Jorge Toledano’s mother recovered from meningitis, but her family amassed $200,000 in medical bills as a result. Photo: JESUS E. VALENZUELA-FELIX

Editor’s Note:  California Senator Ricardo Lara’s (D- Huntington Park/Long Beach) Health For all Bill (SB 1005) – it would make all Californians, regardless of immigration status, eligible to purchase insurance – advanced out of the Senate Health Committee on Wednesday, April 30, and will go to the Senate Appropriations Committee before being moved for a vote.  Under the Affordable Care Act, undocumented immigrants are barred from receiving federal subsidies for their health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. In California alone, there are an estimated 1 million undocumented immigrants who lack health care.

Below is the story of an undocumented farm worker family in Salinas, the Toledanos, which now faces insurmountable medical debt due to being uninsured.

By JESÚS E. VALENZUELA-FÉLIX/Coachella Uninc

“I felt she was going to die”

How much does it cost to live? $200,000. That’s what Jorge Toledano discovered when he opened his mother’s hospital bill.

“My mother was having convulsions,” said Toledano. “We (still) don’t know exactly what happened.  My sister found her chocking in her sleep, and tried giving her mouth-to-mouth.  I knew it was bad, because she was twitching, her voice was gone, and she couldn’t even speak.  When I sat her up she vomited, and from there I called my grandmother and told her that my mother was in bad shape and we didn’t know what was wrong with her.  Then I called the ambulance.”

Toledano, 28, is a farm worker, like the rest of his family. He came to California from Mexico at the age of 14 in pursuit of the American Dream, because at home there was nothing to eat.  He made the trek from his home in San Martin Peras, Oaxaca, to San Diego, California, rarely if ever taking a day off.  He was a migrant farm worker in Mexico long before he came to the U.S. – as a kid he picked tomatoes in Sinaloa, where there are neither bathrooms nor water for workers, and where being indigenous means putting up with strong racism from the mestizos, or mixed-race Mexicans.  Toledano’s first language is not Spanish but Mixteco, an indigenous language.  As Toledano puts it, the goal has always been survival. Prosperity? Maybe that will come later.

Stories like Toledano’s are commonplace these days in the farming regions of California.  Economic conditions at home have forced entire generations of Mexicans to move north, with the promise that if they worked hard enough they would get ahead.  But in the Toledano’s line of work, farm work, wages are low and health risks associated with the occupation – to the physical nature of the labor and exposure to harmful agricultural pesticides and chemicals – are high.

“She was in the hospital all day Monday and Tuesday, and it wasn’t until late Wednesday that she opened her eyes,” Toledano said of his mother.

It turns out she was suffering from meningitis, a viral infection that causes inflammation of the areas around the brain and spinal cord, that can lead to serious symptoms such as vomiting, convulsions and fever.  Doctors, said Toledano, were unable to confirm exactly when or where she contracted the virus.

A full week in the hospital was followed by four days resting at home.  Toledano and his sister followed up by accompanying their mother to an outpatient clinic.

“As we were waiting in the clinic she began to get convulsions. My sister was there and as soon as she noticed that something was wrong, we held her hands. When she was convulsing I felt that she was going to die. I screamed, ‘Help her, please, help her!’  I was crying.  The clinic called an ambulance and we went (back) to the hospital.  She went in on a Thursday and left on a Wednesday.  After leaving the hospital we came to the house, but it was as if we’d brought home a dead person. She had no idea where she was.”

In debt for life

The bills for the two weeks combined came out to more than $200,000.  The ambulance ride alone cost over $3,000.

Asked if he’d be able to pay the bill on his own, Toledano, laughing, said, “Maybe if I stop eating for a whole year.  A farm worker makes on average $25,000 a year.  If I had insurance, of course, it would help.”

Toledano applied for Medi-Cal on behalf of his mother, but the application was denied because the she is undocumented.

“I don’t know how we’ll be able to pay,” he said.  “We barely make enough to pay the rent.”

After 14 years of working hard and saving up, Toledano is completely broke.  What little money he had managed to save up through the years has gone to help pay for the medical bills. By the time this article is published he’ll be in Oxnard, working the same cycle that he’s been following for years, picking strawberries there, making $9 an hour, working ten hour days for 6 days a week, hoping to not get sick or do something that will impede him from working.  When that season ends, he’ll be back at home in Salinas.

Despite it all, he talks with a smile. Life has been hard, toiling in the fields through the dirt and sweat, but he has faith that everything will turn out fine.  Pity, said Toledano, is the last thing he would want from anyone.  Rather, the recent nightmare with his mother has him hoping for something else entirely — to live in a society where equality means equality, regardless of status.

Jesús E. Valenzuela Félix is a reporter from Coachella living in Salinas and working for the United Farm Workers Foundation. He is a regular contributor to Coachella Unincorporated and New America Media. Read more of his work here. 

The Diary of Joaquín Magón Entry 31: Why Citizenship?

Citizenship is one of the most important rights in this country; so why is there talk of denying this to an entire population?

Republican members of Congress recently unveiled their “Immigration Standards,” a lengthy list of requirements that undocumented immigrants must meet in order to become legal residents – but a path to citizenship is not included on this list.

Let me tell you why full citizenship is important.

In the spectrum of extremes – on one side no immigration reform at all, on the other full citizenship to the 11 million – there is a middle ground. That middle ground can only begin with the two sides of the representative spectrum start talking, and the people they represent start pushing. The fact that the two sides are now at least talking about immigration in realistic terms is positive.

