Bus Station Consul Just the Ticket

When Leticia Morales needed to get to Mexico quickly, her first stop was the Mexican Consulate’s Oxnard office in the city’s bus station.

The 22-year-old Santa Barbara homemaker wanted to visit her ailing grandmother. But she couldn’t cross the border unless she had an official ID card, something she had never obtained during her five years in the United States.

“I need this card to go back to my country,” Morales said.

Putting migrants on the bus with papers in hand is just one task of the consulate’s Oxnard office, which has an unusual and convenient location on the second floor of the downtown bus and train terminal. In a place where journeys begin and end, the consulate also offers birth certificates and helps transport the dead.

The office also assists immigrants who have been detained and even arranges twice-weekly literacy classes.

“We’re not the traditional diplomats of cocktail parties,” said Consul Luz Elena Bueno. “We’re interested in service.”

Bueno knows the difference. Her brother was the Mexican ambassador to Belgium. Her son-in-law was a diplomat in Canada. She served in Honduras and Venezuela.

Then, almost five years ago, she came to the office at the Oxnard transportation center. As the only Mexican representative between Los Angeles and Fresno, she is responsible for half a million Mexican citizens. A staff of 13 helps.

Many of the clients are impoverished farm workers who have nowhere else to turn for help. The Oxnard office handles more than 150 requests for assistance a day.

It’s tough work, said Bueno, who has a blond bob haircut, a Virgin of Guadalupe pendant and a kindly manner. The office looks out on Greyhound and local buses, Amtrak and Metrolink trains, and taxis.

A block away, competing bus companies offer a dozen departures a day to Tijuana. While most consulate users arrive by car, many arrive by bus and train.

As soon as they step off the bus, said Greyhound terminal manager Ramon Placensia, the inevitable question comes: “They ask, ‘Where’s the consulate?’ ”

Of the 46 Mexican consulates in the United States, Oxnard’s is the only one in a bus station, according to officials at the Mexican Embassy in Washington, D.C.

“Lots of stories here are very sad,” Bueno said. “People come here full of illusions about starting a new life and seeking a new future--but life can be hell.”

She has helped abandoned wives who have no money, deportees who don’t know how to get from the border to villages deep in Mexico, and sick people whose family members have no visas and so can’t come and care for them.

And many, many people with no identification.

Morales, the Santa Barbara woman, was one of them. On the day of her visit, she talked to a clerk at the counter, leaning on one leg, nervously twisting her other foot in a platform sandal.

She presented a fake ID purchased in Santa Barbara. “United States ID” read a false but official-looking seal. She also showed a Mexican birth certificate. But this is not enough to get her a consular registration card.

Morales had an immediate problem. She needed her mother, who lives with her in Santa Barbara, to swear to her identity. Right now.

A 20-minute call resulted in her mother’s agreeing to come down and swear to her daughter’s identity. Morales attempted to keep her rambunctious 2-year-old quiet as she settled on a plastic chair to wait.

Others in the waiting room showed different documents: a combination of primary school records, birth certificates and village ID cards made of paper with stapled photos.

But many applicants show up with no identification at all. The consulate sometimes resorts to faxing a head shot to a village in Mexico so officials there can look at the photo and confirm an identity.

Issuing a $27 ID card is the most common service at the consulate. Last year, the Oxnard office issued 12,806 cards.

Some people need them for appointments with the Immigration and Naturalization Service so they can stay in the United States. Most, like Morales, use them as their only solid proof of nationality when they cross the border to go home.

Bueno will not hazard a guess as to how many of her clients are undocumented immigrants.

“It’s not my concern,” she said. “I only want to know if they’re Mexican.”

A decade ago, the consulate had a difficult relationship with U.S. immigration officials. Border Patrol agents sometimes plucked Mexicans from a line outside the consulate, and the former consul accused them of infringing on consular sovereignty.

It seemed murky as to which parts of the bus station had consular immunity. Could agents stake out a person getting off a bus?

But those confrontations have been resolved, Bueno said.

Consular and INS officials keep the channels of communication open through monthly lunch meetings. INS officials call the consulate whenever they take a Mexican citizen into custody, and representatives visit the Camarillo detention center daily.

Bueno sees business at the consulate as a barometer of change. New attention from Mexico City shows Mexican President Vicente Fox’s interest in migrant affairs, she said.

High-level officials call frequently to check up on the Program for Mexican Communities Abroad, which offers textbooks, literacy classes and exchange trips for Mexican Americans.

Officials also send the consulate CDs of “radionovela” soap operas and short public service announcements to be broadcast on local Spanish-language radio stations. The message: Connect with the consulate.

“Although you’re far from Mexico, you’re not alone,” says one recording. “Mexican Communities Abroad, the Secretary of External Relations.”

Mexicans in the U.S. are paying more attention to the national politics of their native country, Bueno said. Immigrants here have been energized by Fox’s election, seeing it as a chance for real change on both sides of the border.

“Change in Mexico has awakened people here,” she said.

For the first time she is receiving letters of advice for the government instead of just letters of complaint. An Oxnard songwriter donated a CD with his rollicking “Song to Vicente Fox” warning the president to keep clean.

Still, some complain. The consulate lacks a staff member who speaks Mixteco, the language of an estimated 10,000 Ventura County residents who are indigenous people from the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico.

“It’s a problem,” said Santos Gomez, an attorney for California Rural Legal Assistance, whose Mixteco staff member sometimes ends up serving as translator.

Others complain about the high prices for a passport--$83--or restrictions on taking goods to Mexico.

Mostly things go on as they have since the consulate opened in 1987. The day begins at 7 a.m., when people begin to line up in the bus station waiting room beside tired travelers. Lines stretch as long as 20 deep by the time the doors open upstairs at 8.

Bueno works on a Mexican schedule and takes an early afternoon siesta, then returns to the office until early evening.

About once a week, a stowaway hops off a freight train from Mexico, walks into the station and ends up in her office, Bueno said. Often they have been traveling for days, aren’t sure where they are, have not eaten and want work, she said.

Others leave for Tijuana after arranging their paperwork. They walk downstairs, new ID cards in hand, to ask about fares. They compare them with the competition nearby.

Across the street recently, at the InterCalifornia bus line, Maria Josefa and Aron Vega walked into a sparse waiting room lined with plastic chairs. The couple, who live in Santa Maria, had just waited an hour at the consulate and emerged with new ID cards. Now they wanted to buy a ticket to the transportation hub of Tijuana, where they could catch a bus to Michoacan.

Like others who visit the consulate, they had a sick relative and no time to waste.

“It’s a convenient location,” Maria Josefa said of the consulate. “I’m glad it’s here.”