A Quest for Citizenship Takes Him From L.A. to the Streets of Laredo

Roberto Castillo needed help Tuesday. The people who could prove that he has been in the United States for the last seven years were telling him to stay out of their lives.

He had returned here from Los Angeles, where he is a construction worker, because this is where his life in the United States began on Sept. 14, 1979. On that day, he became one of the millions who have illegally crossed the border from Mexico.

He worked at handyman and carpentry jobs over the years in San Antonio and Houston before moving to Southern California. His latest employers had given him a leave from work to begin his search for legality under the nationwide amnesty program that began Tuesday, but he was getting nowhere.

He needed people to write letters to the Immigration and Naturalization Service confirming that he had lived and worked in all those places. But as he stood in front of Laredo’s new legalization center in the early morning seeking guidance, Castillo said the flight to San Antonio, then the bus ride to Laredo had been futile so far.

“No one wants to write me a letter because they are afraid of getting in trouble with the immigration people,” he said.

Castillo was one of four applicants standing in front of the legalization center of this sleepy border city of 125,000 people when it opened Tuesday.

Authorities estimate that 18 million people legally enter the United States from Mexico each year at the Laredo crossing, while thousands more swim the Rio Grande River along this stretch of Texas because it is the most direct route from Mexico City and Central America to the larger cities further north. But only a trickle of illegal aliens began the process Tuesday that would allow them to live here legally, even though this city is almost exclusively Mexican-American.

The legalization office, the only tenant of a gaudy, hot-pink stucco shopping center, was operating with rented furniture because the government issue had not yet arrived. Government approval of the center’s facilities came Monday, after the installation of fire and burglar alarms.

“We did a lot of sweating over whether the things we need were going to arrive on time,” said Fred Munt, director of the center. He had worried a bit, as well, about warnings that there would be a flood of applications, too many for his 15 employees to process.

He need not have bothered. Besides Castillo, there was only Claudia Arias, a 17-year-old student who brought her report cards to prove eligibility; Maria Barron, who came with her husband, Manuel, and Rosalia Rodriguez, a legal resident who came to pick up the forms for her husband because he was at work.

Castillo and the others were given applications to fill out and return. By mid-afternoon, Munt said the same ritual had been repeated 100 or so times.

A few miles away, at the Catholic Social Services agency, there was at least a line of people, about 45 in all, waiting for counseling on how to fill out the application forms.

Inside the small frame house with burglar bars on all the windows and doors, Isela Sanchez, the legalization program director, was giving a lecture in Spanish to a small group of aliens on the correct procedures.

“People are afraid to come forward,” she said. “The onslaught will come in April of ‘88, when the program is ending.”

In the late morning Tuesday, the workers at nearby Centro Aztlan, a community-based watchdog group, were also going about their business.

Rafael Torres, one of the directors, walked downstairs accompanied by a little man with “California” emblazoned on his baseball cap. It was Roberto Castillo, looking much happier than he had a few hours earlier.

Torres said he thought Castillo’s former employers would now write the letters that he had come so far to get.

“I told them it was the right thing to do,” Torres said.