There is currently a huge population of legal permanent residents (LPR) as a result of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 which granted amnesty to roughly 2.7 million people, according to the Center for Immigration Studies. Aside from that there are millions more that have achieved LPR status, as well as the millions more that are the children of those immigrants who are born in the U.S. leading to a diversification in the demographics of the citizen population and, thus, the voting block.

The diversification of the voting population is a beautiful thing for a democracy. There are new growing global issues that this country is facing and, in order to tackle those issues with success, we need a global-minded population. The need for a population that can think different, that brings to the table different perspectives can only strengthen a democracy. Citizenship allows us to come to the table as equals, share each other’s ideas and acknowledge that we all deserve the same rights to representation, that we all share the same concerns for the nation’s prosperity and that we will all share our unique ideas to ensure that we move forward as a nation.

The alternative being proposed, in which LPR status does not lead to citizenship for everyone except students brought to the U.S. under a certain age, is a shift from the citizenship perspective to a criminalization perspective. The Republican “immigration standards” is a list – which includes border enforcement, entry-exit visa tracking system, employment verification and workplace enforcement, Individuals living Outside the Rule of Law – portraying an entire population as criminals.

The criminalization of an entire population whose vibrant ideas and experiences are barred from supporting the nation’s democratic system can only hurt a nation. There is potential there, huge potential, to be inclusive and to move forward together.

Citizenship drives – what I’ve been calling the other side of immigration reform – is a less media-worthy, yet very effective means of applying the political pressure necessary to achieve a comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) bill that includes a path to citizenship. It was the quiet workings of thousands of organizations across the country working to turn LPRs into citizens that brought us to this point in time where CIR feels more real than it has felt for almost 30 years.

At the same time, citizenship has been used as one of the Latino population’s failures. According to the Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Trends Project report “The Path Not Taken,” only 30 percent of Mexican LPRs eligible to become full citizens do so. That is not to say that all LPRs chose to remain LPRs. The majority of LPRs from other backgrounds do, indeed, take that path.

The Mexicano, however, has a tendency to not do so. “I just don’t know how to go about it,” is the most common response — which is a key indicator that not becoming a citizen is not so much a lack of want as a need for help navigating the immigration system.

Citizenship drives are a very powerful tactic that can help achieve immigration reform and citizenship for others. We can ensure that this nation will remain strong, competitive, diverse, and ready to tackle any and all issues that arise in an ever-globalized nation, state, county, city, home.

The Diary of Joaquín Magón is written by Jesús E. Valenzuela Félix, a reporter from Coachella living in Salinas and working for the United Farm Workers Foundation. He is a regular contributor to Coachella Unincorporated and New America Media.

César Chávez: An American Hero, starring Michael Peña as the late co-founder of  United Farm Workers, opens in theaters today.

The Diary of Joaquín Magón Entry 30: Living Unconquered

“César Chávez: An American Hero” opens in theaters today, bringing to the big screen the story of the beginning of the United Farm Workers.

The film will inspire dialogue – that can help or not help — the farm worker rights movement.

Discourse around farm workers by media, the general community, and even some farm worker advocates, often revolves around the idea of farm workers as victims. There is also a tendency to idolize farm workers.

If we want to change the conditions of farm workers and thereby live in a system where the food we consume comes at a fair price, we must start talking about farm workers in a realistic and humanistic manner.

Some farm workers are fighters who have walked out on strikes, risking their jobs and even deportation to continue their struggle. Some saw their co-workers strike and instead decided to stay and scab.

Like César Chávez said, “Some farm workers are bums, just like some growers are. It’s a mistake to begin by idolizing the workers because they’re the ‘down and outers.’ Most farm workers are just human; they live, like all of us, from day to day; they want happiness and they want to avoid confusion and pain.”

We can credit Chávez’s success in organizing to understanding that farm workers are regular human beings with the capacity to build a movement; they simply lacked the tools to do so. He did not see or talk to them as if they were victims.

“We don’t let people sit around a room crying about their problems,” Chávez also said. “No philosophizing – do something about it. In the beginning there was a lot of nonsense about the poor farm worker…in order to help farm workers, look at them as human beings and not as something extra special or else you are kidding yourself and are going to be mighty, mighty disappointed. Don’t pity them either. Treat them as human beings, because they have just as many faults as you have; that way you’ll never be in trouble, because you’ll never be disappointed.”

This applies whether you are organizing farm workers, participating in civic engagement, or donating to a cause. Do not pity them. We do no one any favors by treating them as if they do not have the strength and capacity to change their situations.

This is the Chávez that comes through in the film. The director, Diego Luna, followed those instructions clearly. And, as difficult as it may be when an issue is dear to us, we have to show what is real. The film portrays hope and workers fighting for their rights, making them instant heroes in our eyes. But the film does a good job at capturing the fear that comes when some don’t strike. The film captures the frustration of a long struggle. The film does not fall into this trap of impeccable good versus absolute evil.

I talked to a group of female farm workers who had attended the meetings to create change in their work place. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to change the situations — low wages, potential wage theft, discrimination for being indigenous, just to name a few. They lacked the space to participate in the dialogue that would engage them in change. They never had the tools to dismantle fears instilled long ago that this was their fate and that they should accept it. They began to dismantle once they discovered the space, walked into the space, engaged in dialogue, and had access to the tools.

So it is with all farm workers. If we had listened to their problems, said, “Oh poor you, here’s some money for your children,” then the cycle of poverty would not change.

