Border Street: Is the dream a nightmare?

By Tina Griego, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Monday, January 8, 2007

A week after the Reporter Lady returns home from the Mexican farm town where Maria the Younger now lives, she dreams that her mother is still alive.

In the dream, her mother survived cancer, but moved away from her husband and children. She chose to live apart from them and in 17 years has seen her children only three times.

"I don't even know where she is now," the Reporter Lady tells her sister in the dream. They can't imagine how this has happened, why their mother would leave them.

It takes the Reporter Lady a day to shake off this dream and another to realize its origin likely lay in that Mexican village, which has sent so many fathers and mothers to Denver and to Border Street.

On her first day in the village, a boy tells her he wants to come to the U.S. to find his father who has not been home for eight years.

On her second day, an 18-year- old girl tells her she longs to see her father whom she has never met and who has another family in the U.S. I would go with my heart in my hands.

On her third day, Doña Antonia, the future mother-in-law of Maria the Younger, tells her that Maria would not have ended up in her son's arms, a girl in the bed of a man, if Maria's father had not abandoned the family to return to the U.S. and Maria's mother had not then crossed illegally herself to look for work, leaving Maria behind with relatives when she was just 8 years old. Doña Antonia says: She was looking for love.

The Reporter Lady knows stories of abandonment are not unique to illegal immigrants. But she had not thought about what it would be like to be in Mexico and come face-to-face with this particular consequence of illegal immigration. She's not prepared for the yearning of the children left behind.

Or for the anger, disappointment and resignation she hears in the voices of townspeople who blame their government and themselves.

They don't have to leave, she hears. We have enough to survive here.

No, she hears, they must leave. We do not have enough to better ourselves and our children have no future.

But once they go, it's hard for them to come back.

Many months ago, the Teacher of Border Street wondered whether those who enter the U.S. illegally are exchanging one set of chains for another.

When the Reporter Lady returns from Mexico, she visits the Teacher to tell her, yes, they are. Freedom for a paycheck; family for a future.

"Now, you that you have been there, you are ready to understand Al Filo del Agua," says a Mexican-born friend of the Reporter Lady. In keeping with custom, he shall be known here as The Professor.

"It's a famous novel," he says. "It means, 'The Edge of the Storm.' It takes place in a fictional village outside Guadalajara just before the Revolution."

The Professor, now a citizen, has a son attending Princeton University. He is the only member of his family who moved to the United States. In the time the Reporter Lady has known him, he has been a restaurant manager, a caterer, a Spanish teacher, an English teacher and now is a middle school teacher.

For a brief time, he was a court interpreter, but he became disillusioned by the number of his former countrymen appearing before the judges. They are insolent, he says, and he sounds like the older men of the Mexican village who look at the younger men returning home in their trucks and fancy boots: We went to the U.S. to work. They go to have fun. They go on a whim.

The Reporter Lady finds one copy of the book in the library. Written by Agustin Yañez. Published in 1963. Sixteen pages in, a father recalls his hope that his son, Damian, would take over the farm. "But Damian had succumbed to the temptation to go North and off he had gone with other farmers, to seek his fortune, when he already had it at home."

Deeper into the book, the villagers disparage those who have gone to El Norte for their airs and bad manners and lack of obligation.

Damian replies to these charges in a conversation with a priest during a visit home: "No, Padre, I'm sorry to say so, but when we come back, we realize what the people here have to put up with, the injustice and living conditions. Why should a man have to sweat all day to earn a few cents? And sometimes not even that?"

Yañez foretold the future, The Professor says. "The question is which life is better?"

One evening in the Mexican town, the Reporter Lady meets a young father working in his mother's store. He is holding his infant son, his firstborn child, in his lap as he sells cookies and chips. He says his brothers are living in Denver and now that he has a child he is thinking he should go. I could a build a house here for my wife and son, he says.

He hears he can make $400 a week in the U.S. "Four hundred dollars a week," he says. "Do you know how long it would take me to earn that here?" He jiggles his son on his knee and looks up at the ceiling. "Four hundred dollars a week. Do you know what I could do with that kind of money?"

griegot@RockyMountainNews.com