side room her parents closed off, the smells of sizzling ginger and garlic wafting in from the kitchen.

  When she wasn’t at the restaurant, Marie would hang out at the library across the street. She spent so much time there that the librarians sometimes had her test out new educational software. She took the job seriously, her green eyes scanning the screen, tight black curls bouncing ever so slightly as she read. Eventually, her parents saved enough money, along with the help of a scholarship, to enroll her in a nearby Catholic school. Marie loved school and took up tennis and track, deftly avoiding the dreaded label of nerd.

  Watching her father crunch numbers at his desk in the back, she learned early not to complain about being alone or about her parents’ having to work at the restaurant instead of attending her tennis games. She knew the difference between telling her parents she wanted something and telling them she needed it. And she prided herself at being her parents’ helper, their translator, and their adviser.

  Marvin and Marina took out a small business loan for the restaurant and diligently repaid it, but the restaurant hours took their toll, and business was fickle. In January 2001, the father of one of Marie’s schoolmates told Marvin about the $20,000-a-year mail room messenger job with the governor. Finally he and Marina would have good medical insurance and a steady income. They bought a house on a quiet residential street, a one-floor brick home with an elm tree in the front yard. It never occurred to Marvin or his family that his connection to the state’s highest-ranking official would prove his undoing, nor that it would lead his daughter to help ignite a national movement.

  By high school, Marie no longer spent her afternoons alone. Increasingly, she was busy with the track and tennis teams, attending church on Sundays with her parents. The governor even sent Marie a handwritten letter congratulating her on her academic achievements. Life was good, at least until her father began opening the letters with the powder inside. He wasn’t the same after that. He became more anxious, distracted. At the time, Marie thought it was just because of the threat of the attacks.

  In April 2002, when Marie turned sixteen, she, like her friends, made a beeline with her mother to the Department of Motor Vehicles to obtain that piece of plastic signifying freedom for teenagers across the United States. But the DMV wouldn’t accept her identification. She had come in on a child’s passport, one that needed to be renewed every five years. And her parents had never renewed it. They hadn’t thought about traveling anywhere, and it seemed an unnecessary expense. Her US visa had also expired. She had no proof of identity. At work, colleagues joked with Marvin about Marie’s not getting her license and offered to help. The governor’s chief of staff accompanied Marie and her mother to get the coveted card, but again they were rebuffed. Now Marie was worried. What did it mean that she didn’t have the right papers to get her license? It will all get sorted out, she told herself. These kind of things always do.

  It wasn’t for lack of trying that Marvin and Marina remained in the country without legal status. When they’d lived in Los Angeles, they’d forked over thousands of dollars to immigration lawyers to get on the right side of the law. The lawyers had told them if they worked hard, paid taxes, bought a home, and stayed out of trouble, after five years they would have a good shot at applying for a green card. And the lawyers had been right. Back then, to avoid deportation, immigrants had to show the “extreme hardship” they might face if they were sent back to their home country. But in practice, one often had to show simply the likelihood of more routine hardship, including separation from children, with the US government taking into account the person’s age, his or her time in the United States, the financial strain of deportation, lost educational opportunities, and family connections. After five years, Mario and Marina were told the wait had now stretched to seven years. But then the law changed in 1996, and the wait became ten years. The Gonzalezes moved to Missouri, where finding a lawyer who spoke Spanish was no small task. They briefly looked for one, but just paying the bills on the restaurant, and later the house, took up most of their money and energy.

  Soon after the license fiasco, Governor Holden spoke at an event where Marie was honored for her academic success and again at a ceremony recognizing the state’s growing Latino community. The governor gave a shout-out to Marie and her father’s patriotism. Once again Marvin winced at all the attention.

  In early June of 2002, his fears came true. The governor’s office alerted Marvin that it had received an anonymous tip: Holden’s trusted messenger and mail room clerk was in the country illegally and had been for years, the caller said. Someone should look into it. Marvin had presented a Social Security number and a valid driver’s license when he applied for the job. Like Dario Guerrero, he’d been issued the Social Security number when he arrived, and he’d gotten his driver’s license with it. And back then, that was enough to get hired as a state employee. The governor’s staff didn’t need to see a work permit.

  Federal agents came to Marvin’s office and interviewed him for two hours. This time, no one treated him like a hero. He phoned Marina to warn her that the agents might come to the house. Someone leaked the investigation to the media, and by the evening, the family made the local news. The following day the story had gone national. Holden’s staffers weren’t willing to stick their necks out for an undocumented immigrant who appeared to have duped them.

  Marie wondered who had called in the tip. A jealous staffer? A friend? Someone seeking to damage the governor? She no longer knew whom she could trust. Terrified of what people would think, she began calling everyone she knew—teachers at school, friends from church—trying to explain they were not criminals.

  Their friends at church didn’t understand how the family they knew could be “illegals.” Marie had gone to school with their children; her mother had worked as a teacher’s aide; her father had even been a government employee. These kinds of cases didn’t happen in Jefferson City, at least not to people they knew. Sure, they didn’t want drug dealers and gangban
gers sneaking across the border. But this was different. The community rallied around the Gonzalezes. A group of friends began calling themselves the “Gonzalez Group” and reached out to every lawmaker, every political contact they knew.

  But others were wary of being associated with Marie and her family. After so much recognition from the governor’s office, Marvin was quickly cast out. And now that his case had made the headlines, no one would hire him. Fortunately, Marina was allowed to continue working at her school as a volunteer, receiving donations and gift cards in lieu of pay. Now she was the main breadwinner.

  At night, Marie watched the stories on CNN and Univision of people being deported. Oh, my God, she thought. That could be us.

  But the immigration agents didn’t come, not at first. There weren’t any in Jefferson City back then. Governor Holden’s office recommended an attorney, and Marie’s parents drove all the way to St. Louis to meet her, but she barely gave them the time of day. And she was expensive. Through friends, they found a pro bono lawyer, Ben Mook. He wasn’t even an immigration lawyer, but he was local and eager to help. It wasn’t until the summer of 2003 that the agents finally arrived. Marie was at a Christian youth camp in Asheville, North Carolina. She called home, and her mom sounded curt. “What’s wrong?” Marie asked.

  “Ask your father,” Marina answered, and handed him the phone.

  An agent from the newly created Department of Homeland Security had come to the home and interviewed Marvin and Marina. That first interview was simple. The officer was cordial enough and warned the couple that it could have been much worse. He could have come in a show of force, with several vehicles, and taken them into custody.

  Later other agents would return to interview the couple separately about a small-business loan they’d taken out years before and paid off, seeking, it seemed to Marie, to catch them in some misstatement, some illegal act. As the officers watched, Marvin and Marina carefully pulled out years of records establishing their ties to the country: ownership of the American Wok, the loan, their home mortgage, the years Marina had spent as a teacher, the background checks they’d undergone for their jobs in government and at the school. They were, in fact, anything but undocumented.