From Undocumented to U.S. Career Diplomat
A Foreign Service Officer with USAID shares his story
Jesse Gutierrez is a USAID Foreign Service Officer at USAID’s Somalia Mission in Nairobi. In the below essay, he tells the story of his childhood and how he became the person he is today.
After a meeting to set up a diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) council for USAID/Somalia, I chatted with a local employee who talked about his struggles growing up as a member of a minority group in Kenya. I shared something about my childhood, and we were surprised by the similarities.
I had always been ashamed of my background.
I grew up going back and forth across the border between Calexico, California, and Mexicali, Mexico. I was born in Mexicali, but with one parent from each side of the wall, I felt at home on both sides. It wasn’t until my mom had brain surgery in 1992, when I was 11, that my parents decided to settle on the side with better health care. Dad lost everything to take care of Mom. He scattered the kids with family members in Mexico while Mom relearned how to walk and speak.
In six months, she was ready to reunite the family. Tía Lupe on the American side offered to convert her garage into an apartment for us. We carried out the construction as a family. While cutting wood, my cousin Luis accidentally dropped the saw on my hand and severed my ring finger.
Tío José Luís decided to take me to a hospital in Mexico. He was concerned that converting the garage into an apartment without permits would create issues. And besides, he said, “El niño no tiene papeles [The boy doesn’t have papers].”
That was when I learned I was undocumented.
My great-grandparents migrated from Mexico to Chicago in the 1920s as legal residents. In 1936, the whole family, except for my grandfather, was deported. As the Great Depression saw unemployment sweep across the country, hostility to immigrant workers grew, and the government deported up to 2 million Mexicans, including citizens and lawful residents, between 1929 and 1939 through the Mexican Repatriation Act.
I also was deported when I was trying to travel to Los Angeles for a surgery to repair my hand.
Although my father has birthright American citizenship, I was born in Mexico and did not. After being smuggled back to America, I worried every day about the border patrol taking my siblings or me. I avoided going out to play for fear of being separated from my family.
In the mid-1980s, my parents had hired someone to process immigration documents for Mom and the four kids. Mom got her permanent resident card, but we kids were denied for using the wrong forms. Thousands of dollars went down the drain. By the time I was a freshman in high school, Mom had saved enough money to reapply. After submitting the applications, all we got was a receipt that looked more like an old bodega cashier’s register receipt than official acceptance.
I was always a good student, but my high school academic counselor advised against wasting money on university applications, saying kids like me are not allowed. I applied anyway and went to University of California-Irvine. Dad hired a “coyote” van to take me across the interior border patrol checkpoint from Calexico to Irvine.
A couple of weeks before the end of my first academic quarter, when I turned 18, my world crumbled. I received a letter from the admissions office explaining I previously derived residency from my father, but now as an adult, I no longer qualified to be a student there.
I searched for my application in every Naturalization and Immigration Services office in Southern California. It turns out it was archived by mistake. To my great relief, I received interim papers just days before I was to be expelled from school.
Those documents gave me the right to dream and the hope that those dreams could become real for the first time. I dreamt of going on a study abroad program. Unfortunately, I did not have the resources or the type of papers to study overseas, so I did the next best thing. I volunteered to build homes and schools across the border in Tijuana.
After graduating, I worked as a civil engineer on billion-dollar construction projects in Southern California but never felt I was using my skills to make a difference.
By then, I had my U.S. citizenship and qualified for a federal government job. Volunteering in Tijuana gave me enough overseas experience to land an interview for a Foreign Service officer position with USAID. Today, after 12 years, I have worked in 17 countries. I count my blessings because many undocumented friends never got an opportunity to pursue an education and dreams.
I think my life experiences make me a better development professional. I had slept on the floor, been homeless, used subpar health facilities, and been separated from my family as a kid. I empathize with and relate to refugees and other people who benefit from USAID’s work because I have been in their shoes.
It speaks eloquently about the power of the American Dream that someone that the government deported, a descendant of someone that the government expelled in the mass deportations of the 1930s, could be entrusted by the same government to dispense international aid and conduct diplomacy on its behalf.
This blog is a condensed version of an article originally published in The Foreign Service Journal in July/August 2023.
About the Author
Jesse Gutierrez joined the Foreign Service with USAID in 2010. He is currently serving at USAID Mission Somalia in Nairobi. He recently completed a Master of Legal Studies degree at the Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. He also holds a B.S. and M.S. in civil engineering from the University of California, Irvine, and California State University, Fullerton.
