Border Run Ends Family’s Separation : 3 Young Sisters, Last to Make Illegal Crossing, Follow Parents, Brothers to Build Better Life in U.S.

Marisela leaned out the gate and glanced down Calle Cuatlahuac, dusty and hot and filled with children and watchful old women. She has lived here for all of her 13 years, in Colonia Ruben Jaramillo, a settlement of a few thousand families near Cuernavaca, surrounded by rice paddies and fields of roses, by jacaranda trees and noisy cleft-tailed swallows.

“Do children play in the street up there too?,” she asked, suggesting for the first time that she might be nervous about leaving her home for a strange American city 2,000 miles away. In a few hours, she and her two sisters would leave for Tijuana and, with luck, end up in Santa Ana, Calif., where they would join their parents and brothers and become mojadas (wets), as they call themselves--illegal immigrants.

Marisela’s sister, Oralia, plopped herself down in a chair pressed up against the concrete kitchen wall. At 15, Oralia is the oldest of the three girls, and has been in charge since her mother left last year to join their father in the United States.

“I’m sad,” she said. “I don’t know when we’ll be coming back.”

When the girls’ father, Jose, first left his home for the United States seven years ago, he figured he would be back in less than a year with enough dollars to lift his family out of poverty. Staying in the United States was not something he had considered.

His family, after all, had been one of the original half-dozen families to form the colonia. They had occupied the land--part of the communal farmlands that belonged to the local villagers--in 1972, to keep a local politician from unlawfully grabbing it for his son. Jose had helped carve the first street in the village out of the hillside, and was building a new house, one wall at a time, out of bricks and cement.

But Jose did not go back, except for two brief visits to see his family and to work on his house. Instead, his family has come to him in Santa Ana--first one son, then two more, then his wife and two more sons.

A few months ago, Oralia, Marisela and 11-year-old Marta became the last members of the family--whose last name has been withheld to protect their identity--to leave Mexico for Orange County. The house that Jose built is empty now; the big tin washtubs from the courtyard are pushed in the corner against the kitchen stove, the cupboards are draped with cloth.

In Santa Ana they will live in a house that Jose and his wife, Maria Luisa, rent; they share it with another Mexican family. When the girls arrive, 15 people will live in the three-bedroom house. Two sleep in the garage.

The family’s story is typical of thousands of Mexican families who once viewed Orange County as a place to earn quick cash, but which they now call home. Estimates of the number of Mexicans in the county illegally range from 80,000 to 200,000 but most experts agree that the newest waves of immigrants include increasing numbers of women and children, many of them coming to join their husbands, fathers and brothers.

As complete families, they are changing the profile of the undocumented immigrant community. Their children are schooled here and learn English, and some go to college here; those who are born here, usually in county-funded hospitals, are American citizens. They hold permanent jobs and receive promotions. They get loans and buy cars and houses.

The family hopes for a better future are no longer based in Mexico; they have smuggled these, and little else, into the United States on their clandestine trips north.

Five members of the family hold jobs in Orange County. Two children are in school in Santa Ana--where illegal immigrants make up 22% of the school district’s population--and the three daughters will enroll soon. The oldest brother is in night school, learning English. A granddaughter was born last year at UCI Medical Center in Orange. She is the family’s first U.S. citizen.

“I had to go--what I earned just wasn’t enough,” said Jose one recent afternoon, sitting on a stack of Purina sacks in the back of the feed store where he works for $5.25 an hour. He speaks in his native Spanish, although he has learned enough English to wait on customers. When business is slow, Jose sometimes flips through a dilapidated Berlitz guide, learning new phrases.

He has worked in the store for seven years--the owners, a couple from the South, say they have “tried Anglos, but they just don’t work out as well.”

Had Work as a Mason

When Jose left Mexico, he had plenty of work as a mason, but if he earned 150 pesos a day (about $6 in 1978), it was a good day. And he and Maria Luisa had eight children to worry about.

“The children were all young, they needed clothing, food, money to keep on studying,” Jose said. “It was a decision that I made very quickly. . . . We didn’t want to separate. I remember that my wife was mortified. But I thought I wouldn’t be there for more than six or eight months--a year at most.”

Jose took a bus from Mexico City--about 60 miles from Colonia Ruben Jaramillo--to Tijuana, where he paid a coyote $200 to lead him across the border.

