Border’s Just a Line for Students Who Cross Daily from Mexico

The border, for Velia Gandarilla, is a point on a sidewalk she strides across every school day as the sun starts to rise over the desert.

“I don’t see the difference going from one country to the other. Just going to school,” says the 17-year-old who wakes up at home in Palomas, Mexico, but attends classes--and will graduate this month, a first in her family--in the United States.

At 6:55 a.m., her styled hair still wet, her violin case in hand, Velia enters the U.S. Customs building, which is crowded with children wearing backpacks and carrying books. They are waiting for the bus.

If she went to school back home, Velia would take night classes at the Palomas middle school, a cluster of concrete rooms lacking a library, cafeteria, gym and band room. There is no high school in the shabby border town.

But each morning, the Deming, N.M., school district, with its unique open-door policy, sends buses to pick up 250 Palomas children who are U.S. citizens. Most, like Velia, are citizens because they were born in U.S. hospitals.

At 7 a.m., Velia boards a yellow school bus bound for Deming, 34 miles to the north. As it rumbles up the two-lane State Highway 11, past sun-soaked fields blanketed with desert shrubs, she chats with her friends in Spanish over Mexican folk music drifting through the bus.

Velia has been going through a similar routine since kindergarten. She rises before dawn each day to bathe and dress. Then she walks or hitches a ride with a sibling from her unpainted concrete home to the border five blocks away.

Her English is nearly flawless, but she feels more comfortable speaking Spanish. She says she considers herself a Mexican rather than an American because of where she lives.

But just after 8:30 a.m., Velia stands at the front of her geometry classroom and faces a small red, white and blue flag. Her hand is over her heart. She pledges allegiance.

Then she turns to a classmate behind her and gabs excitedly in Spanish until class begins.

Being from “over there” has not inhibited Velia, a bubbly girl with an easy smile. She is on the honor roll, has taken up the violin and is one of five prom queen nominees. As a member of the art club, she looks forward to a field trip to museums in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. To raise money for the trip, she and other members of the club are serving food in the cafeteria for two weeks.

When it’s her turn to eat, Velia joins her “school friends”--girls she never sees elsewhere because they live “over here.” Her friends rarely go to Palomas.

“Our parents won’t let us go to the border too much because it’s too dangerous,” says Laura Chavez, a 17-year-old junior.

Velia knows of the violence all too well. Her 21-year-old brother, Sergio, who she says associated with drug smugglers, was shot and killed last year.

She is the youngest of nine children. Her parents own a motel on Palomas’ Avenida Cinco de Mayo, the town’s only paved street. The motel is known as a resting point for soon-to-be illegal immigrants coming up from southern Mexico.

Velia plans to leave Palomas. Though she won’t graduate until Monday, she already wears a Deming class ring with her ruby birthstone, a treble clef and her name. After graduation, her plans are set; she has signed up to join the U.S. Navy and will go to boot camp in Chicago this winter.

“I just want to make something out of my life,” she says.

For now, each day her trip back home from school begins at 3:40 p.m.

Back on the bus, her friends are signing her “Senior Memories” book in English and Spanish.

Later, as the hot afternoon sun beats down and church bells ring in Palomas, she waves at a Mexican Customs inspector.

And Velia crosses the line once more.