The Making of a Dream

by Laura Wides-Muñoz

  At DHS, officers stood outside with guns at the ready. Felipe froze, terrified that they might actually shoot him. Only later did he realize that the men and women in uniform were simply stationed at the ready, according to standard procedure. No one at DHS planned to shoot at the ragtag demonstration by fewer than a hundred students. No one was arrested. The group barely made the local news that night, but Felipe had discovered two things: he had been scared, but he had not run; and the officers could have arrested him, but they had chosen not to.

  The march was liberating, and Felipe began to speak out more. Yet as exciting as life seemed on the political side, in his personal life, Felipe felt as if he were sinking. He was finalizing his divorce, and once again the sense of failure washed over him. Juan took to checking in on his friend every day to make sure he got out of bed and ate, sometimes even dragging him out of the apartment. Juan had recently broken up with his girlfriend, and at times the sexual energy between the two men was so intense Felipe could barely breathe. Still, they both brushed off the tension. To Juan, it seemed Felipe was another straight friend, looking to experiment. Felipe was too terrified to suggest otherwise.

  Then one unbearably hot afternoon, the two men took a break from work and strolled upon the grass at Bayfront Park across from the carousel, watching the prestorm whitecaps surge across Biscayne Bay. Felipe thought about the march, about his friends fighting deportation orders. He thought about his desire to be honest with the world about his immigration status. Why then, should he have to remain silent about something even more essential? His heart beat against his chest. He tried to distract himself, mentioning the latest news from the Obama campaign, from their new immigrant friends in Texas, New York, and Los Angeles. Then he stopped. Screw it.

  “I’ve decided to be happy,” he blurted out.

  Juan nodded. “Great.”

  “I’ve decided,” Felipe said slowly, taking a deep breath and hoping his voice didn’t tremble, “to be happy, whether it’s with a girl or with a guy.”

  Silence.

  The breeze stopped. Felipe could see a couple laughing together across the grass. He waited for Juan to say something, anything.

  Slowly a light seemed to flicker behind Juan’s eyes. He took off his glasses and squinted at Felipe. “Wait! Do you mean me?”

  Juan sat back for a second; then he leaned over and kissed Felipe, hard. Felipe felt as if he were floating. He had never been so happy and so terrified. He wasn’t out. They were in a public park in Miami. He could be deported for any reason, at any moment. And he didn’t care.

  They stayed there along the bay for longer than they could remember, Felipe more at peace than he’d ever been. Juan stared at Felipe, his mind whirring, wondering if it were really possible that two young men could make a life together.

  In November, Obama won roughly 57 percent of the Latino vote in Florida, slightly more than Bush had won just four years before. As he heard the news, Felipe thought of Obama, growing up with his mother and then leaving her as he became a teenager, and his thoughts turned to his own life and his own mother, living thousands of miles away. Outside, a party had already started. Felipe went into the street that night, mingling with his celebrating neighbors, optimistic about his future. Two months later, Felipe and Juan rang in the New Year’s with newfound organizing savvy, a boatload of political confidence—and each other.

  4

  DARK CLOUDS LEAD TO A TRAIL

  Felipe Matos and Juan Rodriguez enjoy lunch on a brief break in St. Augustine, January 2010. (COURTESY OF ALEJO STARK)

  Dario Guerrero watched Obama’s 2008 election with his parents, impressed that a “black guy” would for the first time be living in the White House and hopeful that the new president might help reverse the slowdown in construction his father was seeing.

  But in truth, Dario was far more excited about getting his driver’s license, breaking his three-mile track record, maybe getting the attention of some of the cooler girls in his class, and finally getting to enroll in a college-level math course. He was at the top of his class at one of the nation’s top public high schools, the California Academy of Mathematics and Science, nestled in the Dominguez Hills campus of California State University. He had qualified for Principles of Engineering, a class that provided dual community college credits. One evening, as his mother made dinner, Dario sat at the dining table overlooking the backyard and carefully filled out the college credit forms.

  “Mami, I need my Social Security number,” he called to his mother. Rocio wiped her hands clean and fetched the number from papers she kept in her bedroom.

  A few days later, the phone rang. It was an administrator from the California Academy. Dario took the phone into the back corner of the family’s narrow kitchen, where the rumble of the washing machine would drown out the noise of his family. He leaned against the quartz counters his father had recently installed using leftover stone from one of his projects.

  The school administrator didn’t mince words. The Social Security number Dario listed did not match his name. Dario apologized. His mother must have given him the wrong digits.

  You do have a Social Security number, don’t you? the woman pressed him. If he didn’t—

  Why was she asking him this? It was just a stupid mistake. But her words made him nervous. He looked across the kitchen window at the giant playhouse his father had put together for his little sister, Andrea, a miniature wood-shuttered home complete with white fence and a framed heart above the door. He stared at the swing set next to the little house and thought of all the times he’d pushed Andrea, her long black hair floating behind her.

  The administrator asked again. Do you have a Social Security number?

