Worried by Amnesty : A Family’s Struggle to Stay in U.S.

The pull of El Norte has been there for as long as any of them can remember.

Antonio Carrillo, for instance, was only a boy when he first heard talk in his Mexican hometown about how U.S. labor contractors were going “all the way to Mexico City” in search of workers during World War II.

“When the trainloads of braceros (contract farm laborers) arrived across the border, they even threw fiestas to welcome them,” Carrillo, 56, of Pomona said in Spanish. In 1950 at age 20, Carrillo joined the labor flow northward, following in the footsteps of his father, several uncles and other able-bodied men from Jerez, his hometown in Zacatecas.

Once Were Welcomed

He remembers inspectors at Eagle Pass on the Texas border examining the layers of callouses on his fresh-from-the-plow hands and commenting: “Look at these hands! They’re like leather. These are the kind we like. You can go ahead.”

However, when domestic labor shortages eased in the postwar economy, the eager embrace of Mexican workers also cooled and the ensuing decades saw stepped-up deportations of illegal immigrants and the repatriation of braceros to Mexico.

That pattern of embrace and rejection is familiar to Carrillo, who wears the Mexican-style straw hats of his youth but walks with the slow lumbering step of an old man. His childhood memories include men returning to his central Mexican village as far back as the 1930s after being deported from the United States.

Now, after nearly 20 years of living continuously in this country, Carrillo is eligible for legal residence under the immigration reform law enacted in November. But he is worried that being eligible does not necessarily mean he will be allowed to stay.

“The legislature hacked out this law without looking deeply at the problems of the people who will be most affected. I think some people may benefit, but many others will be hurt,” he said. He paused for a moment and added, “Maybe that’s the way they wanted it.”

The new law opens an uncertain chapter for the Carrillo family whose concerns, and those of their relatives, reflect those of thousands of immigrant families. This and later articles will follow the Carrillos as they confront the immigration bureaucracy and other realities of the law in their quest to become legal residents of the United States.

In the family, legal and illegal residents often are part of the same household. One of Carrillo’s nephews is afraid that his wife and children may qualify for amnesty but that he will not. Another relative notes that some of his children are U.S. citizens while others are not eligible for amnesty.

Under the law, illegal aliens who have lived continuously in the United States since Jan. 1, 1982, are eligible for amnesty, or legal residency. At the same time, the law imposes civil and criminal penalties for employers who hire illegal aliens. The Immigration and Naturalization Service will start accepting amnesty applications May 5.

Many immigrants, however, fear that overly restrictive INS regulations will disqualify many who appear eligible. Proposed regulations drafted by the INS specify, for instance, that aliens may not qualify if they have left the country for more than 45 days at a time, if they have received some forms of public assistance and if they cannot properly document their years here.

In fact, the new immigration act has already been branded the “deportation” law in some segments of the immigrant community, and many illegal aliens are ambivalent about it. Even those who say that on a personal level it represents “the opportunity of a lifetime” also fear that it merely reflects the latest wave of anti-Mexican sentiment to sweep the United States in their lifetime.

The Carrillo family’s history has been sketched across the face of Mexico and the American Southwest. Women saw their husbands go off to El Norte, sometimes never to be heard from again. Family stories about the difficulties of crossing the border abound, with relatives recalling episodes of hiding in car trunks or being discovered and landing in jail.

But they have kept coming.

Apart for 10 Years

Carrillo, who was preceded by two uncles, was ultimately joined by his wife and seven of their children after living apart for most of the previous 10 years. His sister and a widowed cousin and her 8 children also entered illegally and now live near the Carrillos. Two brothers immigrated legally with help from their employers and settled in Orange County. They, in turn, sponsored their parents, who ultimately returned to Ensenada to retire.

The family has known the back-breaking work in California’s fields, but some never wore a new pair of shoes before coming to this country.

The family’s experiences here are perhaps more bittersweet than most. While some of Cabrillo’s children have managed to land steady jobs with potential for high earnings, one son died last year of a drug overdose. Another son has been diagnosed as a schizophrenic.

Carrillo and his wife worked for several years at the same videotape factory but the firm recently declared bankruptcy and laid the couple off.

Unable to find other jobs, the couple scavenges cardboard from back alleys and dumpsters and sells it to recyclers. The scavenging adds a few dollars to the couple’s meager unemployment check, but Carrillo hopes it will also help him demonstrate to immigration officials that he is self-supporting, as the law requires.

