She lets go of me. “My friend will provide a safe place for you away from all this turmoil,” my mother says briskly. “It’s dangerous for you and the baby to be here right now.”
I am reeling. My mother is not my biological mother? I was born in Mexico? How can they have hidden this from me all these years?
I do not have time to think. I am in my car, clutching an address in Idaho, and I go. Maybe if I had the time to think, I would have done something different. But everything I knew had been upended, and I went.
Nov. 10, 2017
I have a son. A beautiful baby boy. His name is Rafael Matthews Valdez, in the naming convention of Latinos, a first name, his father’s last name, his mother’s last name. I put his father on the birth certificate, Ryan Matthews. I do everything I can to make my little son safe from what is to come.
My host has been wonderful to me. She is a white lady, but she is my mother’s friend. And she has become my friend. She has been so kind. I could stay forever, but I can’t. She’s a teacher, and she has risked much to give me a safe harbor to give birth. ICE could charge her too if they find me here. She could lose her job. So, I will go home.
There is an attorney who has been waiting to take my case. To file for DACA if they allow it to open again. If anything makes me bitter, it is knowing that my parents hid this from me during the years when DACA would have been awarded without question. And now we are in the years of Trump who fights to close it down. But my attorney knows how to fight, and he will.
Rafael Matthews Valdez is safe. He is an American.
February 13, 2018
I was arraigned today in court. It is a misdemeanor to be without documentation. Like punching someone in a bar. But the punishment if I’m convicted? That is to be sent away from the country I know and love, and call mine, to a place I have never been. I am released on bail because I have a good attorney who knows how to assemble my case and I have Rafael to care for.
I do not know what I would do without Rafael. He is worth everything I must do to fight.
October 30, 2018
Trump is threatening to end birthright citizenship! I am losing my battle with ICE. DACA is frozen. But now this man, who is married to a woman who did not have proper papers either, is threatening the very laws that give my son his rights to be a citizen.
My attorney calms me. He says Trump cannot do this. But Trump has done so much that he cannot do, because of that I am still afraid. So, I draft up papers giving his father custody of Rafael. Ryan’s citizenship confers citizenship upon Rafael as does his birthplace. It is a way to be doubly sure.
As long as I can, I will fight. But if I lose? I will take Rafael to Ryan.
Things are a mess in the family. There is no one here I can rely on to raise Rafael. My mother is devastated by my father’s incarceration. It has been over a year, and he grows thinner and older. So does my mother with worry. Sometimes he cannot be reached. Once they moved him to Portland, and then back to Seattle again. They threaten to fly him out. It would almost be a blessing if they did. Mexico would be better than this.
But I have a talk with my grandfather. And now I am even more worried. Memories are long in Mexico, he says. Mi familia had been part of the police, not part of the drug cartels, and it would be dangerous for any of us to go back. But especially my father, who had been a police officer in Morelia before he fled to the U.S. I did not know that my father had been a police officer! I only know him as a truck driver, as a man who was good at grafting fruit and made the money at it which allowed the family to start a trucking business. That allowed my generation to go to college.
This is the way of many of the Mexican Americans I know. They start as migrant farm labor, and then a generation later, they find ways to settle in one place. They work the harvest, but they save and save until they can start a business — a store, a trucking company — something they know and use already. Then they send the next generation to college. We become teachers or social workers. Professionals who can return to the community and make the family proud.
I am that generation. Becoming a journalist raised eyebrows, but I had my father’s blessing, and others let it alone. But now I have Rafael.
I am not eligible for any kind of government benefits, because I lack the documents even though that has not been determined in court. So, I work part-time at the trucking company as a night dispatcher. My mother watches my son, but mostly it is late enough that he sleeps. My family takes care of family.
January 20, 2019
The House is back in Democratic hands! There is a chance that
