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Teresa’s story: Through the desert
Posted on Apr 30 2018
When Teresa* was seven, her mom said she was going to buy a pack of cigarettes for Grandpa. She did not return for four years.
Teresa’s mother had gone to the United States to find a better life for herself and her children. Teresa remembers, “She would send pictures, clothes, and toys.”
When her mother returned, she was “like an alien, like she was stolen and came back another person.”
The next time, her mother and dad took Teresa and her brother and sister with her. She remembers two days and a night on the bus, and then a day and a night at a “safe house,” with “no food, mattresses on the floor, and a freaking outhouse.”
Then came the desert, and eight hours of walking, lost for four hours out of the eight, finally finishing across the border. Four more days of travel brought the family to the K-Mart on Lake Street in Minneapolis and to a new life.
“Being an undocumented child is horrible,” she says. “My parents could have ended up in jail for trying to bring their own children here.”
The new country brought new experiences: the school bus, school lunches, getting lost and not having words to communicate. “The only English word I knew was donkey, and there are no donkeys in Minneapolis,” she recalls. She learned fast and became the interpreter for her parents, who seemed to work all the time.
Her mother had been robbed at places she worked, held up at gunpoint once, and cooperated with the police. That meant she qualified for a U visa. Applying meant giving all their information to immigration. What if they got deported before they got visas? More fear, until the day when the visa notification arrived.
“I ran upstairs like a crazy person!” Teresa recalls. Now they could live in the open, get social security numbers, apply for any job, and travel home to Mexico to see her beloved grandparents again.
Currently working and attending the University of Minnesota, Teresa dreams of earning a master’s degree in social work.
* We have changed some names in this story. As a matter of policy, we usually change the names of immigrants when telling their stories. While the stories are real, and while the individuals have agreed to let us use their stories, we choose to protect their privacy by not using their real names.