While the Carrillos see their future as uncertain under the new law, some of their “legal” relatives also worry that the legislation’s employer sanctions will unleash discrimination against all Latinos. And those relatives who do not qualify for amnesty fear that their families will be separated and children who have grown up as Americans may be forced to adjust to life in Mexico.

The uncertainties, the threat of deportation if they do not qualify and what he sees as anti-Mexican attitudes remind Carrillo of the 1930s when as a child he saw Don Pedro, another campesino, return to Jerez with his wife and children and a few possessions packed in a pickup truck.

‘Doesn’t Like Mexicans’

“This American President doesn’t like Mexicans,” explained Don Pedro, who was among hundreds of thousands of Mexicans deported during the Great Depression.

Later, Don Pedro, his U.S.-born son, Alfredo, and Carrillo’s father were caught while trying to cross the border illegally. The men were returned to Mexico, but Alfredo was detained and later inducted into the U.S. Army.

“Back home, Alfredo’s parents were proud to say that their son was ‘fighting for democracy,’ ” Carrillo said. “In 1943, the whole neighborhood turned out to see Alfredo’s remains arrive in a small bronze box.”

When Carrillo was a boy working the land alongside his father, he would see men returning from El Norte with “new shoes and with money in their pockets. We’d get a new change of clothes once a year. The men from El Norte came back with suitcases full.”

He decided then that when he grew up, he would become a bracero.

On one trip home, he married his wife, Estefana, a woman who sold two pigs to help pay for her first husband’s trip to the United States. He never returned.

She was left, at age 21, with four children and pregnant with a fifth. She would later have five more children by Carrillo.

Estefana Carrillo, a hefty, good-humored woman who reveals little of herself to strangers, had worked in the fields since she was a child and knew the feeling of going hungry. But she had also learned how to survive. She remembers without shame that as a young girl she baby-sat for rich families in town just for the chance to drink the milk in the children’s baby bottles.

Life a Little Easier

Life became a little easier after she married Carrillo and settled in Mexicali on the California border, but the money orders he regularly sent home were never enough to support the growing family.

Meanwhile, Antonio Carrillo had grown increasingly reluctant to cross the border for visits after several brushes with the Border Patrol and one 20-day jail stint.

Eight years ago, Estefana Carrillo seized the opportunity to reunite the family on what was ostensibly a school outing to Disneyland. She packed up her five youngest children and pretended to be a chaperon for the bus full of youngsters who were all actually crossing the border to be reunited with families.

They crossed without incident, and within a few hours Estefana Carrillo, her husband and their children were embracing in the Disneyland parking lot.

But the joy of being reunited began to give way to newly found stresses after the family settled in the San Gabriel Valley.

Maria Toscano, the Carrillos’ youngest daughter, was angry that her parents had removed her so suddenly from her school and friends in Mexico. Before completing a year at Monrovia High School, she ran off with the first boy she had met. By 17 she had her first child.

Other children in the family remember schoolmates harassing them about their immigration status and trying to scare them with tales of “La Migra ,” the feared immigration service. The Carrillos also had to contend with condescension from some of their own cousins who had been raised in the United States and looked down on “mojados , “ or “wetbacks.”

One of Toscano’s sisters-in-law recalled that “the moment” one of her uncles, who had lived in the United States illegally for many years, was granted legal residency, he declared: “No daughter of mine is marrying a mojado. “

Regrets Leaving School

Toscano, now 23, married and the mother of two children, regrets having dropped out of high school and said she plans to return to classes this summer.

Her 22-year-old brother Alonso (not his real name), considered the brightest in the family, is an apprentice ironworker earning $14 an hour in a program that promises a $23-an-hour salary in a few years. He speaks English so well that no one at his job has ever suspected that he is in the country illegally, he said. (Concerned over the possible consequences at work or with immigration authorities, Alonso and his wife, as well as a few others in the family, asked that their identities not be revealed.)

In fact, when Alonso earlier worked as a truck driver, he would fearlessly pull up to immigration checkpoints where unsuspecting officers would jokingly ask whether he was transporting illegal aliens.

His wife, Lourdes, also speaks unaccented English and is accepted at the medical office where she works as a U.S. native, but there are still painful moments.

“I work mostly with white people who are very strict about everybody being legal,” she said. “The other day I heard my supervisor and the doctors talking about amnesty and how they are against it, and that no more Mexicans should be allowed to stay. . . .” This only deepened her anxieties and made her realize once again the kinds of anti-immigrant attitudes she and her family are up against.

