By FRANCO ORDOÑEZ —
McClatchy Foreign Staff
MEXICO
CITY — In a corner of her room is a pink drawer. It's almost hidden by the
3-foot pile of clothes. But when Alejandra Pinzon clears a path and pulls open
the plastic drawer, she can touch her most cherished possessions: a jumble of
mementos that connect her to a life that's slipping from her grasp.
Homecoming
photos from her high school back in Kansas. A worn letter from her aunt in
Overland Park, Kan. A report card of five A's and, in Spanish, a B-minus. And
her SAT scores, numbers she's never bothered to read.
Kneeling
on the floor of her Mexico City apartment, Pinzon rifled through the drawer until
she found her gold Taylor Swift concert tickets. She stared at the tickets and
smiled.
"I'm
obsessed with Taylor Swift," she said. "I wish she'd come to
Mexico."
Just
months after the concert, in the spring of 2010, while her friends were
chattering about what to wear to prom, Pinzon faced an irreversible decision —
whether to return to Mexico — that would forever shape her future.
Pinzon was
17 and living in the United States illegally. She wanted to go to college, but
she knew that wasn't an option. She worried about being deported. She thought
she could go back to Mexico, get her degree, build her skills and then,
hopefully, a U.S. company would sponsor her to return on a visa. She might be
back in as little as four or five years.
It didn't
work out that way.
When
Washington lawmakers debate pro and con, immigration is framed as a political
issue. But the repercussions are real for young people such as Pinzon, whose
parents chose the difficulties of starting new lives in the United States
illegally over the safety and small horizons of home. This fractured
relationship between right and left, Republicans and Democrats, has half a
million young people like Pinzon caught in a state of limbo between countries.
The now
21-year-old with big brown eyes and a wide smile lives in Mexico City. But
emotionally she's tied to the broad suburbs and flat accents of the American
Midwest. It's an ambiguous space for these young people that affects everything
from the relationships they develop to their sense of self. It's a space that
exists somewhere on both sides of the border, but not on one or the other.
The late
poet Gloria Anzaldua called it the "borderlands." An estimated
500,000 Mexicans ages 15 to 32 returned to their homeland from 2005 to 2010,
according to an analysis of Mexican migration records by Jill Anderson, a
postdoctoral fellow at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In all,
about 1.4 million people moved from the United States to Mexico in that time,
about double the number that did so from 1995 to 2000.
About 11
million people, including 6.1 million from Mexico, remain in the U.S.
illegally, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
"For
these young people, like Ali, it's a very painful and confusing space, because
the question is, 'Where do I belong?' and 'To whom do I belong?' "
Anderson said. She's editing a book, "Los Otros Dreamers," that
documents the sociological challenges that young returning migrants experience.
"And I think that becomes even more painful when you're separated from
your family."
Ali Pinzon
could be anyone's American-born next-door neighbor. She adores country music
and peppers her sentences with "like" and "you know." But
she's not next door.
Her family
has been divided by the consequences of the U.S. immigration policy. While
sister Lulu — born in the United States and thus a U.S. citizen — lives in St.
Louis, their younger sister, Gaby, 19, lives in Mexico City.
Gaby
Pinzon also lived for a period in the United States, but she returned to Mexico
several years before her sister did. In the spring of 2010, as she was about to
graduate from high school, Pinzon felt she had two choices.
She could
remain in the United States, be dependent on Lulu and work illegally as a
waitress or in some other service job. Or she could return to Mexico and attend
college. She thought it would be easier to go to a Mexican college.
Lawyers
told her that if she returned to Mexico before she was 18, she could avoid immigration
violations.
Sister
Lulu was against the move. "You don't know what you're doing," Lulu
told her. "You haven't been to Mexico."
On Aug. 9,
2010, Pinzon stepped off a plane into a country that felt foreign to her, even
though it was her native land. She walked out of the airport in her UGG boots
and breathed in the city, which she said smelled like burnt rubber, to begin a
new life in a place teeming with 20 million people. She didn't know when she'd
be back in the U.S. again.