  Of course he did. Dario promised to get back to her the following day and hung up. What if he didn’t? Dario had heard of the cases, on TV or whispered by his parents and friends. People who didn’t have Social Security numbers. Those people were put on buses and sent back to Mexico or wherever. But those people lived in hiding . . .

  Later that evening, Dario grumbled about the call to his mom.

  We need to talk, she said.

  Dario sat on the dark brown couch in the living room with his parents. Quietly, they explained that for years they had been using his younger, US-born brother’s Social Security number for Dario. Now that the two were at the same school, the administration must have flagged it, or maybe the technology to identify errors was getting better. It didn’t matter. There was nothing they could do.

  Yes, they explained, they had come to the United States on tourist visas, just as they’d always told him, but they had overstayed the visas. He had been too young until now for them to say more. They hadn’t been sure at first that they wouldn’t return to Mexico if the economy improved and the crime receded. They hadn’t wanted to burden him with their secret or risk him telling the wrong person.

  But at least now you are in the process of getting citizenship, Dario prompted.

  No, we aren’t. They couldn’t. There was no path, no line, that they could get in to make things right. They didn’t qualify for the so-called millionaire’s visa, the EB-5, which would have enabled them to stay if they invested $1 million in the United States and created at least ten new jobs. And they didn’t qualify for any other visa. But Obama had promised to take action. And for the moment, they weren’t in danger. Immigration officers weren’t looking for them. That night, Dario sat at the computer on the cramped desk in his room, across from the bunk beds he shared with Fernando, Fer, as he’d taken to calling his younger brother, and he began googling “illegal immigrant” and “college.”

  JUST AS THE IMMIGRANT RIGHTS GROUPS had hoped, President Obama bolted out of the gate on immigration reform. He broke tradition, plucking key immigrant advocates out of the back offices of Congress and the cramped quarters of the Washington nonprofit world and bringing them into the White House. In a surprise move, he asked the National Council of La Raza’s Cecilia Muñoz to join h
is domestic policy team on immigration. She agreed to meet with his then chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who would later become mayor of Chicago. Cecilia figured she might at least get some intel on the new president’s immigration strategy even as she declined the job.

  But after the meeting, Emanuel called again, and this time he passed the phone to the president.

  “The president told me he wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer,” Cecilia recalled. She eventually took a job managing the White House’s relationship with state governments and later became the administration’s top liaison with the nation’s Latino groups.

  In February 2009, Cecilia’s friend Esther Olavarria was tapped for the Department of Homeland Security to help the agency refocus its enforcement measures on those whom the government considered the greatest threat.

  A few months later, Ted Kennedy was diagnosed with brain cancer, and by August, the “Liberal Lion” of the Senate would lose his last battle. Esther became even more determined not to let his vision of reform die. The Democrats held both houses in Congress—not by much, but they held them. With Kennedy gone and McCain now taking a back seat on immigration as the backlash in Arizona continued to grow, the administration sought out a new set of partners to carry the mantle forward: New York Democratic senator Chuck Schumer and South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham. Together, maybe they could present Congress with an immigration proposal that would not only strengthen the border and increase the number of temporary work visas issued but also create a path toward citizenship for the 11 million people living in the country without authorization. It had to be something the Democratic-led Senate couldn’t refuse and something enough GOP lawmakers would be willing to join. Some days, Olavarria had to pinch herself: the change she’d wanted to effect for nearly a decade was finally at hand. In the House, a group including Florida representative Lincoln Díaz-Balart secretly met to come up with their own framework.

  Then, like the national economy, the president’s immigration motor sputtered and stalled. In July 2007, the investment bank Bear Stearns had liquidated two of its mortgage-backed security hedge funds, just as the stock market hit a near-record high. Only in hindsight would that combination of events be understood as the red flag for the financial meltdown that lay ahead. A month later, the entire US housing market went under, threatening to take with it the savings of millions of Americans and the world economy. By June 2009, unemployment topped 9 percent, more than double the figure from the same month of 2007.1 During his first months in office, the president sought to rein in Wall Street and stave off financial collapse.

  Then came health care reform. It was the top priority for the Obama administration after shoring up the nation’s financial structure. The battle was fierce and bitter, and the result was an imperfect solution—better, the president and his supporters believed, than what had existed but still satisfying no one. And now the president had spent even more of his personal and political capital.

  Meanwhile, so-called birther conspiracy theorists, who’d first raised their heads during the election season, had once again begun to circulate their theories about the origins of the new president. A fringe group, many of whose members also vehemently opposed immigration reform and whose claims were stoked by big media names such as CNN anchor Lou Dobbs,2 insisted once again that Obama’s short-form Hawaiian birth certificate was a fake. The president himself might even be an “illegal alien,” alleged one birther, Californian Orly Taitz,3 who later accused Obama of creating a plan to traffic “hundreds of thousands of illegals . . . and dump them on the unsuspecting population.”4 It was an accusation Donald Trump would later latch onto.