Here are a few things we can do to change the way we talk and write about farm workers. We can discuss their problems and how they are working toward solutions. If we have a sad story about their conditions, show also how they are fighting to change them. Our photographs can show the struggle as opposed to the sadness.

One can join an organization that focuses on farm worker issues and actively participate, keeping in mind that we are guests in their space and that we must understand what their issues are — which means actively listening.

It’s a simple set of steps that can be transferred to any person in any situation because the reality is that people don’t want to be pitied, they want to live with the dignity they deserve.

The Diary of Joaquín Magón is written by Jesús E. Valenzuela Félix, a reporter from Coachella living in Salinas and working for the United Farm Workers Foundation. He is a regular contributor to Coachella Unincorporated and New America Media.  

Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of three reports on the DREAMer movement.
Part one can be read here and part two can be read here.

The Diary of Joaquín Magón Entry 29: The Dreamer Chronicles, Part 3

Approved for DACA, Mayté and Lamber Can Finally Pursue their Dreams

I first spoke to Mayté, 21, in December as she was finishing up her stay at College of the Desert (COD), the Coachella Valley’s community college. She was getting ready to transfer and was waiting for her Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) approval.

I sat down with her again over the summer, along with her brother, Lamber, 18, for a follow up interview. Mayte had been approved for DACA in January 2013 and Lamber was approved a few months after.

Lamber recently graduated from Desert Mirage High School in Thermal, and he plans to go to COD because, as he puts it, “I have no cash.” He wants to study liberal arts and become a teacher.

Our conversation is a mix between me asking questions about their experience and them asking me questions on what to expect for the DACA renewals and what to expect if S. 744 — or any other comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) bill — becomes law. I explain that if the bill passes in its current form, DACA recipients won’t have to go through another background check and would go through a 5-year waiting period to become a legal permanent resident. It’s all speculation, of course, but it makes for good conversation.

Mayté is getting ready to start her first semester in CSU San Bernardino, embarking on her new adventures in a new school and a new city. To say that DACA changed her life drastically would be undermine her immense ability to survive, her resourcefulness; she would have graduated from a university regardless because she wants it bad enough, but now that the playing field has been leveled a bit more it will be easier.

“The only thing that has come from DACA is that now I can work legally,” says Mayté. “Before I would feel kind of restrained, only because I didn’t have papers. I couldn’t work. Now it’s better. I can go to San Bernardino. I had postponed that because I didn’t have a work permit. I didn’t have papers, and I asked where am I going to work? How am I going to pay for my classes? And my mom wasn’t going to help me out because she can barely pay for this [apartment].”

Their mother is a farm worker. She works the season picking lettuce in the night shifts. When I spoke to them it was May, the heat of the desert was hitting well over 90 degrees and would slowly creep over 100 in the coming summer months.

To go outside for a walk is unbearable, to work at a fast pace is deadly. Many companies prefer to work by night going in at 4 p.m and coming out at 3 a.m. One can imagine the difficulties of such a task, in particular for parents that must leave their children home either with a babysitter or alone at those hours of the night as parents swipe and cut away. While the city dreams, she dreams of one day having her children graduate from college and be the platform for which they, as a family, can achieve the American dream. She navigates the night with a knife and a light bulb searching and cutting produce that will make its way into a sandwich somewhere that one of us will eat.

“Whenever [our mom] comes from the fields,” says Lamber, “I can see her veins, her blood vessels exploded…[she has] cuts everywhere, her skin is rough.”

Seeing the conditions that her mother has to go through, and the injustices that her mother suffers in the work place, Mayté decided to go to school to become a labor attorney. Lamber, having seen how difficult it is to navigate the school system that he, at such a young age has noticed does not welcome all students equally, has decided to become an English teacher because he believes “those are the ones you learn the most from.”

Like Mayté and Lamber, there are millions of students out there fighting for CIR. We can look at CIR, we can look at our communities and see how immigration is integrated into every single aspect, in every single atom of our lives. The undocumented, low-income populations are usually relegated to the less economically privileged part of town, usually the East — the Eastern Coachella Valley, East Salinas, East Los Angeles. What we are seeing more and more of today are young immigrants that look around, notice their parents, notice the walls of the buildings on their side of town, notice the paved streets on the other side of town, notice their hands, notice their dreams, and notice the barriers.

What we see is a crux. A point. A specific point in history where people see that they want to change the world and are beginning to grow and become the root cause of a change that will spread like vines intertwined on walls. Neither Alma, Mayte, nor Lamber want to become leaders of a large movement. They want to become a lawyer, a teacher, a marriage counselor. In other words, they want to become integrated into society and change society from within. But that change, that fight for CIR is not an end; it’s a means from which to attain the full rights of a voting citizen coupled with the power of an education, in order to return to their community and to make things better for both the generation before them – the parents that migrated, that worked in the hot, burning, fields, construction sites, cleaning the halls of a university, mowing the lawn of mansion – and for the next generation that will not have to bear witness to the pain of the past.

The Diary of Joaquín Magón is written by Jesús E. Valenzuela Félix, a reporter from Coachella living in Salinas and working for the United Farm Workers Foundation. He is a regular contributor to Coachella Unincorporated and New America Media.  

Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of three reports on the DREAMer movement.
Part one can be read here and part two can be read here.

Alma Torres, an undocumented college student, has become active in the comprehensive reform movement. Photo: Jesús E. Valenzuela Félix

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of three reports on the DREAMer movement. The first part can be read here.

The Diary of Joaquín Magón Entry 28: The Dreamer Chronicles, Part 2

SALINAS — By the time Alma Torres turned 12, her father had been back and forth between the family’s home in Michoacan, Mexico and the United States so many times that he decided it would be best to just bring the entire family to live with him in King City, California.

