Border Street: Illegal lives in world of fear, anger

By Tina Griego, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published February 12, 2007 at midnight

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As it happens, the American Spouse is not the only citizen married to an illegal immigrant on Border Street. There are at least two other such couples. One of them lives in one of the nicest homes on the block, in a large duplex they bought a year ago and which they keep tidy because that is their nature and because the wife does not want to attract undue attention.

The wife is named Maria, another baby anointed with a blessed name who grew up to find herself on this Denver street of Mexicans and Americans and those like her who are both and neither. Maria the Other, she might call herself. It is how she feels. She says she is a woman living in a house with a glass ceiling. She can see the sky, but she cannot touch it.

"I have hit the ceiling," she says. "And now I am forced to look down."

She and her husband met while she was working in a restaurant. He was a good customer, a white man born in New Mexico. He ran his own small business. She found him funny. He thought she was pretty and smart and just goofy enough to understand him. He kept leaving his business card with her tip. She had 15 cards by the time she finally called him. I work slow, he said.

He does not remember The Conversation itself, only that it was early on in their relationship. She remembers clearly because it meant saying out loud words that shamed her. I am an illegal immigrant. From the moment she became old enough to understand what that meant, she lived with shame. It has never left her. No matter how perfect her English, no matter how American her dress.

Her teachers at school told her she should apply for scholarships, should go to college because she was smart and ambitious and could be whatever she wanted. She never told them the truth. She says nothing now when her friends say, "I don't care that people come here illegally, I just want them to pay taxes."

Almost no one knows her legal status.

"I am too ashamed," she says.

She sits in her living room, next to her husband, and when her eyes begin to water, he grabs her hand.

"I'm beyond-belief ashamed. Once you say you're here illegally, that's all people will see. They won't see you anymore. Only that."

So, yes, she remembers the night she told her story to the man who would become her husband. They had gone to see a movie. They were sitting in her car outside his apartment. She told him she was 12 years old when she came to this country. She had been living in Juarez with her sister and their mother. Their mother worked in a factory and had older children, some of whom were living legally in the United States. One, an older sister, came to visit one day and she brought Maria and her sister back with her to Denver. The sister told the border agent that the girls were her children.

"I thought I was going to be staying for one week, just for a quinceañera," Maria says.

But, their older sister would not be sending them back to Juarez. In two years, you will end up working in a sweatshop like our mother. I can't let that happen. It was 1996.

Maria did not understand her situation until eighth or ninth grade, when her teachers started talking to her about her future, about scholarships.

"That's when the doors started closing, and I remember thinking about my mother and my sister, 'What have you done to me?' I wasn't mad at them. I was upset and angry when I understood what it meant."

With the knowledge that she could not afford college, she began to drift. She remembers thinking, 'Why should I graduate? I can get a G.E.D.' She had almost all the class credits she needed to graduate when she walked away from North High School. Later, she says she was told she could not take G.E.D. classes without some form of state identification. She had none. She won't use fake papers because she is afraid it will hurt her chance to become a resident.

The night she told her husband-to-be, she was 19 years old. She was angry and happy and depressed and falling in love. "I wanted to tell him right away because I didn't want him to say later that I had betrayed him or used him. He deserved to know."

Her mother had become a legal resident that year. She can help me, she told him, but it will take years, and I could be deported.

"It just didn't seem relevant to me," he says now. "It didn't seem like it would hinder our ability to live. Now, I see it does. But, we weren't married then. We didn't have a child then."

They have been married for three years and had a child last year. It is a common misconception that marrying a citizen makes one a citizen. But, Maria entered the country illegally and will have to return to Mexico to file paperwork for U.S. residency. Upon returning to Mexico, she will trigger a part of immigration law that could prevent her from returning to the U.S. legally for 10 years.

"I would love to belong here because I love this country," she says. "I love everything about it. I love the language. I love freedom of speech. There are so many opportunities. In my dreams, I think the government will say, 'Let's cut her some slack, she's been a good person.' I think I have a lot to offer. I want to be someone. I want a title. I want to be a teacher."

She doesn't know why her siblings did not sponsor her years ago. She would still be waiting for her papers, but she would be in line. She tries not to think about this because it depresses her. Instead, she urges them to take the step from legal residency to citizenship, and she becomes infuriated by her ethnic kin who blast their music and leave mattresses in driveways and drink beer in their front yards.

Every mark against them, she says, is a mark against her.

"Can't you try and assimilate a little?" she once complained to a family member. "Don't forget where you come from," he shot back.

She says: "Sometimes I think, 'What the hell, I should just go back to Mexico.' But I have no life there."

She stays at home with their daughter. When she drives, she carries her marriage certificate, a copy of her husband's driver's license, the insurance card and her Mexican consulate-issued ID.

"I understand we can't make law on a case-by-case basis, but the law could be more accommodating," her husband says. "What I resent most, what angers me more than anything else, is that a good person is made to feel bad. She is made to feel an outcast, less than. She was brought here as a child, but she feels at fault. It's a set of circumstances that don't have anything to do with who she is as a person. That's what the law fails to see."

Maria has spent half her life here now. Not long ago, she went to the store to return some crib sheets her husband bought. At the register, the cashier asked her for her driver's license. She felt herself flush, and she fumbled around in her purse, stammering, pretending she had one.

The cashier waited. Maria the Other flipped blindly through her billfold. I'm sorry, she finally told the cashier, I don't seem to have it.

griegot@RockyMountainNews.com

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