What led to my passionate connection to the immigrant experience began in the 1990s. As a young adult, I had moved from a small town in upstate New York to Los Angeles. At the time, I was an RN specializing in intensive care, but my real love was writing. In fact, I took fiction writing classes at UCLA Extension Writers’ Program while I worked at the medical center as a nurse. When my children were school-age, I went back to college full-time to study literature and creative writing. Once I graduated, my first job was teaching English as a Second Language to adults. Many of my students were Mexican and Central American. Their language, food, music, and religion took me back to my early childhood growing up in an Italian neighborhood in Binghamton, New York. Ranchera music reminded me of my Grandpa playing the “squeezabox,” as he called it. Reverence for the Virgin Mary (la Virgen de Guadalupe) and the strong central role of the mother were so familiar. All of this gave me great comfort for at the time my marriage was headed for divorce, and I was three thousand miles away from family.
I loved going to work. My students inspired me. If they, at sixteen, thirty-six, or seventy, could begin again in a new country and with a new language, well, I certainly could in my own country with my own language. I saw how hard they worked and how family-centered they were. I suppose I also saw my own extended family in their stories. My Italian grandparents were immigrants. My grandfather worked construction, and my grandmother worked in a cigar factory. I remember my father telling me how he was punished for speaking Italian in kindergarten. For these many reasons, I felt a fierce connection.
Once divorced, I needed a full-time job with benefits (ESL was part-time), so I began teaching at a Los Angeles public high school. Many of my students were from Mexico and Central America, so stories I had heard from adults, I was now hearing from their children. It was a difficult time with focus on test-taking, which was terrible for the kids. I chose literature that they could relate to, writers like Sandra Cisneros, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and especially Luis Rodriguez, who had a wonderful bookstore nearby, Tia Chucha’s, that we visited. My students would read their poetry for Luis, and he would talk with them about his gang life and how education and poetry saved him. I also showed them a documentary called ¡Chicano! so they could learn about the discrimination so many faced before them, about the walkouts in 1968, and the changes that resulted: bilingual classes, Latinx counselors, Chicano history, no more corporeal punishment. I encouraged them to be proud of their heritage. I told them how lucky they were to be able to learn their family’s language, to watch TV in their language, to go to stores that catered to their food. My Italian neighborhood back home had disappeared completely. They were fortunate to have all of this at their fingertips.
At the same time, I was upset by the anti-immigrant sentiment sweeping our country. Even some of my own family in upstate New York would argue with me about undocumented immigrants, insisting that they were breaking the law and asking why they didn’t stay in their own country. I would tell them my students’ stories about poverty in Mexico and war and violence in Central America, pointing out that they might do the same thing to help their families. I’d heard and read so many stories of the dangers of border crossing—dehydration and death, criminals waiting to take advantage of the vulnerable, the horrors of Ciudad Juárez. As a result, I became involved with Amnesty International, focusing on refugee and immigrant rights. Our group toured what was then the Terminal Island Immigration Detention Center in San Pedro (closed in 2007 after being deemed unsafe). With BorderLinks of Tucson, we spent time in Nogales, Arizona and Mexico, talking with people on both sides of the border, including border patrol agents, maquiladora (factory) workers and their foreman, and a family in Los Encinos Colonia, a squatters’ community in Mexico. The matriarch of the family generously fed us lunch and spoke of how we were all one America—North, Central, South—all one.
I had written since I was in my twenties, but at this point in my life I wanted to write about the undocumented immigrant community in a way that others could see through their eyes and experience and understand why they were driven to leave their homes and risk their lives to come to our country. I started with Blue Flags, as mentioned above. In this novel, a woman ends up on a journey that exposes her to the horror of migrant deaths in the desert, as well as the beauty of the blue flags placed as markers by containers of water left by compassionate volunteers.
While researching this novel, I met three remarkable men: Father Richard Estrada, a tireless defender of the rights of immigrants and refugees, most especially, homeless migrant youth; Enrique Morones, founder of Border Angels, an organization that focuses on immigrant rights and reform, while also preventing deaths along the border; and John Hunter, scientist and humanitarian, who believed in putting people before