The elder Torres, seeing that the price of bread had increased to the point that he could no longer make a living working as a security guard at the local television station, began going to California in the mid-90s to supplement his earnings by working in the fields. But by the early 2000’s, the elder Torres had had enough.

As his daughter, now 23, puts it: “It was in 2002 when we came here for the first, and last, time.”

The Torres family was part of a wave of immigrants who arrived in the mid-90s during a period of economic and politic tumult in Mexico. In 1994, the gruesome assassination in Tijuana of presidential candidate Luis Donato Colosio spurred a massive exodus of international investors; Ernesto Zedillo, a neoliberal, was elected president; and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) inundated the country with cheap, U.S.-produced food products, at the expense of Mexican farmers.

The immigration stories told by young people, like Torres, who crossed the US-Mexico border as children, are often much different than those of their parents, who speak of days spent crossing unforgiving deserts, swimming across rivers and running full speed to avoid La Migra.

“We came with a lady — it was (me), my sister and two other cousins,” she recalls. “They were younger and I was the oldest. We went to the airport and landed in Tijuana. I went with one lady and my mother with another. I remember that we were crossing the border through the main gate. One of the children that came with us got sick and began to vomit. So we had to get out of the line and go back. This time they gave us a pill to sleep. By the time I awoke, I was on this side.”

Moving to a new city is hard enough for any 12-year-old. But for Torres, moving to King City from her small ranch in Michoacan meant adjusting to a new country, a new language, and a foreign culture.

“I entered school (in the U.S.) in the seventh grade. The language, the people, the customs, everything was different and it was very hard to adapt … I didn’t understand what people were telling me, and I became isolated. My sisters would cry because it was so difficult.”

And, like so many undocumented teens in the U.S., when it came time to think about college, Torres had no idea what her options were, let alone where to begin.

“After I graduated high school I didn’t know that I could go to college. I had no idea what I wanted to study; I didn’t know what my major would be; I just knew that I wanted to [continue going] to school.”

In a scenario all too familiar to many immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children, Alma remembers how her parents gave her “the talk” — that she might have to choose the cheapest option, a community college maybe, because she was undocumented.

“I think I always knew I was undocumented. But it wasn’t until high school that I learned that I don’t have the same benefits or opportunities as other people,” she says. “Others would talk about going to college or getting their drivers license but not [my sisters and I]. I knew. It’s in high school that it clicks that you don’t have the same opportunities.”

Not knowing what options were available for her after high school graduation, she got a job working at a packing shed, working a late shift from 2 pm to 11 pm. After spending a year on the job, Torres had gathered enough information on her own to enroll at Hartnell Community Collge in nearby Salinas. Once enrolled, it took a great deal of sacrifice to pay for her tuition and related expenses.

“It’s around $47 per unit, you’re looking at 3 units per class, [and] you take 3 classes,” she says, not to mention the books and the gas for her trips from King City to Salinas, an hour and a half round trip.

Relief came earlier this year, however, after the enactment of AB 540, a California state law making Dreamers like Torres eligible for college financial aid programs funded by the state.

“I already got a semester paid for and it’s such a great relief,” says Torres.

Also this year, Torres’ application was accepted for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a federal program that gives temporary legal status to certain undocumented immigrants who entered the country as children.

“Before [DACA] I didn’t have any plans set. I didn’t see my future. I just kept going to school, waiting for whatever came up. Now I feel like I can finish school, I can have a driver’s license, I don’t have to be afraid of driving, I have the chance of applying for better jobs with better pay, and can definitely graduate from a university,” she says. “Once I got my (work) permit (through DACA), things started falling into place.”

Torres has one semester left at Hartnell, and plans to begin applying to four-year universities in October. Her top choices are within the California State University system — San Jose, Monterey, Sacramento and Long Beach. She intends to major in psychology with the goal of eventually earning a PhD.

Having legal status through DACA emboldened Torres to become increasingly vocal about her support for comprehensive federal immigration reform. She attended a “Caravan for Citizenship” rally in Bakersfield over the summer, and has even hosted house meetings to share information about immigration reform with her community.

“Comprehensive immigration reform is important for my family,” says Torres. “It’s not only about me, about me being able to have a life or about me being able to have a good job. It’s also about my parents. The biggest fear for my parents is that they’ll never be able to go back (to Mexico) to see their parents … that they won’t be able to go back in time.”

The Diary of Joaquín Magón is written by Jesús E. Valenzuela Félix, a reporter from Coachella living in Salinas and working for the United Farm Workers Foundation. He is a regular contributor to Coachella Unincorporated and New America Media. 

Alma Torres, far left, and her sisters are involved in the current push for comprehensive immigration reform. Photo: JESUS E. VALENZUELA-FELIX

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of three reports on the DREAMer movement

The Diary of Joaquín Magón Entry 27: The Dreamer Chronicles, Part 1

It was 2010 and the Immigration movement was at a crossroad— continue advocating for comprehensive immigration reform, or support the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, legislation introduced earlier that year by Senator Durbin (D-IL) which would have benefited undocumented youth exclusively, which is the most common version known today (there was a version introduced in 2001 but that, for reasons I’m sure all of you know, failed in a wave of xenophobia and patriotism). Neither was achieved.