  Obama’s promise to Univision anchor Jorge Ramos “that we will have in the first year an immigration bill that I strongly support and that I’m promoting”5 now seemed wishful thinking. Nor was Congress rushing to act. For the new Democratic leadership, as well as most Republicans, the idea of legalizing the status of millions of people in the country so they could better compete for work in the midst of a recession was now close to a nonstarter.

  In Miami, Felipe watched his hopes of change slowly burn out. He and Juan had moved in together, and he was no longer shy about referring to Juan as his boyfriend, at least to his small circle of friends. But despite graduating at the top of his class in June 2008 and being named among the top twenty community college graduates in the nation, he had to take a year off school because he couldn’t figure out a way to pay for the rest of college. His server job at the nightclub kept milk and peanut butter in his fridge but not much else. He kept busy with fellow immigrant activists. Following the training he and Juan had received from Carlos and other disciples of Harvard’s Marshall Ganz, he joined them to train more groups of young, undocumented immigrants in Florida, Ohio, Colorado, and Nevada—key congressional, as well as presidential, swing states, where strategists in Washington realized the Latino vote could be key.

  Yet there were days when Felipe found it difficult to get out of bed. It wasn’t just his disillusionment about the president’s unkept promise for the overhaul of the country’s immigration system, or his struggle to pay rent. That summer he attended a workshop organized by a local nonprofit whose mission was to stop queer kids from attempting suicide. The idea was that by teaching educators how to have frank talks with parents and teens about the issues, the teens would feel less alone.

  Ostensibly Felipe went to the trainings to learn how to help others, but soon he began to think about his own family. Juan had come out to his father two years before. Initially, his father had kicked him out of the house. But after a few months Juan’s dad had called. Are you eating, m’hijo? he’d asked. They rarely spoke about Juan’s love life or much of anything else. But now Juan’s father would occasionally introduce Juan to his own gay friends. Juan and Felipe laughed about the introductions, but Felipe knew how much even the awkward gesture meant to Juan.

  Maybe, thought Felipe, it was time to tell his mother back in Brazil. After all, through the organizing trainings, he’d become pretty good at telling his story: his arrival in the United States and now even his relationship with Juan. He had come out to everyone who mattered—except to the one who mattered most.

  Everything he’d done so far had been tied in some way to making his mother proud, to making her sacrifices worth it. Why couldn’t he tell her about this? He and Juan were creating something, each pulling back sometimes, pushing each other away, but it was the best relationship he’d ever known. Felipe wanted to tell her about the person who made him want to get up in the morning, the person whose social awkwardness sometimes made him want to bang his head against the wall, yet whose caresses made him ache with longing. He wanted to tell her about the person whom he could lie next to at night and finally fall into a deep, panic-free sleep.

  One October evening in 2009, while Juan was out, Felipe sat in their tiny living/dining room and dialed his mother’s number in Rio de Janeiro. The electronic ring sounded hollow, so far away.

  He’d practiced what he would say. But as the words tumbled out, they didn’t sound quite as smooth.

  Olá, Mamãe, how are you? I’m calling you because I have something to tell you. Remember Juan? You know that he’s not my roommate, right?

  His mother was confused.

  Juan is also my partner.

  Okay. Juan is your partner. So?

  Partner as in boyfriend.

  There was silence on the other end, marked only by the distant sound of voices overlapping from another line. Slowly Francisca seemed to be making sense of this information. Finally she spoke. She said she would leave it in God’s hands, and then she changed the subject.

  Okay, you do that, totally fine, Felipe told her, breathing a sigh of relief. All things being equal, the conversation had gone pretty well.

  The next day his mother called back. Her voice was rough. She was agitated. Felipe, you are going to hell. You must stop whatever blasphemous acts you are partaking in. You need to fin
d a new wife, or go back to your old wife!

  Felipe tried to keep his voice steady, not sure how much to argue, how much simply to let her spew her fears. He knew it had been too easy. After all, his mother had in recent years become a born-again Christian. Still, he hoped her anger would blow over. He’d wait it out, like he waited out Miami’s summer storms.

  It did not blow over. His mother called back for days.

  You are a disgrace to God. She implored him to change. Felipe had heard strangers call him “illegal” or “faggot.” But his mother’s voice through the telephone wires sliced through months of carefully sewn protections.

  The world could hate him, whatever. But his own mother?

  He stopped picking up the phone.

  If it’s my life’s purpose to make this one person proud, and I can never do that, what is left? he asked himself.

  A few nights later, while Juan was out, Felipe walked to the bathroom and stared into the mirror. There had to be something to ease the pounding in his head, to quiet that internal voice telling him he was dirty, unworthy, failing. He opened a bottle of Tylenol and began swallowing capsules.

  Juan arrived home around 8 p.m. The apartment was dark and oddly quiet. Felipe was in bed. Juan sighed. Felipe was either sick or depressed again. He tried to wake his boyfriend, to see if he wanted to eat something, but Felipe barely stirred. Finally, after much prodding, he awoke but turned to the wall.

  “Go away, leave me alone. I just need to sleep.”

  “What happened?” Juan wanted to know.

  “I took some pills,” Felipe finally confessed.

  “What do you mean, you took some pills?” Juan asked very slowly.