INTERNSHIP: ARACELI, 2

Wednesday, 22 July 2009

*

When I walk into the Guerra-Gonzalez family home, I look at a picture of a tubby baby on the wall.

Is that you? I ask Jasmin, the oldest.

No, no, she says, None of the stuff on the walls out here can be ours. We can’t have anything here, it all has to be in our room. But come on! See the picture of our whole family—us and our dad!

I follow Jasim, 8, and her squealing siblings down the little hallway and we enter a door plastered with kids drawings. I poke my head into the tiny room, crammed full with a dresser, a TV, clothes and toys. Inside is one giant bed. Four out of five members of the Guerra-Gonzalez family now sleep in this bed—the mother; Araceli and the three children; Jasmin, 8, Anai, 6 and Carlos, 3. The one member missing, their father, Moses sleeps at Christian Country Prison. He awaits deportation.

Moses was arrested in December of last year. He had supported the entire family by working two jobs. Since his arrest, life has been hard. Araceli never had to work before, but now, she spends her days cleaning. The work is hard and she is forbidden from speaking Spanish in the workplace—which makes even communication exhausting. She has applied for work at a million other places; but no one is hiring. There is also another complication—she is undocumented and places like factories now ask any worker for papers.

But the hardest thing is sharing their home. Before, the family lived in the spacious upstairs and rented their basement to a family with two children. But after Moses left, Araceli realized the rent would be impossible—her husband used to make $700 a week; now she makes about $100 to $150 a week. She moved in with the family downstairs so she could rent up the upstairs to new tenants. Now, she and her three children live confined to their tiny bedroom. But the bedroom is not even their own—a tiny cot in the corner sleeps the daughter of the couple downstairs. It is, after all, her room. The Guerra-Gonzalez family are essentially; unwanted visitors in their own home.

Araceli stays strong by thinking about her husband. They met in Mexico when they were ten years old. By the time they were thirteen, they were boyfriend and girlfriend. The year they turned fifteen their families moved to the United States; Araceli’s to California and Moses’ to Chicago. They kept in contact that whole time and when Moses visited, he would try to convince Araceli to marry him. Finally, when they were seventeen; she agreed and he whisked her away to Chicago. They were married there and soon after; their three children were born. The separation now is worse than their brief separation as teenagers.

“I love him even more now than I ever did,” Araceli said. “For the first time in my life, I am alone.”

*

The kids are having a great time showing me the apartment they share. Even under less than ideal conditions; they are proud to be tour guides.

“Come, come! To the kitchen,” shouts little Carlos, leading the way. He climbs on a stool and shows me the ingredients for his favorite drink—leche. Then, he points out the microwave. “For leche!” he announces.

As I drink a glass of water with them in the kitchen; the kids clamor to show me “the rest of their house.”

“Are you coming upstairs?” Anai asks.

When Araceli gently reminds them that upstairs isn’t really their house any more that the kids’ faces fall and they decide, instead, to show me their bikes, stacked outside.

*

As we drive back, Araceli is tired, a little sad. She doesn’t like going home, even for a short visit.

“It is very small,” she says—expressing a lot with that one, simple phrase.

Carlos chirps from the back asking for the radio and Araceli gladly turns it on

Internship: Araceli I

Wednesday, 22 July, 2009

*

Before I enter the mission, I stop a few moments to talk business with the kids standing

outside. It is church fundraising season and the kids of the Mission are stationed behind a little table, peddling soda and candy, water and orange or grape drink. I ask them what is selling well, and the reports are mixed. In the past four hours, they have made about twenty-six dollars. Nicely done, I say, secretly wondering if their own parents or siblings contributed the most to that total.

*

It starts with a tap and a jump. I tap the glass storefront window of the mission and the little, round-faced boy at the other side hops back with fright. A second later, a huge grin spreads across his face. A tiny, balled fist taps back. We begin a game where I splay my fingers on one side and he mirrors me on the other. Soon, his two sisters join in and we are laughing and smacking the glass. I feel terrible about the greasy paw prints we are marking the window with, but the giggles are just too pure, the fun too extreme. We play for a long time, until finally I pry myself away. Embarassingly enough, my interviewee is inside, waiting for me. I am in the process of apologizing when the kids I had just played with crowd around her. I learn that my new friends are her children. They dart back and forth from me to their mother, smacking my hands. In winning their trust, I win their mother’s trust, who smiles a weary, appreciative smile at me.

 

INTERSHIP: Talking with Dulcidia and Joceline Blanco

Wednesday, 15 July 2009

Over the next few weeks, I started hanging out at the Mission a lot. The fact that all I was doing was working my internship and exploring Chicago meant that I was uncharacteristically free. I could be flexible and wait around while someone completed their work. I could get to be friends with the kids. Each conversation ended up supplying me with practical knowledge about the people there or the neighborhood. I was relishing the art of hanging out with people and watching things happen. And moreover, people learned to like and trust me because I was always there.