“I remember coming, I was very content. I stepped over the line, I said, ahora si, I’m in the United States, and we started to walk. . . . We walked all night--we rested by a tree and drank water and ate sandwiches with mayonnaise--until a van picked us up and took us to San Clemente.”

There, Jose recalls, they had to pass through a small tunnel on foot underneath the freeway. “It was 4 or 5 in the morning, we were near Camp Pendleton. . . . When we came out of the tunnel, some of the Marines saw us and took aim. One of our group--there were eight or 10 of us--knew what was happening and he shouted: ‘Don’t shoot, we’re wets! We’re not doing anything!’ It was OK, they let us continue, and there was a car waiting for us that took us the rest of the way to Santa Ana.”

In Santa Ana, Jose quickly found a bed in a garage with five other men on Raymar Street. He paid $35 a week for room and board, and the owner of the house knew of a job in a plastics factory. It paid $1.65 an hour.

First Weeks Hard

“Those first few weeks were very hard for me,” said Jose, 42. “During break, when everyone went to the catering van and drank sodas, I went to the other side of the factory, alone, and remembered Mexico. I missed my family, I didn’t like the food here. But I had to pay for it, in any case. So I got used to it.”

After a few months, Jose left the factory for a better-paying job at the feed store. But he was still only able to send home $30 a week, he said. “And a lot of that went to pay back the money I borrowed to come up here,” he said.

During a visit home in 1980, Jose talked to Gabriel, his second-oldest son, about joining him. Gabriel, then 15, had almost finished high school, and the family did not have enough money for him to continue studying for a career. “My Dad wanted me to come,” said Gabriel, now 20. “And I was tired of life in Mexico.”

Gabriel, a wiry young man who wears a gold chain and cross around his neck, has been more Americanized than the rest of his family. He is the only family member who speaks English fluently, having spent two years in Saddleback High School. He dropped out after 11th grade to get a job “and buy things,” he said.

“I see something I like, I want to buy it,” said Gabriel, dining on a hamburger and fries after closing the feed store one evening. He works part-time at the store but is looking for a full-time job so he can buy another car; he just sold his old one after someone shot a hole in the door while he was leaving a party. He knows who did it but has no idea why, he said. He has reported the incident to police.

“You got to be tough,” Gabriel said, “or people walk all over you. I got a friend, Raul, he’ll fight anybody who looks at him wrong just because he’s a Mexican. He’s crazy, he’ll fight anybody. . . . So far, the police have never caught him.”

Gabriel said he would like someday to get his high school diploma. “I liked high school OK--I met a lot of people, and I like the way they teach here. If you don’t understand something, they repeat it to you. . . . But the Chicanos (Mexican-Americans), they exclude you, they don’t let you join their clubs . . . what do you call that . . . ‘discrimination?’ ”

Giving Up a Lot

Like his father, Gabriel found that going home to Mexico meant giving up a lot. He went back two years ago, “possibly to stay,” but he lasted only a month. “I got used to living here, I didn’t like it down there. You don’t eat that good. And I was used to having my car--there, you always take a bus.”

While Jose knew his family back in Mexico was better off economically if he stayed in Santa Ana, he and his wife also began to realize that his absence had created prob lems. The oldest son, Javier, dropped out of school just before he was to receive a degree in agricultural engineering. He got married and he and his wife have one child. The second son, Alfredo, also married without permission. “That would not have happened if I had been there,” Jose said.

Both sons soon found themselves in the same position as their father. They had young families, but could not support them. Alfredo was earning $20 a week as a busboy in a Cuernavaca restaurant before he left for Santa Ana in the fall of 1984. Javier had been unable to find a job at all after he left school.

Today, Alfredo, 21, works in a company cafeteria in central Orange County, and takes home about $150 a week, $25 of which he sends to his wife and daughter in Mexico, he said.

Javier, 24, earns $4 an hour making bullets in an Orange County ammunition factory, but he doesn’t intend to work for that wage forever, he said. “I have to see what works out. Right now, the most important thing for me is to learn English.” Four nights a week, Javier attends classes at a local high school. Sundays, he works in the feed store. At home, he dotes on his son, also named Javier, and Rocio, his 9-month old daughter, an American citizen.

