Once Upon a Time in Mexico: Ana's Story.
This is the first installment of Once Upon a Time in Mexico: Ana's Story, a long-term story that will be published in the News Section of the WE project's website.
It is about a the life of a Mexican-American immigrant living in a small town in the Heartland of the United States.
It is about a the life of a Mexican-American immigrant living in a small town in the Heartland of the United States.
I. On a frigid Saturday morning in February, Ana, a twenty-six-year-old woman whose family came over from Mexico without immigration documentation when she was six, is making pancakes. She is cooking for her partner, Jose (his name has been changed for safety,) and their two-year-old son, Xavi Alexander (pronounced SHAW-vee), before Jose goes off to work and Ana runs errands around town, as Xavi hops on a blue tricycle and barrels through the kitchen and living room, which is bare except for the kind of modern-style furniture you’d find at an Ikea store, a wooden coffee table, a light-tone fabric chair and an undersized sofa that sits under a single narrow shelf decorated with family pictures, mostly of Xavi, the only personal touches against a vast dark grey wall.
This is the story of Ana.
Ana is a recipient of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program enacted by President Obama in 2012, which let children brought into the United States by their parents without a legal immigration status obtain a social security number and driver’s license, and some protection against deportation. In this dour winter, as she just found out she was “going to welcome a new life,” her future is wrapped in uncertainty, her thoughts resting somewhere between the intense joy of an expecting mother and the dread that cloaks the lives of many undocumented immigrants. It is a dread that all but negates the sort of plans a family about to grow would make, yet she and Jose are making them.
The story of Ana is personal to me, and not just because I am a mother and an immigrant too (in fact our experiences of immigration in this country couldn’t be any more different.) It is personal because to me she is, much more than the face of DACA, whose ultimate fate will be decided by the Supreme Court later on this year, the embodiment of what is best about the country that we both have come to love as our own.
This is the story of Ana, and it gives me hope and it fills me with despair.
Ana lives with her family in the country she calls home in a region sometimes referred to as the Heartland, where she is working while going to school part-time and raising her son, and until recently her younger brother, with her partner. Her DACA status is in limbo, as is that of some eight hundred thousand other DACA recipients, after the Trump administration announced, in September of 2017, that it was not renewing the program.
The story is about Ana, and what it means to be a DACA recipient today deep in Trump country, with a family, dreams and a daily grind.
Ana’s story is banal and extraordinary at the same time; it is a story of heart-breaking hardship amidst mundane chores, it is a story of resilience and love, of lemons drying in the southern Mexico dust, of crossing harsh lands for an uncertain tomorrow of dirty, low-paying jobs, of reaching out across divides and failing, of breaking through with friendship and family and loyalties running deep, it is the story of a meal of taquitos that became the start of a long relationship, it is a story of fear, of a little plastic card that means the world for an immigrant from a devastated country and a program with a promising name that changed everything. It is a story of hope.
Ana lives in Mexico, a small town in north-central Missouri, and not the country that Trump seems to relish demonizing as responsible for anything from a grievous rise in crime in American cities to the disappearance of the American way of life, a narrative that echoes loudly in these parts of the domestic political landscape. The town’s own story, its deep ties to the country of the same name that sees so many of its own make the dangerous trek north, again and again, to come work in the plants and the fields and the homes and the construction sites of the U.S., is banal and extraordinary too. It is about ordinary families and what the growth of globalization, in all its complex web of economic, social and cultural dynamics, has meant to a small town with limited resources and even tighter choices. It is also about families that have succeeded in recreating their community in a foreign land hundreds of miles away from home, one migrant at a time, one family at a time, all from the same place in the Southern Mexico state of Oaxaca, joined by blood, dreams and toil.
But I want to tell the story of Ana, not of Mexico, Missouri, and not of immigration from South and Central America into North America, and not of the ugly politics that have come to dominate the debate about it, although a story about Ana is bound to be about all that, too, through the minute webs of her destiny. To me Ana is a friend, a fellow activist and mother, and a part of the hope that I hold for the future of this country, where I also made my home, albeit under the very different circumstances and privilege of being a white woman from a wealthy European country.
Ana is short, with long wavy hair that she sometimes straightens and dyes, although on that day it was her natural dark chestnut, curly and loose, immense brown eyes and dark olive skin.
Ana, her wide smile and the sway of her arms when she speaks.
Ana is a recipient of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program enacted by President Obama in 2012, which let children brought into the United States by their parents without a legal immigration status obtain a social security number and driver’s license, and some protection against deportation. In this dour winter, as she just found out she was “going to welcome a new life,” her future is wrapped in uncertainty, her thoughts resting somewhere between the intense joy of an expecting mother and the dread that cloaks the lives of many undocumented immigrants. It is a dread that all but negates the sort of plans a family about to grow would make, yet she and Jose are making them.
The story of Ana is personal to me, and not just because I am a mother and an immigrant too (in fact our experiences of immigration in this country couldn’t be any more different.) It is personal because to me she is, much more than the face of DACA, whose ultimate fate will be decided by the Supreme Court later on this year, the embodiment of what is best about the country that we both have come to love as our own.
This is the story of Ana, and it gives me hope and it fills me with despair.
Ana lives with her family in the country she calls home in a region sometimes referred to as the Heartland, where she is working while going to school part-time and raising her son, and until recently her younger brother, with her partner. Her DACA status is in limbo, as is that of some eight hundred thousand other DACA recipients, after the Trump administration announced, in September of 2017, that it was not renewing the program.
The story is about Ana, and what it means to be a DACA recipient today deep in Trump country, with a family, dreams and a daily grind.
Ana’s story is banal and extraordinary at the same time; it is a story of heart-breaking hardship amidst mundane chores, it is a story of resilience and love, of lemons drying in the southern Mexico dust, of crossing harsh lands for an uncertain tomorrow of dirty, low-paying jobs, of reaching out across divides and failing, of breaking through with friendship and family and loyalties running deep, it is the story of a meal of taquitos that became the start of a long relationship, it is a story of fear, of a little plastic card that means the world for an immigrant from a devastated country and a program with a promising name that changed everything. It is a story of hope.
Ana lives in Mexico, a small town in north-central Missouri, and not the country that Trump seems to relish demonizing as responsible for anything from a grievous rise in crime in American cities to the disappearance of the American way of life, a narrative that echoes loudly in these parts of the domestic political landscape. The town’s own story, its deep ties to the country of the same name that sees so many of its own make the dangerous trek north, again and again, to come work in the plants and the fields and the homes and the construction sites of the U.S., is banal and extraordinary too. It is about ordinary families and what the growth of globalization, in all its complex web of economic, social and cultural dynamics, has meant to a small town with limited resources and even tighter choices. It is also about families that have succeeded in recreating their community in a foreign land hundreds of miles away from home, one migrant at a time, one family at a time, all from the same place in the Southern Mexico state of Oaxaca, joined by blood, dreams and toil.
But I want to tell the story of Ana, not of Mexico, Missouri, and not of immigration from South and Central America into North America, and not of the ugly politics that have come to dominate the debate about it, although a story about Ana is bound to be about all that, too, through the minute webs of her destiny. To me Ana is a friend, a fellow activist and mother, and a part of the hope that I hold for the future of this country, where I also made my home, albeit under the very different circumstances and privilege of being a white woman from a wealthy European country.
Ana is short, with long wavy hair that she sometimes straightens and dyes, although on that day it was her natural dark chestnut, curly and loose, immense brown eyes and dark olive skin.
Ana, her wide smile and the sway of her arms when she speaks.
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