The Making of a Dream

by Laura Wides-Muñoz

  Trinity alumna and former Bryn Mawr College president Dr. Jane Dammen McAuliffe gave the keynote speech, recognizing the global threats facing the next generation of graduates while condemning Trump’s December 2015 call for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”2

  McAuliffe told the graduates that yes, war and savagery were committed in the name of Islam, but, she added, “that does not warrant a situation in which Muslim American kids start asking their parents if it’s safe here, if they’re really welcome, if they’re really American.” She closed by urging the students to get out and vote.

  Betty’s thoughts stretched back to Hareth’s first day of kindergarten. She had been so worried her daughter would dissolve into tears, but she hadn’t, and when Hareth came home at the end of the day, pigtails askew, stockings ripped and stained, she was grinning, eyes sparkling, thrilled with her new adventure.

  Betty reached further back to her own years in school. She had dropped out of university to support Mario so he could finish his degree. She’d always wanted to return, but there had never been time or money. Now at least her eldest daughter had fulfilled her dream, and Haziel, too, would be leaving home soon for her own adventure, the first in the family to go away to college. Betty had wished for Hareth to have that freedom but was happy to keep her close to home at least for a little longer as Hareth sorted out her future.

  After the ceremony, Mario embraced his daughter under drizzling rain, brushing away tears. Hareth had wanted to celebrate at a restaurant, as many of her friends had, but there were too many people who wanted to join them, and it was too expensive. So Tía Eli had offered to prepare the feast.

  She and Hareth rarely talked now about the years when the girls had lived with her. Hareth sometimes worried it would hurt her mother to be reminded of that time. In any event, Eliana was the type to move forward, not look back. As Hareth stepped through the front door, once again in her sneakers, and saw the living room decked out with white-clothed tables, fluted glasses with folded gold confetti napkins, and centerpieces of spring violets, she sucked in her breath at the transformation. Once again, her aunt had come through for her.

  More guests arrived that night: Ana Avendaño from the AFL-CIO; former school board member Emma Violand-Sanchez, Hareth’s longtime Bolivian mentor; even “Mr. Monopoly,” her former high school adviser, Robert Garcia. Claudia arrived, still wearing her number 24 basketball shirt. The team had won, and now they were headed to the national finals in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Betty hugged her daughter and immediately began to worry whether she and Mario would be able to attend, whether it would be safe for them to travel. But she tucked those fears away. Now there was something else to celebrate.

  As they took their seats at the table, Mario addressed the group in Spanish. “I am so happy, so content with my daughter who has given us so much happiness today, well, really every day,” he said. “Thank you to you all for collaborating with Hareth. Maybe without your help and support we wouldn’t be here today—” He paused, waiting for Hareth to translate, as was the family custom.

  She blushed but did her job.

  “We are so proud of you,” he said, turning to his daughter. “Continue forward, always with the same enthusiasm—”

  Hareth stopped translating. “I’ve already forgotten the rest,” she said quickly, looking at the floor.

  “I am so happy tonight,” Betty joined her husband, speaking in clear English. “There are—there are no words to express how happy I am.”

  Claudia gave her eldest sister a hug. Everyone was graduating, she noted: Hareth from college, Haziel to college. “I’m the only one who will be left in the house,” she said sadly.

  Hareth thought about Haziel leaving, leapfrogging ahead of her to be the first in the family to attend a residential college at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. She would be left behind for the first time.

  Finally, it was Hareth’s turn to speak.

  She pointed over to her aunt. “I don’t get to thank her a lot, so, gracias, Tía, for making this possible.” She stopped and took a deep breath before saying, for once, the unsaid: “She loves me so much, and she was there for me when my parents weren’t able to be.”

  Hareth lifted her glass to the rest of the room. “There was a time when I was so confused. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to finish,” she said, “but obviously with all your friendship and mentoring and calls and the family, going through the tough times we’ve gone through, I can say it was definitely worth it.”

  IN THE SPRING of 2016, after more than a decade in exile, Marie Gonzalez’s mother, Marina Morales Moreno, was finally able to request permanent residency in the United States. The ten-year ban had run out, and now Marie petitioned for her mother’s green card. Starting over in Costa Rica had been difficult enough, but without Marvin, Marina had little to keep her there. She wouldn’t have minded splitting her time between the two countries, but she was afraid DHS might revoke her visa once again. Better to be safe and make a permanent move. Marie and Chapin had just moved to New Mexico for his work, and she’d given birth to baby Lorena the previous summer. With two babies under age three, having her mother there would be a godsend.

  Once more, though, government bureaucracy seemed to be playing a cruel game with their lives. The green card was approved but did not appear. USCIS officials couldn’t seem to locate it. Later, they told Marie there had been a card production error. A dozen calls and email chains later, Marina finally received the paper that would allow her to call the United States home. Summer rolled around, and Marie’s girls were old enough to be in school and day care. Marina could also watch them, and for the first time, Marie felt overwhelmed by the choices ahead of her. New Mexico was more expensive than Missouri. She needed to work.