Choose Freely

Rocio’s American citizenship will be important for her, said her mother, Eli Guardarrama. “She will be able to choose freely where she wants to live.”

Javier sent for Eli less than a year after he left, because “I was too young to be living away from my wife and son,” he said. She crossed the border in November, 1984, carrying 2-year-old Javier in her arms during the all-night walk through the hills and down into San Diego. There, a friend drove them to the airport and put them on a plane for L.A.

Jose’s wife, Maria Luisa, arrived last year with the two youngest sons, Eduardo, 14, and Jose Luis, 8. “Half here and half there, that’s no good,” Maria Luisa said. “It’s better if the family is together.”

To help make ends meet, Maria Luisa operates a sewing machine in a small garment factory. She earns the minimum wage--if her employer is honest. At her last job, her paycheck bounced, and it took weeks before her boss made it good. At her current job, she often works 60 hours a week but receives no overtime bonus, just the straight $3.65 an hour. Some women in the factory have not been paid in four weeks. “It isn’t just, but what can we do?” asks Jose. “The other women in the factory told her it’s always like that.”

And 60 hours at $3.65 is money the family needs, Jose said. When Maria Luisa left Mexico with the two boys, the girls stayed behind because Jose did not earn enough at the feed store to bring the whole family at once. Eduardo could not begin school for several weeks after he arrived; he had only two shabby changes of clothes and had to wait until his parents could buy him some new clothes before enrolling.

Eduardo is now in the ninth grade and his latest report card showed an A and four C’s in mostly bilingual courses.

Jose Luis, a bright-eyed third-grader, recently won his classroom’s “Student-of-the-Month” award. The paper is taped to his parents’ bedroom wall. “They’ve sent him home with a few of those,” his father said proudly.

Wants Children to Study

“That is what I want for my children--that they study, that they learn something,” said Jose, who left school at 12 to work in construction alongside his father and uncle. “So if they decide to stay, they will be able to defend themselves here. If they decide to go back, with English, they will do well in Mexico.

“Sometimes I remind Jose Luis that he is Mexican, that it is something to be proud of. He asks me, ‘Why?’ I don’t know, I tell him, but I feel proud to speak Spanish, it’s very beautiful, it’s my language and I don’t know how to speak any other language. . . . I tell Eduardo: ‘Here you can advance, you can work, there are all the facilities that are absent in Mexico. Over there, you stagnate.’ ”

Jose said he may return to Mexico someday, but right now he wants to begin the process of obtaining legal resident status. He wants a valid Social Security card. The one he bought on the black market seven years ago to help him get a job is no good, and he cannot file for an income tax refund--for which he would qualify with so many dependents--without a legitimate number. “I have been here a long time,” he said. “A lot of other people who did not enter legally have them.”

A more immediate concern, though, is finding another place to live. When the girls arrive, the house will be too crowded, Jose said. He would like to rent a house just for his family, but he does not know if he will be able to come up with the first and last month’s rent plus a security deposit. “That would cost $2,000, and I don’t have that much right now,” he said. Bringing his daughters up from Mexico cost $750 for the coyote alone. Bus fare from Mexico City to Tijuana was another $100, he said.

A week after leaving Colonia Ruben Jaramillo, the girls are in Santa Ana, relieved that they are safe and happy that the family is reunited. It was an arduous journey, Oralia said--two nights and a day in the hills southwest of San Diego, then five nights in a safe house waiting for passage to Santa Ana. “There were 40 of us in that house,” she said. “We slept on the floor, in chairs, wherever there was space.” At one point, the INS raided the house next door, which was also harboring illegal aliens, and they were sure they would be next, Oralia said, but the agents never came. Marta, the youngest girl, cried when she spoke with her parents on the phone from the house, but she said she was not scared. Marisela said she was.

Finally, they were herded into vans in the night and driven to a spot near the San Clemente checkpoint, where they were transferred into the back of a semi. They crossed the checkpoint and were put back into vans. Saturday morning, a car delivered them to their parents’ house. Jose said he has no idea who the driver was.

“It was a lot of work,” said Jose, sipping a Tecate on the living-room couch, his wife and daughters surrounding him. “But here they are.”

Even with the whole family in Santa Ana, Jose said he is “not thinking” of selling the empty, two-room, gray cement house in Colonia Ruben Jaramillo. “What happens if they get us and send us back? We need a place to go.”