My Family’s Migration Story
I found myself very deeply interested in Garcia Hernandez’s book, Migrating to Prison, because his story and the stories of various people he managed to capture are so relatable to my life and the history of my family. Ever since last class, I have been thinking more and more about my family’s background and how we all managed to get to this point — here in the United States- today. So, I decided to interview my dad in order to get some more information about family members living a few generations back. It was fascinating to hear about my great grandparent’s migration story to Washington state, and how my grandfather was initially brought here through the Bracero program! My great-grandfather and his son worked together in agricultural farms picking cherries and strawberries and traveled to all parts of the country where there was work for them. They worked very long, and very hard hours for very low pay, but nonetheless they sent almost all the money they made back home to Mexico to help sustain the family financially. Once they had been working here for a little while, they applied for their legal documents to stay here, and thankfully they were both permitted to stay. Shortly after, my dad’s grandfather petitioned to bring his son over to for work purposes also. It was around 1962, and my grandfather was only 16 years old at the time. He had only completed up until the 4th grade in Mexico because working to make money became a bigger priority. Once he came to the US and started working, he also described the workdays as being very long, hot, and beyond tiring, but they knew that he had to keep working. So although he was here in the US, and could potentially stay here permanently (through his father’s petition), it not an easy lifestyle to be living, especially at 16 years old. Finally, he decided that he was going to stay here permanenetly, so he decided to petition for his wife to come to the US (with their 6 months old newborn). His workday description made me think of the grandfather that was mentioned in the reading because he also described his Bracero experience as, “long hours in the hot sun in South Texas, where requests for water were denied with derision” and he was publicly humiliated by having to urinate outside (Garcia Hernandez, 41). Lastly, I’d just like to emphasize how challenging it would be to successfully bring over family members today.
According to Garcia Hernandez, “In the last few months of the Obama administration, ICE held roughly 40,000 people daily, a number that would soon rise under President Trump, surpassing 42,000 daily in 2018” (Hernandez, 10). These extremely high numbers were so shocking to me, and I could only imagine how difficult and nearly impossible it would have been for my dad’s side of the family to try to come over at any point later than they did. According to my grandpa, getting papers back then was not nearly as complicated and impossible as it is now. Luckily, they managed to bring a good chunk of my family into this country through the family petitions, but soon after laws were put in place to no longer allow this. Years and years later, after my mom and dad were born, things got more challenging. My mom had quite a complicated migration story, and I thank you for inspiring me to ask more about my family history because now I know so much more than I did before, and I am happy to share about it. To summarize the very complicated story, my mother was 18 years old when she decided to come to the US with one of her relatives on a student visa. Her intention was to get an education- with a specific goal of learning to speak and write English, and then go back home to Mexico to be with her family once she saved a substantial amount of money. However, during the time that she was going to school, and working part-time at a Mexican restaurant in South San Francisco, she met my father, they ended up falling in love, and my father proposed to her shortly after. At such a young age, my mother was put into such a difficult situation- she could either stay in the US where she could continue her education further, and marry my father, or she could move back to her home country where her whole family, culture, and everything that was familiar and comfortable to her was. She decided to go back home to talk it through with her parents, and then they decided that it was best for her to come back to the US to get married and try to live a better life. However, when she tried to come back to SF, she was taken into an interrogation room at the airport and was harshly questioned about why she was making so many trips back and forth to the US and what her true intentions were. When she told them that she was going to get married, they didn’t believe her so she was interrogated further until hours later she was finally released. How scary of a situation for my mother though, they kept threatening her saying that they were just going to deport her back to Mexico with no permission to ever come back. I can’t even imagine what that would have felt like? The fear… anxiety… uncertainty!
And I’m sure that she can relate to many people that are dealing with similar situations and fears of being deported back to their countries, especially years and years after already being here and creating a new life. I think that Garia Hernandez did an absolutely excellent job of analyzing different forms of immigration incarceration and some of the political histories leading up to where things stand today. Through interviewing my dad and recalling stories that my mom had told me, I strongly resonated with the political history discusses in the chapters, particularly in relation to the Bracero program and also having family members detained and incarcerated. In addition to the topics mentioned above, I think that one of the key points he analyzed was that “having permission to be here isn’t necessarily a guarantee of freedom. Immigration officers can also arrest anyone who came here for a temporary stance with the government permission and then stayed. And they can arrest anyone like Jerry, whom immigration lawyers referred to as a lawful permanent resident but everyone else calls a green cardholder” (Garia Hernandez, 6). I think that more so now then ever, my people are so worried about what their future holds. My family members with and without proper documentation are worried about other family members and are deeply hurt by all the hatred that is being expressed towards us at this time.
After reading these few chapters of Garcia Hernandez’s book, and talking to my father about my family’s immigration story, I can better relate to some of the things that students at NGS might have gone through or might be currently going through. A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to my assigned student about his family and he mentioned to me that he was actually born in Los Angeles, and one of his siblings was born in Mexico but “they had to leave.”It is quite a challenging to ask a sixth-grader why his family had to leave and to evaluate the level of awareness he had at that time and now, but I think that the right time will come for him to fully understand why they had to leave and why his father has to work two jobs to sustain their family now. I think there’s this underlying assumption that has been prevented in society, which exemplifies the American dream, as an ideal lifestyle and perfect opportunities, but that is clearly not the case for many families. This is where the critical consciousness comes into play and becomes very important; we cannot “see life through a rose-colored glass” simply because we are in the US, and although this is the “land of opportunities and welfare,” it is also full of oppression, racism, dehumanization, and incarcerating innocent people. The way that this country prioritizes and views people of color in itself is a structural issue, for example, “with all the hysteria about drugs, terrorism, and gangs, it’s no wonder that the vast majority of people left inside immigration prisons are people of color” (Garcia Hernandez, 12). Although I’m not saying that people of color don’t fall into these categories, I think that these myths contribute to an overarching structural issue of how we view people of color and how we have labeled them. Another myth that I would like to bring up was also discussed in Chapter 5, and it focuses on American exceptionalism and how we have learned to categorize “good” immigrants from “bad” immigrants. “Whether we categorize migrants as good or bad based on Obama’s metrics or Trump’s, we are still segregating based on nothing more than citizenship status, which has nothing to do with our individual contributions to the US and even less to do with moral worth” (Garcia Hernandez, 115). After all, we are all human beings and deserve to be treated as so, not labeled and confined by superior powers.
In the conclusion, I really resonated with Garcia Hernandez when he said, “Countering the dehumanizing spirit of the bipartisan embrace of the immigration prisons needs to begin with a wholesale embrace of the imperfect humanity of migrants… Migrants aren’t imperfect because they aren’t citizens. Migrants are imperfect because they are people. Just people” (Garcia Hernandez, 166). This could not have been said any better, and I agree with this statement because it encourages humanization and actually looking at people for the qualities that they possess, not their socioeconomic, political, or citizenship statuses. “As a nation, our collective moral compass has swerved to the point that we no longer debate whether we should lock up children. Instead, detaining children with their mothers is offered as the humanitarian response to taking children from their parents” (Garcia Hernandez, 160). This is absolutely insane, how is this our actual reality? All of the actions that Trump has taken towards separating families, keeping them in detainment centers and deporting others back to their countries infuriates me and also makes me want to do something about it. As Garcia Hernandez mentioned towards the end of the conclusion, we need to rethink our approach to migrants and to remove the myths that have engraved themselves deeply into our history.