  “I just don’t know where I’m supposed to be,” she said one afternoon as she gently bounced her youngest daughter on her lap. “So many times, I’ve had to wait for someone other than me, but now it’s up to me, and it’s hard because I’ve gotten into this comfort zone.”

  She considered paralegal work. Once she had wanted to be a lawmaker or a lawyer. She thought of all the people who had to fill out legal forms, immigration related or otherwise, without the help she’d received over the years. It was all so damn confusing, and she was fluent in English. She could help those who weren’t. Yet she struggled to make the numbers add up between the cost of advanced education, the nonprofit world, and child care. The separation from her own parents, even as a young adult, still tore at her. She wanted to be there for Araceli and Lorena, as well as for Chapin, who had supported her for so long. No matter what she decided, she would be letting someone down.

  “Early on, people had projected so much success onto me,” she mused. “And I didn’t really live up to that. I have these degrees, and I have this ability. People are like ‘You are a stay-at-home mom? What are you going to do?’”

  It was no longer an undocumented immigrant or even an immigrant dilemma, yet the pressure of the DREAMer identity to always represent well, to give back, hung over Marie. And then fate interceded in her favor. She found a job through a small employment firm that allowed her to work part-time. It was a low-level government job, but it required a security clearance, and, unlike her father, Marie didn’t have to worry about what a background check would turn up. Friends told her half jokingly she should consider running for office. As she watched the presidential campaign, Marie, less than half jokingly, said she would think about it.

  EARLY ON in her presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton promised once again to introduce a bill for comprehensive immigration reform within the first hundred days of being in office. Her Democratic rival, Senator Bernie Sanders, was an unknown among most Latinos, and he had to play catch-up. Sanders had arrived in the US Senate in 2007, just in time for the last major push for a compromise immigration bill, a
nd had sided with the AFL-CIO against the bill over its lenient guest worker provisions. By the time the 2013 Gang of Eight bill had come to a vote, Sanders had changed his mind. Something, he felt, was better than nothing, and he had backed the comprehensive immigration legislation, guest worker provisions and all. Still, immigration was not a hot topic in Vermont, and it was not among his best talking points.

  Hiring Erika Andiola and a young charismatic immigrant activist and attorney named César Vargas for his campaign began to turn things around. They helped arrange for Sanders to visit the Arizona border in March and speak about immigration reform. But Sanders did more than focus on deportations and the border; he linked the stepped-up incarceration of immigrants to the broader US prison system that had made the United States—home to only 4 percent of the world’s population—responsible for nearly 22 percent of the world’s known prison population.3 And he reminded his audiences that black Americans made up nearly half of those prisoners.

  For Erika, it was clear the immigration movement had a lot to learn from the Black Lives Matter activists. They had forced open the conversation about race and the US justice system that went beyond passing any specific law, to the fundamental American ideals of equality laid out in the Constitution. So much of the immigration movement had been wrapped around legislation, around citizenship, essentially focused on changing the law. Now Erika and many others increasingly focused on the need to change the perception of the immigration system itself—a system that increasingly criminalized thousands of undocumented immigrants.

  More and more, the young activists were taking what they learned and branching out with new organizations. Tania Unzueta, the Chicago advocate, helped found the Chicago-based Mijente (My People), whose mission was to support low-income communities of color.4 One of the first Mijente actions was a peaceful mass protest with local black youth activist groups at the 2015 International Association of Chiefs of Police conference held in Chicago. Carlos Saavedra from Boston worked on another new group called Cosecha (Harvest), which encouraged immigrants to participate in mass work stoppages to highlight the nation’s reliance on their labor.

  Changes were evident at United We Dream during its annual retreat in June 2016. Following the DACA and DAPA orders, the group had taken more than a year to step back, look at its accomplishments, and assess its future direction. It had grown so much in such a short time. The old structure had become unwieldy and even counterproductive.

  “It was the first time we’d had the time and breathing room to take stock,” United We Dream cofounder and executive director Cristina Jiménez said of the review. What Cristina and others at United We Dream realized was that they still needed to change hearts and minds, but they weren’t going to get anywhere without a bigger coalition. “Many people in our movement have stopped talking to [those outside], and we’re just talking to ourselves,” she said. “We need to push ourselves to be in uncomfortable places and have uncomfortable conversations.”

  Cristina and the other youth leaders also now understood that citizenship on its own hadn’t protected poor black Americans, Muslim Americans, and Latinos from racial profiling, nor did it necessarily provide a living wage for many white Americans. If they truly wanted to help their members, they could not stop at the issue of legalization. In its strategic plan for 2020, the coalition recommitted itself to promoting “womxn’s rights” and to working beyond the Latinx communities, using gender neutral terms for both groups for the first time. The organization also promised additional nonviolence and grassroots training for up-and-coming leaders, and it committed to fighting more local battles to build up a stronger grassroots national movement—the same tactic organizers had used more than a decade before with the in-state tuition fights.

  The UWD artwork reflected the shift. A new logo depicted immigrants in a range of colors and included one woman with a hijab. At United We Dream’s first congress in 2009, all the participants had fit into one classroom. Now, as its annual conference approached, organizers scrambled to find hotel space for the thousands of participants headed to Houston. The event’s sponsors had expanded as well and now included Planned Parenthood, SEIU, and other unions, as well as the Ford Foundation. Participants came from as far as Great Britain, where they had begun their own undocumented immigrant coalition modeled on the efforts of UWD.