In the span of the three years, we saw students work with a conviction. A perpetual defiance going viral through the media, cap-and-gown-wearing youth arrested across in the street shouting Si Se Puede, forsaking the use of massive marches and focusing strictly on media spectacles that caught the sympathy necessary to ensure that students would have a place in the hearts of constituents of even the most xenophobic districts. The Immigration movement had seldom witnessed such a spectacle much less why the generational gap so wide, parents were not getting arrested; their children, however, where.

Parents saw America as a new identity; But Dreamers came at a young age and the American identity continues to be the only identity they know; they attended same school systems as U.S. born children, learning the same patriotic U.S. history. Then one day they learned that the system denied them and that sense of belonging was threatened. This movement is a movement to retake that sense of belonging.

DREAMers are everywhere. You went to school with them; they live invisibly, you can’t know who is a DREAMer and who isn’t unless they trust you enough to speak about the immense sense of frustration that comes with having something to hide. But, then again, that’s all undocumented immigrants – farm workers, domestic workers, gardeners, fast food workers, all share that same sense of fear of being discovered, caught, and deported.

CHIRLA

Enter the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA). Formed after the passage of IRCA, CHIRLA has been one of the leading organizations in the fight for a path to citizenship in recent years.

In 2001 CHIRLA created Wise Up!, a youth-led organization where high school students could organize to make going to college for undocumented youth more accessible. To this day undocumented students must pay out-of-state tuition, which can cost twice as much, if not more. Through their organizing efforts California Assembly Bill 540 came into existence giving any student, regardless of immigration status, that graduated from a California high school the right to pay in-state tuition given they met these and other criteria. From WiseUp! The CA Dream  Network was born.

Diana Colín, 25, a Community Organizer for CHIRLA joined in 2008. “While the whole country and the youth movement were working to get the federal DREAM ACT, the CA DREAM Network was working on immigration reform for families… CHIRLA isn’t only working for students. It’s for families.”

In a very real sense every person, every immigrant, documented or undocumented is an embodiment of a comprehensive package. As Colín points out, “Just because you’re a college student doesn’t mean you’re not a brother or sister or parent; you can be a family member even though you’re a student.”

An Organizer: Diana Colín

Like all large movements there are unseen players somewhere fighting for something that will benefit or harm us. At times we walk a day without knowing that there is something being negotiated in Capitol Hill that’ll have a profound effect on our lives, and there are times when we realize we can make a change and chose to join a movement.

In March of 2006 I attended a march that brought hundreds of thousands of people to rally through the cold, dark, paved, smog-infested streets of a Los Angeles empty of cars and filled with bodies walking with signs united and demanding to not be seen as criminals, but to be treated as equals, to be legalized, and to be able to keep more than just their dignity. Within that Los Angeles crowd Colín was also present.

“[In organizing] I think there are Ones, Twos, and Threes,” says Colín sharing a bit of knowledge she picked in CHIRLA, “One means you’re an organizer; Two means you go to meetings; and Three means you’re just a body. In 2006 I was a Three, I was a body. I was in high school in LA. March 25 march in LA, that was my first action ever; it was huge.”

The constant pressure that the Immigration Reform Movement placed on the Obama administration paid off when, after occupying several Obama campaign offices, the President announced, on June 15, 2012, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) executive order – this in plain campaign season.

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)

It’s been over a year since DACA (a two-year work permit for those that came before the age of 16 and before June 15, 2007, among other qualifications [insert link to DACA info]) was announced. With an employment authorization card one can get a social security number, get help to go to school, and get a driver’s license. The fear of driving and being pulled over, having your car impounded, and potentially being deported are eliminated…temporarily.

“We have a lot of people that have driver licenses,” says Colín who has seen the impacts of DACA first hand with her students, “we have a lot of students that are able to work after college graduation …they’re confident to go in and apply to a job that they’re qualified for. I think that was a big problem before DACA.”

Colín adds another positive consequence: “I also think that DACA made a lot of students active in the movement. [Some of] the most active members and volunteers came out of DACA. They didn’t know that here was a movement going on until DACA and now they want to be part of it.”

“I started getting involved last year around this time when DACA was announced,” says Alma Torres, 23, a member of the UFW Foundation who has been involved in the current push for comprehensive immigration reform. Within weeks of receiving her DACA approval she joined the 100 UFW Foundation and UFW members in April for a week of lobbying and actions Washington, D.C. She participated in a massive march outside of the Capitol where organizations from across the United States joined in an effort that would eventually help pass S. 744, the Senate immigration bill with a path to citizenship which has been stalled by the House of Representatives.

Like every movement in existence there are the big figures that we all remember and there are the rest of us mobilizing from the ground up. It’s easy to get lost in the figures, critiquing the figures, wondering if the figures know what they’re doing. But this article is not about them. It’s about the rest of the folks that organize around the issues and push forward a movement that will most likely never remember their name. The following two stories have extensive quotes so as to capture as much of the story in their own words as possible.

Jesús E. Valenzuela Félix, a reporter from Coachella living in Salinas and working for the United Farm Workers Foundation, contributes regularly to Coachella Unincorporated and New America Media.

The author’s grandmother, Maria, helped him piece together 250 years of family history in order to understand and share his immigration story. Photo: JESUS E. VALENZUELA FELIX

The Diary of Joaquín Magón Entry 26:  Five Generations of Sinaloa

My great grandmother, Maria, never wrote anything down.

Her stories came with laughter and dance as she told me about her mother, who died at 100 years of age, and her father, a small indigenous man from the sierras of Chiricahueto, Cosalá, Sinaloa, who shrunk year after year until he reached well over 115 years of age.