For Alonso and Lourdes, who entered the country as children, returning to Mexico would mean having to start over--for a second time--in a new milieu.

The law is an even greater threat to Estefana Carrillo’s son from her first marriage, Enrique (not his real name). He and his family came to this country from Ensenada in 1983, too late to be eligible for amnesty and now live near his parents.

Desperate to Remain

Recalling hard times in Mexico when he was unable to afford a doctor when his only son fell seriously ill, Enrique, 35, is desperate to remain in the United States.

“In Mexico my son had no toys,” he said. “Here he has a roomful.”

Enrique and his wife worry most about their 13-year-old daughter who, they said, would be placed several grade levels behind her peers were she to return to Mexican schools.

“She says she’d rather die,” her mother said.

Sitting in his living room filled with new matching sofas, oak tables, a stereo system and a large television console tuned to a popular Spanish-language soap opera, Enrique wondered out loud whether he could afford an apartment in Ensenada to house his furniture.

“I’m not leaving it; that’s for sure,” he said, noting that he paid the equivalent of millions of pesos to buy it. “Not even a rich person in Ensenada has furniture like this.”

“This is a racist law that hurts us all, especially in the workplace,” said Antonio Carrillo’s younger half-brother Narciso Ortiz, a legal resident.

The factory where he earns $12.50 an hour making cinder blocks has begun demanding proof of legal residence, and the company stopped giving job applications to Latinos shortly after the law was passed, he said.

Antonio and Estefana Carrillo contend that they have been unable to find work largely because employers are demanding proof of legal residence.

Employers are not subject to any penalties for illegal aliens hired before the law was enacted last November or for those workers who say they intend to apply for amnesty. Nonetheless, reports of employers firing workers out of fear that they might be subject to penalties are increasing.

Worried About Jobs

Antonio Carrillo’s stepson, Enrique, said he and most of his co-workers are worried that they may lose their $5.50-an-hour jobs in a foundry. “Our supervisor asked us recently how many of us planned to apply for amnesty, and only three of 15 guys on our crew said they would,” he said. “Nothing else had been said about it.”

Enrique, who feels he is already taken advantage of at work, thinks the law may drive illegals further underground, inviting increased exploitation by some employers. He said he is so determined to stay in this country that he offered to work without a raise for the next three years--”long enough to pay off my bills.”

While Enrique is making arrangements to transport his possessions across the border, should he and his family be forced to leave, his parents and brothers are trying to steer through the morass created by the new immigration law.

Toscano, who usually takes the family lead in dealing with the outside world, has taken family members to community forums on the law. After listening to admonitions to be leery of unscrupulous immigration consultants, the family recently retrieved documents they deposited with a notary public years ago in the false hope that he would help them to become legalized. Their mistake cost them several hundred dollars.

Most recently, Toscano signed the family up with a nonprofit legal aid center that, for a fee of $650 per couple, will help them prepare their applications to the INS.

Amnesty’s most significant advantage, most family members agree, would be the freedom legal residence would give them to come and go between the United States and Mexico. One of Estefana Carrillo’s biggest regrets is that she was unable to visit her dying mother. Other relatives complain that their children have never seen their grandparents or their parents’ homeland.

The Carrillos believe they can document their continuous residence in this country, and Antonio Carrillo feels that he may even be eligible for an expedited legalization process open to immigrants who have been in the country since 1972.

Nonetheless, he assesses his chances at not better than “50-50,” saying he is especially concerned about his mentally ill son who may be adjudged a public charge, thus disqualifying him for amnesty.

‘So Many Requirements’

“They’ve set so many requirements and conditions that they’ll find some reason or other to disqualify the vast majority of us,” said Antonio Carrillo’s nephew, Aurelio (not his real name).

Aurelio, 39, fears that his wife and children will qualify, but that he will not. Aurelio has been in the country for 15 years, but he has been receiving disability payments since undergoing a kidney transplant operation 10 years ago. Although his wife has worked steadily, Aurelio is afraid that he will be considered a public charge.

“What’s going to happen if my family qualifies, but I don’t?” he asked, pointing out that he would have very little chance in Mexico of receiving the specialized medical care he needs to stay alive.

“I just couldn’t leave my family here alone,” he said, noting that they have never been separated. “I would do everything possible to stay with them, even if I had to illegally cross the border again.”