My first talk with T., a green-card bride
I have a friend who knows someone in a green card marriage.
My friend says this woman — I am calling her T. — is going through hell with her sham husband. He has a drinking problem. He has been arrested twice for driving drunk. He posts pictures with random people on social media. If you have an interview with Immigration about your fake marriage coming up, you really want to avoid suspicious activities — on Facebook and especially in real life.
T. knows I know about her situation, but we had never had a conversation about it until three days ago. She has always known I knew about it, though. Our friend once got too drunk to keep a secret, and I connected the dots.
I want to investigate the issues the community of Latina women in green-card marriages faces, and I need to get started. So I decide it is time to reach out to her.
We are in a WhatsApp group, so not only has her information been in the palm of my hand, but her contact information has also always been at my fingertips. But I ask our friend to check with her first if it is okay for me to address the topic for a school project.
T. says yes.
We had our first private conversation on the app. It was short but clarifying. Here it is in its entirety.
Question: “Do you wish there were a safe space for you and other women going through issues regarding green-card marriages to meet and exchange experiences?”
T: “I would never go to a meeting of any sort because I am afraid of being caught.”
My assumptions behind this question:
A real marriage is tough as it is, let alone one to a fake husband. Imagine having to lie and make people you love lie for you. How do you find the support you need when there is no safe space for you to talk about it openly?
Could the fear of being caught be crippling these women’s understanding that they do need to be part of a community to feel less alone? Do they remain unassociated with other people in green-card marriages to avoid being caught by association?
Do they see one another as a threat?
A woman in a green-card marriage often lies to herself; by giving up on the dream of marrying for love in exchange for the American dream, they decide they do not care as much about things that once might have been important to them, like finding a nice guy or woman to spend their lives with.
Maybe they prefer to not be part of a community because it makes them confront decisions that they are not proud of; maybe it is like looking in the mirror.
A group of people united by a secret can easily be seen as a community, but it is hard to picture them gathering around what bonds them together when such thing is a crime.
So I insisted on the topic.
Question 2: “So a group meeting in person would not be in your interest. What about an online one?”
T: “I would do that, as long as I remained anonymous.”
Question 3: “Do you think an online group in which you could engage anonymously with other women in your situation would make some kind of difference in your life?”
T: “Hmm not really. I mean, I already vent to my friends and ask for advice from people that I know to have been through the process.”
This short chat gave me a lot to think about.
1. It is possible that the community of women in green-card marriages consists of many small communities, curated by each woman. By including their closest friends, family and some people who went through the same process, they build their own private communities of secret-keepers, witnesses and advisors.
2. With social network giants these days requiring real credentials, and the Trump administration’s efforts to track down immigrants and undocumented people engaging in any illegal activity, women may intentionally avoid interacting with others in the same situation outside their own social circles using their own identities. At the end of the day, yes, you can have a fake email address linked to a fake Facebook page, but what if Immigration and Customs Enforcement tracks your I.P.? What if a hacker gets your information and blackmails you? There are so many variables in the equation as it is; why would women risk themselves even more?
3. Agreeing to talk about one’s secret only anonymously looks like a natural consequence of a process that is about giving up on an identity in the first place. Women who turn to fake marriages to get green cards are willing to risk being arrested and deported because this is the only way they see themselves going back to their own country: by force. “Buying” a husband or wife also implies in creating a new identity, now attached to a person who, oftentimes, they do not know very well. The loop closes when they finally see themselves as unable to voice their own issues under their real identity.
It is a community of Aliases.
However, I feel this is a community that could function much like the one formed by victims of sexual abuse. When an experience is life-changing for the wrong reasons, it is frequently kept a secret, like a chapter in the book of life that should have been ripped out, but its pages are Super Glued.
What we can really learn from them is that it takes only one woman to voice the community’s issue for others to follow. The #metoo movement and #whyIdidntreport are living, tweeting proofs.
There are many bridges to be built here, on many different levels. There is the bridge that will connect each woman’s private communities; There is also the bridge between these women and the world. The most important and mysterious bridge to be figured out is the one that will allow those women to reconnect with who they are. Otherwise everything else will be built on air.
The night our friend in common gossiped about T.’s situation, I wondered how T. and others like her could sleep at night, knowing her secret could fall into the wrong hands, at a bar two boroughs away, over Fireball shots.
This is one of the reasons this is the community I want to investigate during the Social Journalism program at Craig Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY. Latina women in green-card marriages are dauntless criminals, but also vulnerable and lonely ones. To become someone in American society, they make themselves silent, anonymous and invisible.