Maria’s father got so old and small that she could wrap him in a blanket and hold him. He once fell asleep near a fire and fell in and came out laughing and shaking himself off. His own father, an indigenous man named Francisco Ávila, married a woman named Juana Torres that was white as white could be and had pink cheeks. How those two met and married nobody knows.

Maria’s husband, Atalo came from a tall white father named Onofre and a mother named Loisa who was a tall blond woman with braids. Maria would laugh and tell stories of how Don Onofre would paint his horse different colors because the soldiers would catch him all the time. He changed the color of his horse every chance he got and put on a fake moustache.

He was tremendo, Maria would say. No one knows exactly what Don Onofre did before laying down in El Pescadero, a town near Bacatá, Sinaloa, to piss the soldiers off so much. Was he a revolutionary? A bandit? I don’t know. I never asked her before she passed and, as a result, I have decided to ask twice as many questions to twice as many people since then.

Don Atalo would work the gold mines in Durango, México, and she would keep some of the gold nuggets that he brought home and hide it in a hole by the house until, she said, the moles dug a hole and stole them all.

They had a child named Gilberto who married a woman from El Capulito, Sinaloa, named Luisa. They have lived for the past 50 years in the little ranchito of Bachigualato, Cualiacán, Sinaloa.

Gilberto and Luisa, my grandparents, gave birth to a small daughter. Maria would tell me how she carried my newborn mother to the hospital because she was sick and near death but survived to live her life and, eventually, have me.

My mother migrated following a pattern that was set by her uncles. She had, after all, my brother and me to feed.

To which I add, migration is a mix of sociological and economic forces that drive us  – out of necessity, security, or hunger.

Migration is not random, we do not point our fingers on a map and chose to go “there.” We must have a friend, a relative that was, is, or will be in that specific town working in that specific industry. We were born in a country where external forces and faulty economic equations gave us banks that failed just like the banks in this country failed and gave us the recession.

If you really want to blame someone or something for migration then first look at the systems that fail and force us to leave like the Mexicano after the bank crash in the 1980s, which brought upon an unprecedented migration wave in the 1990s, like the Salvadorans that were in the middle of a US invasion, like the people from Oklahoma that were victims of the depression. So let us dissect our stories with a sociological imagination to bring us better understanding of where we are in the world.

That story of my great-great-great grandparents stems over 250 years, all compiled like an equation that took me from Culiacán to Coachella to San Diego to Bakersfield and Salinas – fighting for immigrants that share a story so unique that the world will never hear one like it ever again.

The Caravan to Citizenship in Bakersfield is the middle of a beginning and can still get the House to go into many directions – pass S. 744, create a series of smaller bills and pass them one at a time, pass bills that will have negative impacts such as the Bracero bill or to defund Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

Which direction it goes depends on you, on me, on us.

Jesús E. Valenzuela Félix, a reporter from Coachella living in Salinas and working for the United Farm Workers Foundation, contributes regularly to Coachella Unincorporated and New America Media.

Immigration reform activists from throughout California demonstrated in Bakersfield last week. Photo: JESUS E. VALENZUELA FELIX

The Diary of Joaquín Magón Entry 25: A Familiar Scene in Bakersfield

Bakersfield, CA –The movement for immigration reform brought over 1,000 supporters to Bakersfield last week to put public pressure on House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy – the new “whipping boy” on immigration as Politico newspaper has so dubbed him.

We gathered in Bakersfield to send a clear message – The United States deserves a vote on immigration reform with a path to citizenship. If House leaders, including McCarthy, scheduled a vote on reform with a new roadmap to citizenship, we would have enough of a bipartisan majority in the House to vote for it. Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and McCarthy must allow democracy to flourish in the House and allow a vote.

Even diehards like McCarthy will change their vote if we show enough support. Granted, McCarthy wasn’t even in the country for the event but did put out a statement.

It’s simple mathematics. “If I vote this way who will vote against me? Are they strong enough to get me out of power? No? Ok good – there aren’t enough registered voters of that population to pose a threat.”

I looked into the crowd in Bakersfield and felt like I’ve been there before. I remember Coachella, I remember the walk outs; I remember Los Angeles on March 25, 2006 when close to a million people covered the streets; I remember watching the opposition forming their Minute Men; I remember the students getting arrested putting all our excuses to shame; I remember the DREAM Act and AgJobs and the division that it spurred inside our own movement; and I look at how S. 744 almost by design has been created to encourage that division again – a category mirroring the DREAM Act, a category Mirroring AgJobs, and the General Population getting a 10 year wait. I can almost imagine the ones that wrote the bill thinking, Go on, fight amongst yourselves again.  

Which brings us here. To the middle of a battle that feels like the beginning. I listen to the opposition talk about themselves as if they are the chosen children of a country where immigration ended with them and that they are the native children of the sun.

We all have an immigrant story in this country. My own history doesn’t only start in México. It goes back centuries through indigenous souls from the Sierras of Sinaloa that mixed with the mining towns of German immigrants that brought us polka music and around five or six red hairs on my beard and freckles on my cheeks to demonstrate that no matter how recessive those genes are they are there to prove that, who knows how many years ago, some German or Irish man or woman became part of my history.

Which is what makes this movement for immigration reform so personal and at the same time so sociological. We must dissect to understand our histories and to understand each other.

In this series, beginning with this piece, I hope to share some of the stories of the students, the farm workers, and all people.

I will begin with my own, later this week.

“The Diary of Joaquín Magón” is written by Jesús E. Valenzuela Félix, a reporter from Coachella living in Salinas and working for the United Farm Workers Foundation. He contributes regularly to Coachella Unincorporated. 

