Ana’s story is rooted in the events that happened long before she was born. In some ways, it begins where her mother’s story begins in rural Mexico. Her mother when she was just a baby, was dropped off at the doorstep of an orphanage.
No name. No birth certificate. No identity.
She was adopted by a family, giving her everything she knew about herself. A name and a life that would be drastically different if she wasn’t left at those orphanage steps all those years ago.
Ana – whose real full name is being withheld for her own protection) recalls that her mom had some type of education in Mexico, and she’s fairly sure she had a job as a secretary. Her mom had her older sister in Mexico, but for much of her mother’s past, Ana knows very little.
But when her sister was five-years-old, her mother made the decision to cross over to the United States, in search of a better life. She wasn’t able to apply for a visa to the US, for she didn’t have a birth certificate, even in Mexico.
The story about the crossing is unknown to Ana. The one time she asked her mom about it, she didn’t say much, instead she just cried thinking back to the memory.
These moments that happened long before Ana was even born have shaped her entire life.
Ana is a legal citizen. Her mom is not.
“When I was little, I always knew my mom didn’t have papers,” Ana said. “But I really didn’t understand how it impacted us.”
Now as she goes into her final semester of college at UW-Milwaukee, ‘s thinking about her future career as a nurse, and what this will mean for her family.
Ana knows what struggles her mom had to go for her to get to this place. She also knows what she had to go through to be here.
There was a time when they faced homelessness. There were times when Ana had to support her family. There were times where Ana would know what her mom’s legal status meant for her.
During the winter, Ana’s mom would go door-to-door, asking her neighbors in the community if she could shovel their driveways in order to pay her rent. It was only through her boyfriend’s family that Ana found out about the lengths her mom went through to make sure that she had a roof over her head and food for her after school each day.
There are other moments that still resonate with Ana to this day. When she was little, her sister was married with three children. Her sister’s husband was involved in a bar fight, and was arrested that night. After that incident, he was deported back to Mexico. Ana was only nine.
“So that really, really affected my family,” she said. “My oldest nephew was three and today, like he remembers but barely.”
Then later in her life, Ana faced her sister’s own choices. After her husband was deported, she turned to a life that focused on drugs. Her sister was arrested multiple times. She had her visa taken away, something that Ana is shocked that her sister was so okay with giving up.
On her sister’s most recent trip to jail, there was constant worry that her sister would be picked up by ICE. Day after day, Ana and the rest of the family would wait day to day to hear about her sister. ICE never came for her.
ICE is a constant fear of Ana’s. Whenever she hears about a possible raid or if someone claims to be an immigration lawyer that could help out, Ana automatically worries about her mom. Any hint of a raid on Facebook, Ana calls her mom and warns her to stay inside and that she needs to remember her rights.
“I want my mom to be able to say, ‘I’m in the country without papers,’ and not have to fear that someone’s gonna overhear and deport her.”
But looking forward to after college, Ana has a plan to help her mom. Once she has a stable nursing job, she’s going to hire a lawyer to help both her mom and her boyfriend’s parents, who are also in the country without papers.
This is what she’s waiting for. With graduation around the corner, she only has a little bit more time to wait till she can help make her mom a legal citizen.