On that first day of hanging out, the Padre returned to the Mission to make a phone call. When we walked in, he greeted a mother and daughter talking to friends at the front.

These are the Blancos, he said. You should talk to them. Marilu is helping them to get loan modifications.

And so, Dulcidia Blanco, her fourteen-year-old daughter Joceline and I sat on the wooden pews.

Dulcidia spoke ok English, but soon we moved into a rhythm where she spoke to Joceline in Spanish and Joceline translated. Sometimes, I asked interview questions, sometimes we chatted. It was in that way, in this relaxed, conversational style that I got their story.

Dulcidia and Luis had crossed into Mexico from Guatemala twenty-five years ago. They later crossed the rio to get into the united states. In the 1990ss, they received amnesty through a lottery. Dulcidia feels safer now, more free, less afraid.

They bought their house in the nineties and Joceline and her three brothers were raised there.

They told me about joining the church: “It helps out a lot of people, we like that a lot.” Luis drove supplies down on a mission trip to Tabasco. They never expected to be the recipients of aid.

They told me about last September, when Luis started getting less and less work as a trucker. Soon, he was only working 2 or 3 days a week at most.

Dulcidia had to go onto food stamps, something she has never done before.

She spoke of how they could no longer pay the mortgage. “The bank keeps pressuring me,” she said. “The first time they called was Christmas. They said we had lost the house. They keep calling and saying we have already lost the house when we haven’t. They once called my husband when he was driving and said the same thing. He almost crashed, so now I take all of the calls.”

“If they take the house away, what are we going to do?” she asked. “It’d be easy to rent another place but it’s been fifteen years there, I don’t want to leave.”

Joceline turned to me. “Mom gets really depressed. She cries a lot. Sometimes, I come into the room and she is just staring at the wall.”

Dulcidia adds: “Sometimes I want to just leave it all behind.”

The most precious part of the whole thing was the silence after we talked. I was able to share that with them, share the fact that discussing these things weighted us all down. I offered them a little hope, Well, if anyone can help you, it’ll be Padre, I said. I know, I know, said Dulcidia. 

INTERNSHIP: what Jorge sees daily

13 July 2009

Conversations in the Car between Pilsen and Little Village (Chicago)

*

This what we are seeing, he said. In the city of Chicago, one hundred men are deported each week. These are young, working men with families. The family has a traditional set-up so usually the wife doesn’t work. Small kids. Well, then he is gone and suddenly we have these mothers, these kids becoming homeless. That’s why if you come to our office right now, it is like a daycare center.

What do you do? I asked.

Well, we try to find someone to take them in, maybe someone who used to be in the same situation.

That’s how the community is. We open up our homes. The other day, my wife and I were counting how many people we had had to stay. It’s been thirty-four in the past six years. Some stay for days, some for weeks or months; I think this one guy stayed for years. Yeah, he was in the basement for about a year and a half. That’s just how we are.

We’re used to overcrowding. You know, if a young, undocumented man comes here they afford the rent by living maybe 12, 14 to a house. People aren’t there together, you know, eight are sleeping while eight are working and so on. You see it in the grocery store; you see two skinny guys with the two carts loaded up with beans, tortillas and you think, how can they eat that? Well, they are buying for all the guys.

*

Here is something else. We are seeing all these families who are being foreclosed on. You see, if you are an undocumented permanent resident than you can’t get any of the stimulus package money to get loans to keep your house. So we tell them, don’t keep paying your mortgage—don’t try to keep your house as long as possible. If it looks like it is going to happen, it is going to happen. So we tell them, stop paying. If it’s two thousand a month, and you don’t pay for three months than you have six thousand you can put down on an apartment when you loose your house. That’s what we tell them.

Me: Wait. So are there a lot of people like this? Permanent, undocumented residents who have bought houses? How does that work?

That’s the housing boom for you. You could go to the bank and get a loan, granted, they didn’t get good interest rates, they weren’t eligible since they weren’t documented.

Me: Wait, I say. They’d loan to undocumented people? Don’t you need a SS number?

Nope. You need what’s called an IT number, which you can get if you go to any number of places. It’s an Income Tax number and you get it when you register to pay taxes. All you need is your W-2s. So these people would go in with this. They’d get a loan to put down the deposit and then they’d get a loan to help pay for the rest of it. But then they’d have crazy mortgages—like $4,000 a month. But they were so happy, this was America—they had a house. But now, they lose their jobs and they can’t pay the $4,000 anymore.

Me: I get it. So these are the people who arrived after they gave out amnesty in 1986. So they were buying houses in the nineties... oh yeah, right in the middle of the housing bubble.

Exactly, exactly!

*