Photo: JESUS E. VALENZUELA FELIX/Coachella Unincorporated

The Diary of Joaquín Magón Entry 24: The Deportation Chronicles, Part 3

Raul: Those Who Said Goodbye

In 2010, there were an estimated 387,000 “removals” according to Department of Homeland Security documents. My high school friend Raul was one of them.

He has been living in Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico, for three years now. He has been trying to adjust to his new life ever since.

The fact that he was born in Acapulco, Guerrero, Mexico, doesn’t help much. He may as well have been born in the United States because Mexicali is a different world. Even though its motto is “the homeland begins here,” it is a strange city that most Mexicans wouldn’t even consider Mexico. The neon lights, the smells of taco stands, candy stores, strip clubs, pharmacies, have made it into a city of tourists and passersby going to or coming from the U.S.

Meeting someone born and raised in Mexicali is not as common as meeting someone passing through. The heat of the desert mixes with the traffic to cause a heat even those who have lived there their whole lives can’t stand. I’ve driven through those streets plenty of times to pick up family members that rode the bus from Sinaloa. I love it, but I am aware that it’s a privilege to be able to come and go.

When Raul was deported, it struck him as crazy. He was, after all, a college student with no criminal record. He was stopped and questioned by the police while hanging out with some friends in one of Indio’s deserted areas, a big patch of desert, with dirt and bushes and, well, nothing around them. The officer told them they were trespassing. Then the officer asked if he had papers. He didn’t.

He recalls, “Then he called immigration. Immigration hassled and harassed me verbally for a while…then they told me I was to be deported. They took me to a station where I explained that I was a student in college, and that I had done nothing wrong. They didn’t release me but offered… a voluntary deportation and that as soon as I was on Mexican soil I could arrange to get papers the legal way…I had to “play piano” (get my fingerprints taken) and slept at the station for one night then they drove me to Mexico… oh and they gave me what looked like a small receipt telling me that I had just been deported.”

The promise of being able to fix papers if a person signs a voluntary deportation is a common practice. Detained immigrants are harassed until they see that signing this paper will end everything that it’s the best choice. Of course, it’s not. As Mario Lazcano, the immigration activist in Coachella, pointed out to a couple that was detained — the fact that they refused to sign is what kept them from being deported.

But Raul’s case is more common than not. And now he has to rough it in Mexicali. He has no family there. They all still live in the Eastern Coachella Valley. The family of a mutual friend of ours took him in.

Luckily he had saved some money. Ever since I’ve known Raul, regardless of how the economy was doing, he could always get a job. He even had two or three at a time. He’s had more or less that same luck in Mexicali.

“The first year was terrible as I was just adjusting to all the changes in my life. I had to learn many colloquial phrases and jump over the small language barrier I had. I had to adjust to the hostility, during the first year my house was broken into and robbed naked. Finding a job was difficult without a proper Mexican ID. I guess here in México they don’t like immigrants either, like from El Salvador and other southern countries. So I got whatever jobs I could. By 2011, I was working at a maquila [large factories that produce mostly U.S. products] where, because of my English I got an opportunity for a good job. Last year I got a job as an English instructor in a private school and I can say now I’m fully adjusted… I still think a lot about my family though.”

I have this feeling that humans often feel invincible. That we take risks like we’re immortals, we speed as if we’ll never get caught, and we talk about sickness like it won’t happen to us. It’s the way Raul lived in the U.S. as well. But undocumented immigrants must take extra precautions.

“In the back of my mind I always knew that I could get deported any time, as my father and brother once did,” he says. “So I wasn’t the first in my family to get deported.”

Raul adjusted at age seven to a life in the U.S., and now he has adjusted to life in Mexicali. He works and is on a constant dream to better his situation. Raul is one of those that President Obama said he wouldn’t deport — one of the 45 percent, a college student who could apply for DACA, like Mayte, if he was living in the United States.

But living in the ECV means that a cop can ask you for papers, being undocumented means being hunted like a school of fish with a net, no need to be precise or cautious, you just drag the damned thing and take what you can get. If you get caught there will be no lawyer there to defend you in the event that you cannot pay for one, and to hell with it – get kicked out, deported, have your name put into a database and live as a memory in the streets that saw you grow as the streets that saw your birth.

All Those Who Fight and DREAM

There is a huge difference between undocumented youth — the DREAMers — with no recollection of their home country and their parents who do. They fight for their lives in the open. They are taken away like Raul, sometimes they are stuck in a limbo that feels like an inescapable nightmare like Estela, or sometimes their hard work pays off like it did for Mayte.

In the ECV, we know all of these people. We know people who dream and fight even when the fight is not their own, like Lazcano. He is distressed by how common deportation is. We speak of it like an old friend, like a sickness, like the flu without a vaccine.

The road has been hard, and people want a comprehensive immigration process. And that fight in the Coachella Valley has been a slow process of empowering the community with the vote. As Lazcano points out, “[The fight for immigration reform] has allowed the following: there was a an Assemblywoman named Bonnie Garcia (R). We managed to defeat her. Then there was [Congresswoman] Mary Bono Mack (R) who had been in power for 14 years and…now we have a new Congressman [Dr. Raul Ruiz (D)].”

It has led to a community that has, over the years, amassed enough power to remove the politicians that stand in the way of immigration reform and replace them with those who say they will try and help.

Now, I don’t want to talk too much about a metaphorical giant rearing its head or the rise of a new wave of voters. What will happen will happen, and the ECV will, eventually, recover from the wounds inflicted upon it by ICE.

