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GRIEGO: Teen not as young as years suggest

By Tina Griego, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published September 15, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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Happenstance brings us another immigration story today. This one with a happy ending.

Laylaa Ramos is home. Not Guatemala home, which is the place she was born; Colorado home, the place she has lived most of her almost 19 years on this Earth. She arrived in Denver last Thursday courtesy of her brand-spanking-new immigrant visa. Her stepfather, Kevin Ferrell, picked her up.

On the ride home from the airport she couldn't get over the roads, how smooth and even. Eleven months in Guatemala accustomed her to potholes and drivers unfamiliar with the concept of lanes. Eleven months in Guatemala seems like forever, as she sees it now, still weary from her flight, overwhelmed by the strange, simple knowledge that she is back, giggling with her two best friends, as if she had never left at all.

Laylaa, you might remember, is the Legacy High School honor roll student I wrote about last October. Her parents brought her into this country illegally when she was about 3 years old. She returned to Guatemala on her 18th birthday to try and come back to the U.S. "the right way." As a legal immigrant.

She left on her 18th birthday for a reason. Federal immigration law does not hold minors accountable for their illegal presence in this country until they turn 18. Once that birthday hits, tick, tock, the legal clock starts.

Had Laylaa stayed here for another 180 days and then left for Guatemala to process her paperwork, she would have triggered a bar preventing her from legally returning to the U.S. for three years. Had she waited until she was 19 to leave, she would have tripped a 10-year bar on legal return to this country.

She was in her senior year of high school. She planned to go to college, become a plastic surgeon. She told her teachers and her friends she was going to Guatemala and hoped to be back by graduation. Their jaws dropped.

What do you mean you have to leave? What do you mean you're here illegally?

Laylaa never told anyone her legal status. She didn't tell anyone when immigration agents came to her house and picked up her mom, Guadalupe, in February 2007. That's another story, one complicated by a languishing asylum application, but Guadalupe returned to Guatemala and remains there while her legal application is being reviewed. Laylaa's stepfather, Ferrell, and Guadalupe married in 2005. Their U.S.-born son, now 2 years old, is also living in Guatemala.

It pays to reiterate this one crucial fact: Ferrell is a U.S. citizen and, in the words of immigration lawyer Laura Lichter, "without a U.S. citizen parent, there'd be no way, absolutely zero, Laylaa would be coming back."

In several months, she'll receive her green card. In five years, she can apply for citizenship. So, she's lucky. Luckier than most. Many of the other young people in her situation are stuck. You can blame their parents for bringing them here, but it won't change the outcome. They'll turn 18 and most won't leave because there is no legal way back.

Laylaa is home. Legally. She and her two best friends, Angelica Lombardi and Christie Carmichael, came to see me Friday. I wanted to know how she was and how Guatemala was and what she will do next and what I find is a young woman who is both happy and sad, who begins a story and then begins to cry and cannot explain why.

She told me she first saw Guatemala through the eyes of a tourist. Laylaa the tourist was just as stunned as others are when visiting the Third World by the poverty, the lack of sanitation and education, by what she perceived to be the abdication of government responsibility to the health and welfare of its citizenry. It was in describing this that she began to cry.

"I just feel overwhelmed," she said when she found her voice again. "I saw, like, two worlds because I saw how so many people don't have anything. It's so sad."

Laylaa described a place where misery lives side-by-side with beauty, a lush landscape of sugar cane fields and fruit trees. She stayed in the homes of relatives, cinderblock squares with laminate roofs and clotheslines strung across the rooftops.

"In the beginning, I was just sad," she said. Sadness turned to boredom. She took a job at a shoe store for a month. Boring. She quit and in March was hired by a private school to teach English to the children of wealthier Guatemalans. I try to picture this just-yesterday high school honor student, her speech peppered with "like," teaching 26 kindergartners by herself. "It was really hard," she said.

She stayed with the job until she left, earning what she said is considered a good salary of $2,391 quetzales or about $320 a month.

For all the hardship, she also saw close- knit family life, shared mealtimes, a vibrant spirit of community. When the U.S. consulate granted her visa, her spirits soared until she realized her mother could not return, not yet.

"And then I wasn't happy, at all," she said, crying all over again. Her mother hugged her and said: estoy muy contenta por vos. I'm so happy for you.

A person does not live in another country for nearly a year without gaining a perspective on country, on self, a view impossible to see from up close. Laylaa, back only a day when we talked, cannot yet articulate that change except to say she thinks she might become an orthopedic rather than plastic surgeon.

She is still the polite and perky suburban girl I met a year ago, but her view of the world now includes the floating ash of burning sugar cane fields and Mayan ruins, laughing kindergartners, and the men and women of Guatemala, the handicapped, the malnourished, the maimed who drag their bodies onto boards mounted on tricycles and pedal down the streets with their hands.

Comments

  • September 15, 2008

    6:27 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    DakotaPlainsman writes:

    Hopefully, this immigration story is not ended. Laylaa came back to America legally. That shows that it can be done. She feels bad for the "the men and women of Guatemala, the handicapped, the malnourished, the maimed who drag their bodies onto boards mounted on tricycles and pedal down the streets with their hands".
    For her story to have a happier ending, after she gets her education and orthopedic surgeon credentials in America, she should be encouraged to go back and help make her home land more livable. They obviously need a talented go-getter like her.
    She has seen what is possible here. Perhaps she can make it possible there?

  • September 15, 2008

    1:46 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    T1anda writes:

    Good luck Laylaa! When you venture forth in life remember your people in Gautemala.

    Once you have finished your American education you might think about returning to help your fellow Gautemalans.

  • September 16, 2008

    12:26 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    redwhiteandBLUE writes:

    Wonderful story Laylaa, I wish you the very best in all you do.