"I
felt like I was going somewhere where I had never been before," she said.
"I didn't really speak a lot of Spanish." At first, Pinzon spent much
of her free time on Facebook and Skype, up to eight hours a day. The friends
she does have in Mexico are almost all recent returnees from the U.S., many via
deportation. She doesn't have to worry about being judged by them when she
speaks English. Until she found them, she felt as if no one in this massive
city understood her homesickness.
Pinzon was
taken to the United States when she was 11 years old by her father, who was
hoping to cultivate a better life, along with little sister Gaby. Their mother
remained in Mexico, and Lulu already was living in the U.S. The three then
overstayed their tourist visas and moved in with Pinzon's grandmother, a legal
U.S. resident, in Overland Park.
Pinzon
entered the seventh grade at Oxford Middle School in Overland Park, a suburb of
Kansas City, Mo. She was the only Latino child in her class. Later, at Blue
Valley Northwest High School, she joined the yearbook committee, sang with the
chorus and danced with the Dazzlers drill team.
Pinzon
tried to get into college when she returned to Mexico City, but she couldn't
overcome the bureaucracy. The government wouldn't validate her U.S. high school
diploma because she'd used a hyphenated name in the United States. Many
returning migrants struggle to certify their transcripts. Pinzon was told she'd
have to get a U.S. court to validate her identity or wait until she was 21,
when she could take a GED-equivalent test.
With her
good grades and diverse extracurricular activities, which included collecting
school supplies for children in Uganda, Pinzon probably would been a shoo-in
for a U.S. state college, had she been there legally. But in Mexico, she couldn't
even get the government to accept her high school diploma.
"It
was so much paperwork," she said. "So much bureaucracy that it kind
of wears you out, and eventually you're going to need money. So I just got a
job, and that's what I do now." She ended up finding a job at a call
center, one of thousands where telephone and cable companies, among others,
hire Americanized migrants to take customer service calls from the United
States at Mexican wages.
One day,
she recognized the 913 area code. It was a woman from Overland Park who needed
her cable services transferred. Pinzon ignored the five-minute-per-call limit
and chatted. She told the woman she used to live by Johnson County Community
College. They talked about a local Greek restaurant they both liked.
"Don't
you love Overland Park?" she asked the caller.
On June
15, 2012, less than two years after Pinzon returned to Mexico, she was playing
foosball with friends when her sister called from St. Louis.
It was
about the DREAM Act. Her sister said there was news: High school graduates no
longer would be deported.
Her sister
sounded anxious, but Pinzon paid little mind. What did it matter to her? She
was already in Mexico. She went back to foosball.
But that
night, she opened her laptop and typed in "DREAM Act." News stories
popped onto her screen. President Barack Obama raised the hopes of many
immigrants when he announced from the White House rose garden that he'd block
deportations for hundreds of thousands of young people, like Pinzon, who'd arrived
as kids and graduated from U.S. high schools.
More than
400,000 already have been accepted into the program and more than 1 million
probably are eligible. Pinzon might have been one of them. but she'd gambled by
leaving the country.
"What
have I done?" Pinzon thought to herself.
She should
have waited, she now says.
"It
would have just taken me two years," she said. "The two years I've
been doing this, I could have been doing it there."
She still
hopes to attend college in Mexico. When she turns 21, she'll be able to take an
equivalency exam for high school and hopefully then enter a Mexican college.
She still hopes to earn a degree and entice an American company to sponsor her
in the United States.
Going back
illegally is also an option, Pinzon admits. She's thought of various ways to
return. "I'm always going to think about going back," she said.
Her sister
Lulu even bought her a plane ticket. Pinzon still has her tourist visa, which
she could use to return and then overstay again. But she's not sure whether
she's ready to start over again, leaving Gaby and her new nephew, Santiago.
But she's
keeping the ticket, which she has saved on her computer in her room. It's near
the pink drawer with the rest of her American stuff.