Until then, we’ll continue to talk about people who have been deported, people who will have to adjust their dreams to a new reality. The scars left by these mass deportations will heal; the community will heal itself, mend itself and learn to live, and the people will always remember and tell their stories – as I am sharing the stories of the four brave people who opened up to me and to the entire community.

Previously: The Deportation Chronicles, Part 1

Previously: The Deportation Chronicles, Part 2

_____

“The Diary of Joaquín Magón” is written by Jesús E. Valenzuela Félix, a reporter from Coachella living in Salinas and working for the United Farm Workers Foundation. He contributes regularly to Coachella Unincorporated.

The Diary of Joaquín Magón Entry 23: The Deportation Chronicles, Part 2

Mayte: The Haves and the Have Nots of Immigration

One of the greatest fears is driving. With Operation Stone Garden Police officers were able to ask for citizenship and it became commonplace to have police officers radio in immigration officers to pick up the slack if the officer believed the person was undocumented a la Arizona.

This is how Mayte, 21, sees the world: She graduated high school in 2009 and was accepted to UC Irvine, UC Merced, and UC Riverside but opted for College of the Desert, a local community college, because of cost. But now she can transfer to a four-year university but fears she won’t be able to afford the cost. That reality seeped from her hands onto paper when she wrote her university personal statement.

“My dream is simple: I want to have an opportunity to have a dream that could actually come true. My world, a world that is made of people who belong and people who are excluded, a world that divides human beings into two categories, legal and illegal, this world makes it difficult to really have a dream.”

Mayte is among the thousands who applied for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). “The moment that President Obama announced DACA,” says Mayte, “I was watching the news…I started crying. I thought I wasn’t going to be able to go to the university and I didn’t want to stop there. It gave me a lot of hope.”

Mayte was born in Churumuco, Michoacan, Mexico and was brought to the Eastern Coachella Valley (ECV) when she was 10 years old. Her mother is a farm worker whose story is much like other farm workers in California — exploitative conditions, long hours, cheated out of over time, no voice in the workplace, and the realization that she will one day be replaced by someone younger and faster. To this, Mayte responds with the dream of becoming a lawyer that specializes in labor and employment law.

“I continue because of [my mother],” she says, “and that’s why I chose the career I chose, because I’ve seen how my mom has been treated in the fields and I truly want to change that.”

Mayte remembers little of Mexico. She learned she was undocumented when she was applying for college.

“It was terrible,” says Mayte, “but my mom always said, ‘don’t give up, you don’t want to end up like me. Working for almost nothing, and then you know how they treat me, I don’t want you to end up like this.’”

And like others in the ECV she shares a common fear that at any given moment she, or her mother could be deported, yes even with Obama’s promise not to do so. It is often difficult for people who are not surrounded by a perpetual threat of deportation to fully grasp its nature just as it’s difficult for those who are surrounded by the news of deportation to know that this should not be this way. There is a militaristic feeling in the ECV when it comes to the constant raids, checkpoints, and peace officers you cannot trust. For Mayte, it’s a common feeling.

“Families are separated because of the raids that were happening at that time. My mom never gets home late. The latest she gets home is 7 p.m. After that, my hearts just pounds so hard that I wonder where she’s at. And she doesn’t have a phone. I’d just stay awake nervous. It’s terrible for families.”

She asks in her personal statement: “A young woman like me, born Mexican, female, and poor what kinds of dreams are available to her? …A young woman like me is not looking for a handout, but rather, a chance to have a dream that could really come true.”

Estela: The Non-Eligible

For now Mayte can only wait for her DACA approval or denial, a process that could take a few more months.

It is estimated that 1.7 million youth are eligible for DACA. But Estela (not her real name), 17, is not one of them.

To be eligible for DACA, the applicant must have arrived in the United States before June 15, 2007. Estela arrived one month later.

Estela’s story mirrors Mayte’s in so many ways. She was brought to the US when she was 11. She lived in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico. Looking around and seeing all her friends getting ready to continue their education is a bit frustrating.

“They say the end of high school is very overwhelming,” says Estela. “And it is! But I feel like it is a thousand times more for me. It gets me very frustrated, the fact that I can’t apply for many things. In a way, my future is hanging in the air. I don’t know what my plan is, but all I know is that even though it is hard, I will keep on trying to find a way to make it.”

Naturally, a spirit like Estela’s cannot be crushed so easily.

In perfect world, her dreams of pursuing a career in Mass Communications at CSU Fullerton would be without any more or less obstacles than her peers. But her reality is different. Like other undocumented youth, deportation is a fear that has a permanent apartment in her mind.

“It’s something that, even though I try not think about, is always on the back of my head. I think it makes a person very insecure most of the time. You want to hide…not because you are ashamed of it, but because of fear. You never know the kind of people you are dealing with and they could affect you if they wanted to just by knowing you are not legal.”

It’s a perpetual fear, it’s a strange situation — she can’t go back, she doesn’t know Mexico, she wouldn’t know if she would be able finish high school over there, and here she has more obstacles than dreams, but her dreams are bigger and so she’ll continue to fight in their name.

Coming Wednesday: The story of Raul, a deported college student who has been adjusting to living in Mexicali since 2010.

Previously: The Deportation Chronicles, Part 1

_____

“The Diary of Joaquín Magón” is written by Jesús E. Valenzuela Félix, a reporter from Coachella living in Salinas and working for the United Farm Workers Foundation. He contributes regularly to Coachella Unincorporated.