Border Street: Comfortable life plagued by uncertainty

By Tina Griego, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published September 18, 2006 at midnight

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Maria the elder reaches Maria the younger by phone two months after they leave Border Street - the elder for a one-bedroom suburban apartment, the younger for Mexico and the home state of her fugitive boyfriend where they live together in a tiny house in a tiny village.

It is so beautiful here, Maria the younger tells Maria the elder. It's green and there are so many trees, and in the evening the men play soccer and we sit outside in the breeze and the children play around us.

They live with family and Maria the younger works with her boyfriend's mother, peeling the skins and spines off prickly pear cactus pads so the vegetable is ready to go for stew or salad or juice. She says her boyfriend is working in the fields and that their baby is much loved and his aunties watch over him while she works.

You should come and live here, Maria the younger tells her older sister. And Maria the elder laughs: "No way."

Not now. Leaving Border Street requires more than the act of moving. Maria the elder has understood this for some time and so she takes English classes offered by a Christian church, even though she already speaks English, because the classes are one of the few places outside a fast-food counter or a store aisle where she can interact with Americans, where she can practice her new language.

She studies with her mother, who is 40 years old and who has lived here for seven years but cannot speak English, who is nearly paralyzed by self-consciousness when she tries anything outside the vocabulary of her industry.

"O.K., that's one cheeseburger and fries. Would you like anything to drink?"

It is the same English spoken by the fast-food worker wife of Border Street. She, too, has been taking classes. It's so hard, she moans. The pronunciation, oh, and she throws up her hands. When the fast-food worker wife demonstrates fast-food English, it is as if she becomes someone else. Her posture straightens and her head tilts and she says in a quick stream of clipped, clear words: "One chicken taco with guacamole, one steak burrito. Would you like anything else?"

Maria the elder says her mom hasn't had much chance to learn. She has worked since the week she arrived here and everyone at work speaks Spanish, she says. Then she comes home and takes care of the family. "She bought some tapes to study, but when she listens to them, she falls asleep."

Maria the elder was 16 when she walked through the desert into Arizona four years ago, and because she so quickly became bilingual, her former bosses call and plead with her now. Come back to work, they say. We'll make you a manager. We need bilingual managers.

I'll ask my husband, she tells them. But she knows before she asks what he will say.

"Maybe later," he tells her again on a recent night. "When the baby is older. But he's only 4 months old and that's too young."

Maria the elder sits next to him and nods and says, "I know."

Maria the elder's husband is 21 and they have been married for one year. His mother is the grandma who recently left Border Street. She brought him here when he was a boy and put him in middle school and so he, too, speaks English well.

He is sitting at their dining room table in their apartment after work. Maria the elder skipped her English class to make him supper and to be there to serve it. She has made soup with vegetables and chicken feet and she sits next to him, dressed in a pretty blouse and fresh lipstick, their son on her lap.

Eat, she urges her husband. But he talks and the soup gets cold as he remembers the Mexico of his childhood. He says he went to school here until the ninth grade and then dropped out to go to work. "I'm not proud of that," he says. If he hadn't left school, he says, maybe he could have found a job that wasn't as physically demanding as construction. Maybe, he says, he could have been a car salesman.

The realization that he has spent nearly half his life in the United States takes him aback. He is, he says, more Mexican than American, but is not really either. "I'm not an American," he says, "because I'm not. I don't have papers. But I'm more American than the rest of my family. I can't explain how. I think differently."

Sometimes, on his way home from work, he says he thinks about how he is going home to his beautiful wife and their baby, to their neat one-bedroom apartment with the bowl of fresh fruit on the table and a virgen de Guadalupe poster on the wall over their bed, and he thinks, "This is a comfortable life," and he says he can imagine spending the rest of his days here. But, he says, turning to Maria the elder, "She can't."

"No," Maria the elder says. "I can't." She does not like living as an illegal immigrant. She does not like living with so much uncertainty, in the twilight of a border street. "My mom and I talk about it a lot. Who knows? One day immigration might just come to the door and take us."

Living here now is fine and it is necessary, she says, "because we have nothing in Mexico, no house or anything, so we need to save money." Her husband says that if they saved enough, they could open a small grocery store in Mexico. Their son, a U.S. citizen, could grow up as a Mexican and return to the U.S. as a young man if he chooses.

They're trying to save now. Maria the elder's husband landed a new job. He's earning $19 an hour under a government contract.

griegot@RockyMountainNews.com

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