Don't forget where you came from, douche.
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This (Illegal) American Life
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The coyotes hid my mother and me for weeks in a shack in Tijuana with an outhouse so pungent I held my need to use it until I was bursting. At 8 years old, I only vaguely understood the danger of being in a no man's land, completely dependent on the smugglers, with nothing but my mother's mostly empty purse and the clothes we were wearing.
Being light-skinned like gringas would work in our favor, the coyotes told us. They drove us to the Mexican side of the border, and left us at a beach. Another from their operation picked us up there and drove us across as his family. We passed Disneyland on our way to the airport, where we boarded the plane to finally rejoin my father.
As a child, I had thought coming back home would be the magical end to our troubles, but in many ways it was the beginning. I chafed at the strictures of undocumented life: no social security number meant no public school (instead I attended a Catholic school my parents could scarcely afford); no driver's license, no after-school job. My parents had made their choices, and I had to live with those, seeing off my classmates as they left on a class trip to Canada, or packing to go off to college, where I could not go.
The year before I graduated from high school, Congress passed the amnesty law of 1987. A few months after my 18th birthday, I became legal and what had always seemed a blank future of no hope suddenly turned dazzling with possibility.
When I went for my interview at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the caseworker looked at me quizzically when he heard me talk in unaccented English and joke about current events. Surely this American teenager did not fit in with the crowd of illegals looking to make things right.
At the time, I was flattered. His confusion meant I could pass as an American. But in the 20 years since, I have come to realize that I fit in with that crowd of illegal immigrants as well as with "real" Americans. I've finally come to understand there are many paths to living the American Dream, and I took one of them—mine.
Andreu lives in Leonia, N.J.
© 2008
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