  This time the black immigrant coalition UndocuBlack Network made its voice heard at the conference, calling out the organizers when speakers’ Spanish phrases or jokes weren’t quickly translated into English for the non-Spanish-speaking immigrants, even at one point challenging the keynote speaker, Jorge Ramos. When he repeated the common refrain that immigrants were not criminals, several black immigrants pushed back.

  “What is this racial dynamic when we say that we are not criminals? What is the subtext with this? The subtext is that the black people are criminal,” they argued. Ramos, they said, should call out the unjust laws that turned poor and desperate people, regardless of their nationality, into criminals—rather than perpetuate this false distinction.

  Ramos was gracious. He listened. He didn’t have a quick answer, and he didn’t pretend otherwise. This was new territory for him, too. It was an argument the young undocumented activists would increasingly put forward. No longer did they want to be used as the counterpoint to criminals, be it their own parents or anyone else. And, like Hareth, they questioned the easy distinction in the catchphrase “families, not felons.”

  Many of the older leaders like Felipe, Tania, and Marie did not attend the gathering. Nor did Gaby Pacheco, who was now helping run a nonprofit scholarship program for undocumented students cofounded by former Washington Post publisher Donald Graham.

  But Hareth, still enjoying postgraduation freedom, booked a flight at the last minute. No longer was she the minor celebrity from the Aloe Blacc video or the AFL-CIO speech. Now she sat quietly in the massive hall, enjoying lunch while catching up with old friends about their lives, marriages, new jobs, recounting relatives who had been deported. She marveled at how young some of the participants seemed. Many of those attending were first-timers. Hareth had been considered a baby activist when she went public with her immigration status as a senior in high school. Now some high school sophomores had traveled across the country to attend the congress with their teachers.

  Organizers had planned a march for the following day at Houston’s massive downtown jail complex, where law enforcement officials had partnered with the federal government to check inmates’ immigration status. An up-and-coming UWD leader from Connecticut, Tashi Sanchez-Llaury, gave the crowd some lighthearted practical advice. “I know us girls look really good in heels,” she told the crowd of newbie activists, “but tomorrow is not the day.” Then she got serious. Above all: the participants were to remain orderly and nonviolent. UWD was straddling unchartered space, gaining permission from, and working closely with, law enforcement on a march that would protest law enforcement.

  Some younger activists saw it as a cop-out. Others saw it as the necessary compromise for a grassroots organization that also held a seat at the table during White House meetings. The group’s leadership, now paid, included some activists who were the oldest in the movement and now long undocumented themselves. Occasionally young activists groused about their earning salaries to advocate for undocumented youth. Others saw the United We Dream staff as providing necessary access, continuity, and stability—key players needed to balance the even more confrontational wings of the movement, and to educate newly out undocumented teens about their broader history.

  The changes at United We Dream reflected the demographic changes of the movement. Like Marie and Felipe, like Erika and Dario and Alex, many young undocumented immigrants were no longer limited to working as activists. They were out of school. They had loans to repay and families to support, and they could fill out W-2s. They were increasingly part of the US economy.

  “We are infiltrating,” United We Dream advocacy director Greisa M
artinez told the conference participants. “They just don’t know it. We are already in health care, government, business.”

  Overlooked by many during the conference were Jorge Ramos’s more sobering words. At the end of his talk, he urged the teens and young adults to understand and respect why their parents had remained silent for so many years.

  “Your parents had to fight in a completely different way,” he reminded them. “The fact that you are here right now means that your parents were right. . . . They needed to be silent.”

  The parents of those at the conference were part of a generation that had sacrificed it all for their children, Ramos told them. They were in a sense a lost generation. Even if their parents did eventually adjust their status, people like Betty and Mario, Dario Sr., and Marina would have spent the better part of their lives to a degree invisible and in fear.

  “It doesn’t matter what happens,” he continued, referring to the Supreme Court’s pending decision on whether to expand temporary protection to millions more undocumented immigrants but also more subtly to the presidential election. “You’re gonna keep fighting,” he said. It was both a statement and a demand. “We cannot lose another generation.”

  ON JUNE 23, 2016, the Supreme Court issued its ruling on the administration’s expanded DACA order. It was one line: “The judgment is affirmed by an equally divided Court.”

  There was no accompanying opinion, no tea leaves to examine. For now the case was done, the expanded legal protection Obama had announced in 2014 on indefinite hold. Millions of immigrants would remain in the shadows as they had for decades, working and driving illegally, unable to obtain medical insurance, and fearful of reporting criminal abuse, lest they be deported. It was a blow for the young activists and their advocates, who knew the order could easily disappear altogether under the next administration. For Cecilia Muñoz, it was also a chilling predictor of what might happen to DACA. A successful challenge to one part of the program could lay the groundwork for successful challenges to the rest of it. How the lawsuits fared could depend on how strongly the next US attorney general defended the Obama administration’s 2012 order.